Making the Most of the Modern Multiverse Movie

The multiverse has always been an exciting concept to me.

The way they film the fracturing of Evelyn's different realities is always so cool. It's hard to find goof still images of this movie because it's always in movement.

I grew up on science fiction television in the likes of Star Trek and Stargate SG-1, where alternate universes were a regular feature – to the point where the best part of the spin-off Stargate Universe is when they decide to dive back into alternate universe plots. For the most part, these plots have always been driven by the idea of asking, “what if our characters had made different choices? Led different lives? What if this character was evil, or if this character never joined the team?” That sort of thing. They existed to drive our understanding of the characters, to see different shades of them that we’d never be able to see otherwise. With the release of The Avengers in 2012, I started to get into the comics, and there it was very much the same. Around that time, the Spider-Verse comics were kicking off, bringing together a bunch of different kinds of Spider-Men into the same narrative. What a cool concept! I remember talking to people and imagining what a movie Spider-Verse would look like. Would that even be possible? Could we get to that point?

Enter 2018, and Sony Animation puts out Into the Spider-Verse, a.k.a., the best comic book movie. Where a lot of recent comic book movies feel the need to toe this line between realism and their sillier roots, Spider-Verse skips straight past the divide and is able to fully embody the comic book style in its animated form. The characters can be exaggerated and larger-than-life, and the movie can do things visually that you would simply never be able to do in live-action. Where the ending of Spider-Verse could have been a CGI mess in an MCU movie, it instead feels like a natural, dazzling flex of the medium. Moreover, the animated medium allows for the film to cleanly and simply diversify the cast. Several of the characters utilize extremely different animation styles in order to represent totally different worlds. It's all seamless, it all happens without commentary or discussion. Into the Spider-Verse is a masterpiece of a movie, and it does it all under a two-hour runtime. It’s tight, and perfect. I walked out of that movie thinking, “we did it! We found the perfect way to tell a comic book multiverse story! We pulled it off!”

If Nick Cage doesn't come back for the sequel I will be a little sad.

However, it seems like Marvel has learned all of the wrong lessons from Spider-Verse’s success. On the one hand, we are getting sequels – and while I’m hesitant on anything following up Spider-Verse’s perfection, I am glad that we are at least learning that this medium is the way to tell comic book stories. On the other hand, the MCU has dove fully into the multiverse angle. It started with Loki, which is a show I largely liked! Loki followed in the vein of the sci-fi I grew up with, using the concept of the multiverse to see different reflections of the central character. The finale teased the idea of full-on multiversal war which sounds kind of like a nebulous concept, but for the most part, Loki was a self-contained character exploration, and that was great! However, the MCU multiverse exploded with Spider-Man: No Way Home. Rather than use the multiverse to really explore the central character, No Way Home mostly felt like it was using the multiverse as a means to bring in fan favourites from other franchises. Look, we have Alfred Malina’s Doc Ock! We have Willem Defoe’s Green Goblin! And more! A vast majority of the alternate Spider-Men in the Spider-Verse comics and the animated movie were new iterations of Spider-Man to grant some perspective. In No Way Home, it’s a means to bring in old actors. And sure, there are ways that approach does wind up reflecting on Holland’s Spider-Man, and he does have a meaningful character arc, but that never seems like it’s the movie’s core reasoning for the multiverse concept. Doctor Strange & the Multiverse of Madness comes out this weekend, and a lot of the pre-release hype has been built around people speculating what beloved characters they might bring back with the multiverse concept. And, notably, I don’t think anyone is looking for different MCU characters – at no point has anyone suggested, “maybe Yinson became Iron Man in one universe! Maybe Captain America is evil!” I guess a lot of that energy has gone towards What If? which felt like a show that still didn’t double down on that format as much as it could. Instead, the trailers for Doctor Strange prominently feature Patrick Stewart in voice-over, heavily teasing the return of his Professor X. And I don’t really care? I’m excited for the movie and to see what Sam Raimi is going to do, but I’m simply not invested in the idea of a multiverse entirely populated with cameos. That’s kind of boring! And the fact that this is kind of where the entire MCU is shifting towards is so tiring to me. DC’s Flash movie looks to be falling into all the same traps, propping up familiar versions of Batman instead of developing its main character. This concept that used to be so rife for exploration now feels like a tool for cash-grabbing. I’m kind of done with multiverse stories.

Or so I thought, until I was interrupted by Daniels Kwan and Scheinert.

The googly eyes are the opposite of the everything bagel. That might not make sense to you yet, but it will.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a tour de force of a movie. It dropped less than 1% at the box office in its second week – that is basically unprecedented. Everyone who has seen this movie is singing its praises. But in case you don’t have anyone around you who is talking about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, let me just say. It is truly something else. I have oh-so-many adjectives and superlatives to throw at this thing. Simply speaking, it’s not like any other movie out there.

The movie introduces you to Evelyn Wang, played by living legend Michelle Yeoh. Evelyn is the mother of a teenage woman she doesn’t fully understand and struggles to communicate with. She’s the wife of a husband who is earnestly trying to help but is always a little behind. She’s the daughter of an overbearing father with heavy expectations for her life. She’s the manager of a failing laundromat that is on the brink of collapse. Evelyn is busy. Every moment pulls her in a dozen directions. She feels like there are a thousand different things she could have, should have been doing with her life. She believes she is the embodiment of wasted potential. And then her husband from a different universe chimes in to tell her that everything is falling apart and she is the one person who can save the entire world. Every world. There are goofy fight scenes and sentient raccoons and an everything bagel with everything on it which represents the existential meaninglessness of our life.

