Review: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

2022-07-24

5/5, I loved this movie.

It takes a bunch of classic concepts and executes them flawlessly. Parental unwillingness to accept their children for deviating from the norms of their time, a child's rejection of their parents antiquity, loss of passion, regretting one's major life decisions, and more. The use of multiverses is actually refreshing and original, and highly central to the plot instead of being where you go when you screwed up and need to retconn something.

The pace is fast, the acting is excellent, and the tone (and events) are positively absurb and (to my knowledge) refreshingly original.

A quick spoiler for something I really appreciated. The realizations that nothing is important and that happiness is only ever a fleeting moment are pretty central to the plot, both Joy and Evelyn discovering them as their consciousness' are fractured across the multiverse. Joy, ever the teenager, finds these concepts depressing and wants to die, whereas Evelyn, beaten down by decades of perceived mistakes and regrets, has learned that life is still worth living for the occasional lanterns along the cold winter road. It beautifully encapsulates the experience I had (and continue to have) growing up. I still struggle to be Evelyn on some days, just as she did until the final chapter, but I guess that's just life.

And ultimately, that's what this movie is about: life. And dildos.