NAB
Everything Everywhere All at Once, lives up to its
title. The sci-fi comedy feature “takes the red-pill mind-screw of The
Matrix and multiplies it by infinity,” according to Variety,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean audiences can handle the “gnarly
three-dimensional sudoku puzzle” that results.
article here
The movie stars Michelle Yeoh as a woman who learns that she
can experience endless dimensions simultaneously, and uses the power to attempt
a reconciliation with her estranged teen daughter.
The internal logic of the film is complex, but the
gist is that different decisions cause splinters in time, and, somewhere out
there, anything that could have happened actually did. So, that means there is
a timeline where Evelyn is not the lowly laundromat owner we first meet but is
also a huge Hong Kong action star, an opera singer, a maid or a
teppanyaki-style chef… ad infinitum.
Co-directors and writers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
(who collectively sign as the Daniels) made the equally absurd Swiss Army
Man (about a man who befriends’ Daniel Radcliffe’s semi-sentient
corpse) and this time have The Russo Brothers (Avengers: Infinity War)
producing with A24 and Ley Line Entertainment, IAC and Josh Rudnick exec
producing.
The film rushes headlong into unruly anarchy: Evelyn is
plunged into the metaphysical world of “verse-jumping,” veering from the
mundane dreariness of a IRS building to the palatial lair of a nihilistic
villain, from the flashing lights of Hong Kong red carpets to a deserted canyon
where sentient rocks have an extended on-screen chat.
Critics say the unhinged imagination on show here will leave
viewers exhausted but that could be intentional. The filmmakers believe they’re
saying something about the impact of the metaverse on our ability to truly see
those near us.
“We could say a million things about [the film], but the
most simple, honest thing is it's about a mom learning to pay attention to her
family in the chaos,” says Kwan. “The biggest seed that drove us through - that
felt like a metaphor for what we're going through right now in society - is
this information overload.”
He adds, “People keep saying ‘empathy fatigue' set in with
covid, but I feel like even before covid we were already there—there's too much
to care about and everyone's lost the thread. That was the last key, turning
this into a movie about empathy in the chaos.”
Information overload
In an era of information overload, extreme polarization, and
mass existential dread, the struggle to connect with family might feel less
like a banal, everyday experience, and more of an increasingly confounding
battle between a loved companion and a mortal enemy.
“In a lot of ways, the movie is just a family drama,”
Scheinert says, “and then we came up with some of the most insane, enormous,
overcomplicated hyperbolic metaphors for generational gaps, along with
communication errors and ideological differences within a family.”
The film slyly tweaks the ‘hero's journey' story beats that
audiences have come to expect, squishing and stretching a three-act structure
as if the movie itself were jumping through a fracturing multiverse.
“The result is a mess,” says Variety, “but a meticulously
planned and executed mess, where every shot, every sound effect and every sight
gag fits exactly as the Daniels intended into this dense and cacophonous
eyesore, which endeavors to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in
a world of boundless choice.”
The co-directors wanted that sense of infinity— of all of
the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, and all of the tiny moving
pieces underneath it—to stayed front of mind for the audience even that meant
fraying their minds.
“There are enough ideas in Everything to fuel a dozen
movies, or else a full-blown TV series, but the Daniels have shoehorned it all
into a bombastic, emotionally draining 139 minutes,” writes Variety.
“Moviegoers with limber imaginations may well appreciate the
lunatic ambition and nutso execution of this high-concept hurricane, which
ricochets like a live-action cartoon for most of that duration. But less
versatile viewers will emerge frazzled, like Wile E. Coyote after swallowing a
stick of dynamite: their heads charred, blinking blankly as smoke wafts from
their ears.”
Execution
Much of the film was shot in a warehouse in Simi Valley. “It
was big enough that we could wreck one part of the building, then walk away and
just go somewhere else in the complex to continue filming while our team
restored the initial part of the building,” says production designer Jason
Kisvarday
It was lensed by Swiss Army Man DP Larkin Seiple and
edited with manic intensity by Paul Rogers using split screens and blurry
overlay effects.
“The directors don’t shy away from the use of dizzying
flashing lights, or rapidly shifting light sources that disorient the viewer,”
reviews Paste.
“They also aren’t afraid to implement over-the-top images, like a person’s head
exploding into confetti or a butt-naked man flying in slow-motion toward the
camera. At the same time, movement between ‘verses feels seamless through
Rogers’ meticulous editing, as does the effortless fashion in which different
aspect ratios melt into one another.”
Infinite storytelling possibilities
While Everything offers a treasure hunt of eclectic
cinematic references—from 2001: A Space Odyssey to In the Mood For
Love to Ratatouille—Kwan insists their voice is far from that of a cinephile,
but was honed rather through things like YouTube videos, ‘Tim and Eric’
sketches, and the form-breaking anarchy of Japanese anime movies.
“We would put our stuff online, and the algorithm would push
it because it was so insane, and then we’d get attention and that positive
reinforcement,” Kwan recalls. “We were like, oh, I guess we should be more
insane.”
The film is also their response to other multiverse sci-fi
movies that bugged them. Star Trek’s 2009 reboot by JJ Abrams might have
featured two Spocks but they felt this twist didn’t make any way near enough of
the mind-bending opportunity.
“My pet peeve is time travel when you introduce it and just
do a tiny bit like it’s no big deal,” Scheinert told IndieWire.
“It would be such a big deal! Like if logic broke down and time didn’t move
forward and a million people could go back in time a million number of times
there’d be absolute chaos.”
“This movie is 100 percent a response to The Matrix,
obviously,” Kwan added. “We wanted to
make our version of it.”
He’s specifically talking about the original Matrix
and in particular the film’s iconic fighting scenes. “There's something so
entertaining and visceral about it, and we wanted to try to take that kind of
energy and satisfying filmmaking and point it towards love and understanding,”
Kwan says in the film’s production notes. “We don't know how to do that, but we
want to see it on the big screen.”
The film has also just satirized the trajectory of Marvel’s
ever-expanding universe. With an MCU increasingly folding over on itself with
actors playing the same (or different versions of) characters from past movies
(Spider-Man: No Way Home) or opening portals into other storylines (the
entire Loki series- which the Daniels apparently turned down an offer from
Marvel to make) not to mention explicit references as in the forthcoming Doctor
Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it's clear that the multiverse will
be a recurring theme for years to come.
“It’s no wonder that the idea of the multiverse is so
popular within the sci-fi genre when there are infinite storytelling
opportunities,” notes Gavin Spoors at Space. “When films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse come around, it
proves how powerful and exciting the multiverse can be. With infinite
universes, comes infinite possibilities.”
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