By Andrew Mendia
Everything Everywhere All At Once is exactly what its title states. The movie can be defined in any genre in the movie industry. Horror? Yeah definitely. Romance? Oh yeah, a ton. Drama? Tons! Did I also forget to mention this is a multiverse movie? While it does seem like a recipe for disaster to make a movie like this, the directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert succeed marvelously through the masterfully crafted screenplay they created.
What is the movie about? The movie is about a Chinese immigrant woman who moved to America with her husband. They started a laundry business and later had a kid named Joy. With its 2 hour and 19 minute runtime, it explores themes of queer identity, nihilism, existentialism, and love.
During that runtime, you get to connect deeply with these characters and their motives. Joy, played by the actress Stephanie Hsu brings a powerful performance to the troubled character. Michelle Yeoh plays the main character Evelyn who goes through an arc of accepting her queer daughter and fixing her broken marriage with her husband. Her husband is played by the actor Ke Hey Quan who played Shortround in Indiana Jones. This is one of his first major acting roles in over 30 years and carries a lot of the film's emotions.
This film was created for a budget of around 14.3 million dollars as stated by one of the directors during an interview. They used very accessible programs to create most of the editing and VFX. For one, much of the editing was done in Adobe Premiere which is not a software used much for creating feature films. It is very impressive for how sharp and creative the editing of the film is, it even won Best Editing at the Oscars this year. The VFX, however, was made by complete amateurs on a team of only 5 people who learned how to do VFX via YouTube tutorials. They used many softwares like blender to create the iconic donut seen in the movie. This film is incredibly impressive, they managed to make this on a low budget with such an ambitious script revolving around the concept of multiverses.
Unfortunately, this film is rated R and you do need a parent’s permission to view it. I would definitely recommend this to people who do have a weird or absurd sense of humor, the film has very immature and childish jokes which are integrated within its very serious storyline - which does fit the characters of the film a ton! There are certain scenes that may drive viewers away from completing the movie, but there is a reason why it won best picture at the Oscars.
Final thoughts? There are some problems, yeah, but the pure emotion and symbolism in the film captivated me and clearly other people too. It is often ranked at the very top of people’s favorite movies of all time, including my own. I’d say it's as close to a perfect movie as humanly possible.
Final Rating:
5/5