Everything Everywhere All at Once

Life comes at you fast

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

4 / 5

I feel compelled to mention here that I always hoped Ke Huy Quan had something like this in him. I still want desperately for an Indiana Jones sequel to bring back Short Round as the best smuggler on the Yalu River, or for a Goonies 2 to reunite Mikey, Chunk, Mouth, and Data on some new adventure. This kind of thinking, while valid, is a big part of what makes Everything Everywhere All at Once so good. The current state of moviemaking, which studio execs all over the industry are stuck in, is one in which I (we?) have been hoping for Quan to reprise something. This film’s active struggle against that hope has made this film knock around in my head for a while. It’s a movie that defies easy analysis, precisely because it strives to be something very rare in today’s movie world: completely original. It is hard to get thoughts in order about it, because there’s a lot going on.

While I still hope to see Quan in another Indiana Jones movie (let me have my nerdy dreams!), this movie subverts expectations at every opportunity. Over and over, it makes a surprise juke in a direction you never thought it would go, smashing narrative comfort zones, building a story you never expected to see, and certainly never would have expected the mudhole of self-indulgent woke mediocrity that is the Oscars to give awards to. It’s too challenging, and asks too many really serious questions. Unless the Academy honored it because it has “minorities” in it, awarding it not for quality but for representation, which would be unsurprising but sad. There is depth here far beyond anything Hollywood has produced in recent memory, and maybe ever. 

The film looks to offer an answer to the question of what god-level omnipotence looks like. The central conceit here is that it is possible to exist outside linear time, having access to every outcome (no matter how implausible or seemingly impossible) to every possible choice (no matter how remotely possible) you could ever have made leading up to the present moment. A person in this state has knowledge of every possible skill and every available fact they could ever have learned in any way about anything. Such a being literally possesses everything, everywhere, all at once. Having established that (via loopy visuals and a frantic whiplash pace that you really have to lean into–a round of applause to the editors for keeping it comprehensible) the movie then explores what is required to manage such power. Unfettered, this power leads only to nihilistic ennui. It requires an overriding sense of individual identity and purpose to keep such power organized and controlled. That frame, according to the film, is love. God, says EEAaO, is love. Not love between lovers (of any persuasion), but love between a parent and child. The love of a creator for creations, the love of those who have learned for those who are still learning, is what ultimately saves the hero. There’s some deep conversation to be had there. You’ll need to sit with it a bit once the credits roll.   

4 stars of 5: This is the closest I’ve seen any film come to thoughtfully and responsibly portraying godhood, and I would watch it again, especially with people willing to have a serious theological conversation.