Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Not Quite a Movie Review!

 

Written By Saba Siddiqui

If you want to see what creativity at its best looks like, then Everything, Everywhere, All at Once should be on your bucket list. It has the power to lift you from a mental block. It will shake you from your boring reveries. It will make a ball of all your thoughts and smack you in the face. Yet, I dare say, the messy chaos depicted in this film pours down as a balm to sore nerves.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once released in April 2022 is just too much of everything, everywhere, all at once. Watching this movie has been a very personal experience and therapeutic to say the least. 

There is so much mess, yet it is glorious and depicts human existence with all it's quandary, mayhem, chaos, anxiety, depression, regret with a bewildering rhapsody of philosophy, human emotions and science fiction. 

The movie is all about quintessential multiverse madness with chaos and anarchy as it's theme while a cosmic battle stretches along!

Okay, time for a confession, I woke up to the idea of multiverse rupturing late in life and fortunately happened to stumble upon Everything everywhere all at Once. The movie has the ability to stay with you long after you have slept over the weariness of the daily hummings of your monotonous life!

The whole experience is interspersed with delusional psychedelic visuals bewildering the viewers’ mind and yet touching some cords deep within.

Of course there is a lot of multidimensional adventure. The movie sprawls further. It depicts tension between parents and children and the need for love and kindness and most importantly the need to be understood and accepted. Screaming back at us that the lack of these so dismissed 'imbecile' emotions is hellbent to destroy the universe.

This movie is a remarkable delineation of how broken hearts breed broken hearts and that parental pressure can break the sense of balance of the family at a personal level and the whole universe at large! You see all this adventure unravelling through the kaleidoscope of science fiction. The volatile metaphysics tectonics in the movie balance on a sturdy frame of morals and ethics. The story trots from being a galaxy trip to a regret filled mother daughter love, domestic frustrations, marital drama. While the plot unfolds, the moral compass remains dangling, until Michelle Yoeh, the protagonist who play and aging immigrant mother takes control.

This movie is bubbling with so many themes, ideas layered into a unique take on multiverse. The directors Daniel duo have crammed a exhilarating, overwhelming, incredible and wonderful subplot. The underlying theme of the movie is about no matter what side or which end of the rope one choses, it would not make much of a difference. The metaphor of Jobu Tupaki’s  tragic transposition of a bagel that sucks everything into obliteration, like the blackhole, is touching even when its practically exasperating.

The drab but interesting realism of Evelyne’s life is aplenty for the movie to keep pace up but the hint of metaversal confusions brings it to a brilliantly sketched out extension of cosmic complexity in the first few scenes where a battle is looming. The timid Waymond files for divorce to gain attention from his wife suddenly turns into a space jumping commando. While the battle goes on, the family still manages to work on their issues. Though Evelyne may be treated as a quasi messianic hero, the chosen one, she lifts the trope by hitting on her free will and obligation towards family rather than getting swept by what she has been dictated.

The failures and frustrations of Evelyn's life are swerved with finesse as the drama unfolds. From clownish silliness to pathos, the storyline keeps shuffling it's denominations as quickly and frantically as the variety of visuals.

Basically what I am trying to say is that, if you are feeling like you turning into a wreck of yourself, go watch it. If you are feeling like you are having your precious boss-lady moments, go watch it. If you are doling in depressive denominations of daily drama of your life, go watch it! If you have nothing better to do with your time, go watch it!