Everything Everywhere All at Once (Preview)
Reviewed by Thom R. Delapa

Produced by Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, and Mike Larocca; written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert; cinematography by Larkin Seiple; production design by Jason Kisvarday; music by Son Lux; edited by Paul Rogers; starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Blu-ray or DVD, color, 139 min., 2022. An A24 theatrical release and a Lionsgate Home Entertainment release.

We all know that sometimes we can get too much of a good thing. Certainly, we can get too much of a bad thing. But what about getting too much of a big nothing? 

Such is the stunning conundrum facing most if not all discerning viewers of Everything Everywhere All at Once, at once an Oscar-omnivore indie, soporific sleeper hit, and loved-up critical darling that came out of nowhere to make nearly every Ten Best list during its 2022–23 theatrical run everywhere.

Now making the jump from the theatrical multiplex and streaming multiverse to the shrinking digital-disc dimension, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s absurdly absurdist, family-centric sci-fi fantasy is liable to bewilder cinephile stalwarts who haven’t yet swallowed the latest blue pills engineered for mass media migration. Such perplexity is not owing to the film’s alleged narrative complexities, metaphysical musings, or amusing visual effects, but rather their warped opposites hailing from some schlocky Plan 9 (or 10) from Outer Space. Earth to Planet Hollywood—in what dystopian film world are we now living where such puerile and tasteless tripe merits anything but an attack of killer rotten tomatoes?

All too harsh, you say? Go with the flow, however low, you counter? Nevertheless, I suspect that an alliance of unidentified flying, under-the-radar objects was responsible for creating the box-office Godzilla that crept from this cosmic comic hash. In the wake of the groundbreaking (and astronomically better) 2018 global smash Crazy Rich Asians, the writer-director duo that collectively and cutely call themselves “Daniels” shot to the top of the 2022 Hollywood gold rush powered by the lucrative and historically underserved Asian American movie market. Further boosted by an all-American generation of youngish digital natives, Everything was a direct hit for the high-flying indie distributor A24 Films, soaring far past the $100 million mark in grosses that bests even the mid-Nineties breakouts of The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet (both 1993), ferociously followed by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000.

Not only does the dysfunctional Chinese American Wang family serve as the film’s space-tripping, time-shifting protagonists, their dialogue also careens from English to Mandarin and Cantonese, while the heroine is the harried, declawed Tiger Mom, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who is struggling to cope in at least two discombobulating dimensions. First up is a looming IRS tax audit that threatens to scrub her self-service laundromat out of business, and second is coping with her sullen gay daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is on the verge of leaving her old-fashioned mom—and her starchy hang-ups—well, hung out to dry.  

Like other savvy postmodernists worth their desktop copy-and-paste emojis, the Daniels recycle, rinse, and repeat a pile of weightless tropes from all corners and years of the film firmament, Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) being the big bangs. As codirector Kwan has acknowledged, “I was like, now if I could just make something half as fun as The Matrix is, but with our own stamp and our spirits, I would just die happy.” Not only does the goofy extraterrestrial solution to Evelyn’s midlife crisis smack into her on the elevator to the IRS offices but she’s also floored to find out she’s now the new (Neo?) anointed savior of humanity, destined to battle a “great evil” threatening everything, everywhere, all the time—including the galaxy of other universes that somehow simultaneously coexist with our own. Tasked with saving not just the whole darn cosmos but her store, marriage, family, and serenity, too, Mom must channel her inner ninja and bust out a flurry of kick-ass moves to get down with the kung fu fighting…

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Thom R. Delapa is a film and arts critic, educator, and film programmer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3