Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

One of the longest 2 & a bit hours of my life, wasted on watching a terrible film - Everything Everywhere All at Once review by TB

The hype was stratospheric. The haul of Oscars enormous. The praise pretty much universal. And then I watched it...

Within the first 5 minutes, this film started to grate on me. It was like watching the most out of control art experiment gone wrong I've ever seen. But it had the effect of being so over the top, that I literally didn't care about anything within it. So much effort had been put into what for me was just a complete and utter mess. Whatever this film was trying to build in terms of worlds, for me it totally failed. And the harder it tried, the worse it became.

As someone who loves Michelle Yeoh and always wants to experience new films and try different things, I went into this fully open and wanting to be blown away. Instead, I sat and waited, and waited, and waited, whilst every possible random thing happened on the screen. None of it connected, none of it worked and I just sat waiting for something to happen to engage me in it and for it to make some kind of sense, or even to be able to enjoy it.

I have no doubt that for many many people, this movie is great. My best friend adored it. But for me, it was just an exercise in getting through it, so I could get to the end, say I'd seen it, then never watch it again. I fully appreciate I'm in a minority, but it was seriously how I felt. Afterwards I watched the 4K remastered film of Heat, and was able to enjoy a proper masterpiece. Amusingly, Heat is half an hour longer than EEAAO, but the time flew by.

Exhausting sci-fi absurdism - Everything Everywhere All at Once review by PD

This mile-a-minute mind-bender from absurdist duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert takes as its premise that every conceivable variation of our lives exists in some alternate universe or other, then proceeds to give its harried heroine Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) a whirlwind tour of all those possibilities, which endeavours to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice. At its heart is the intense parent-child bond in one Asian family — especially the impossible demands that the immigrant mother puts on her daughter — and argues that letting go while loving unconditionally is the answer. A fair enough sentiment, but unfortunately, this is drowned in a bombastic, sensory-overload experience, which throttles us for a truly exhausting two hours and more. There's far too much overcomplicated sci-fi logic, based around the heroine's being some sort of big-brain physicist in another dimension, whereas she learns “you’re living your worst you” in this one — meaning that every other possible Evelyn made more successful life choices. One became a huge Hong Kong action star, others an opera singer, a maid or a teppanyaki-style chef. The Daniels present as many of these realities as possible in short, zany micro-sketches, and there’s even a universe in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers, a scenario which the directors bring back again and again as an extended joke which wasn't that funny first time round, and we get much the same thing with a running gag about a world where people are mind-controlled by raccoons; meanwhile, a giant CG everything bagel comes bursting through a parallel dimension to swallow up everything Evelyn holds dear. Inevitably, the real threat to life, the universe and everything is Joy, Evelyn’s daughter, on whom Mum has piled life’s many disappointments, to the point that Joy finally snapped and reinvented herself as an entity known as Jobu Tupaki, who jumps from universe to universe murdering Evelyns and leaving a trail of chaos in her wake. All of this, especially given the film's rapid editing and Son Lux’s broken-pipes score, just succeeded in giving me a headache and just left me pleased when it was finally all over, I'm afraid.