Don’t read this if you haven’t yet seen Everything Everywhere All at Once.
I watched the movie this afternoon, and it does want to stuff everything in everywhere all at once. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I didn’t like it much, and it missed a couple of ends it should have taken.
Many reviews have said it’s multigenre in being about multiuniverses, but all I could see were the domestic drama–immigrant style and action movie–kung fu style. The underlying story—spoiler alert!—that merges the two: the mother-daughter conflict of the domestic drama and the evil genius out to destroy every single one of the universes, became annoying and boring to me as soon as I became aware of it. And the mother-daughter reconciliation of the near end was pure Hollywood sentimentality.
There were indeed many moments I liked, many funny moments, and the nods to all the classic movies were like a film quiz, even the obligatory 10 million years ago 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wanted it to end with the two mother-daughter rocks and the mother rock’s joke about language, when each one in turn says “ha ha ha.” I wanted the screen to fill up with “ha ha ha”s, and then the credit roll. But no, there was still a lot of movie left to go.
I never wanted to “walk out” (I’ve ever walked out of a movie once in my entire life), but I wish that martial arts hadn’t been the default for so many scenes. Even when Michelle Yeoh’s character, Evelyn Wang, tries to solve things with her husband’s kindness, it looks like a fight scene. The movie is trying to be about too many things at the same time, which its title certainly tells us. There’s no secret there.
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