What is this movie?

The Daniels always nail a certain sense of visual chaos.

I’ve spent the last two weeks desperately trying to wrestle together my thoughts on this movie into a cohesive argument. Is it possible to talk about this thing without spoiling it? Can you spoil this movie? The Daniels manage to direct a film that feels like the best ode to maximalism possible in a live-action format, and it’s so overwhelming that I really don’t know if you can properly process the thing on a single watch. Where I figured Spider-Verse did things I believed live-action would never be able to pull off, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once comes close through the sheer insanity of its visuals. It takes the multiverse concept to its wildest potential. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the piano with her feet and it’s an oddly potent, touching moment. In one universe Evelyn is a popular movie star… strongly implied to just be Michelle Yeoh? Like, they straight up pull red carpet footage of Michelle Yeoh? But more than its sheer creativity, the use of the multiverse in this movie is directly relevant to the potent themes playing throughout. The sheer chaos of multiple realities crashing into Evelyn’s brain becomes a perfect metaphor for the insane business of modern life, where it feels like everything is coming undone all the time. The multiple versions of herself she has access to are all described as manifestations of her failed potential, all the things she could have been, the things she wanted to be. But through the mechanics of the movie, it is this exact failed potential that gives her power – because she has so many alternate realities she has access to! The infinite potential of the multiverse is used to explore the grand totality of the human experience, all the different facets of Evelyn and, more importantly, what it means to be alive.

The soundtrack of Swiss Army Man is so good. The single most enchanting version of "Cotton Eyed Joe" you will ever find.

But lest you think this sounds like a daunting, heavy philosophical treatise, let me reassure you – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is thoroughly a blast. Not only does it has some of the best action I’ve seen in a movie recently, but it’s also deeply silly. I cannot understate how silly and irreverent this movie is. To the point, and your mileage will vary on this one, where I almost was like, “this is getting out of hand. Can you go in this direction?” The Daniels certainly have a specific style of humour, and not all of it is my thing! Yet they kind of get away with it because of what they are doing in their weird and wild sense of humour. This is best depicted through their other big movie, Swiss Army Man. If you think Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is weird, oh boy, strap in. In the first ten minutes of Swiss Army Man, Paul Dano’s character, Hank, is trapped on a desolate island and is prepared to end it all until he stumbles upon a corpse played by Daniel Radcliff. To his dismay, Racliff’s corpse is extremely flatulent, which perturbs Hank until he realizes he can ride Radcliff’s corpse like a jet ski back to the mainland. This is the first ten minutes of Swiss Army Man! I seriously doubt I would have made it past those ten minutes without having seen Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and having some built-in trust of the Daniels. Because as Swiss Army Man continues, it becomes this weirdly delightful expression of hope in the world? And how the human body is beautiful even if we often find it off-putting, and how we can only truly find joy when we move past some of these social mores and accept that we’re all kind of weird and gross and that’s okay? And then the corpse of Daniel Radcliff tells Paul Dano how to be alive? I can’t stress enough that Swiss Army Man is an absolutely insane movie and I’m not sure there’s any way I can accurately describe it that makes it seem appealing when a main character is a farting corpse, but it also moved me to tears! This is what the Daniels do! Because their humour, as much as it can rely on gross-out gags, cuts straight through all of our social expectations and gets to the heart and soul of what being alive is all about. And, yeah, sometimes the truth of life is a little repulsive, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still joy and beauty in it.

Stephanie Hsu's performance kind of holds all of this together. Though, I could easily say that about just about every performance.

Which brings us back to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Because, as is fitting for a movie directed at this generation, there is a core anxiety that sits at the heart of the story. What if all this, all the things that pressure us in life, all of the different things that could have been, what if none of it matters? What if all of this is pointless? It definitely feels like that some days. It’s hard not to look around at the failing systems and the countless suffering and just be overwhelmed with despair. The movie gets this, it understands this fear and the way it can consume everything. And, for a moment, it seems like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once might give in under its own weight. That the silliness and the existential dread will collapse together and that there will be nothing left, that there will be no way out from underneath it. But then, the movie finds a crucial lifeline, a guiding light out from the crushing despair of having everything happening all of the time…

Love. Love and simple, basic, goodness.

Ke Huy Quan is so good in this movie. He is able to hold so many different angles of his character and nails all of them effortlessly.

“You think because I’m kind, it means I’m naïve,” says Weymond (played by Ke Huy Quan, who has barely been in anything since he was Short Round in Indiana Jones and is so incredibly good here!). Weymond has spent the entire movie as a foil to Evelyn’s exhausted, world-weary pessimism. He sees joy in all the little things, putting googly eyes on objects around the laundromat to make the world a little more pleasant. “Maybe I am,” he continues. “It’s strategic, and necessary. This is how I fight.” Because his kindness, his silliness, isn’t just the symptoms of an adult who’s never learned to grow up. Rather, it’s a tactical maneuver against the forces of anguish that threatens to swallow our lives like a black hole. Love is a form of combat. And a potent one at that. Without becoming cheesy or trite, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once manages to depict the sheer power of individual goodness, the forcefulness of choosing to love, to try to understand. “You are not unloveable, there is always something to love,” and so in the midst of the chaos of a world where it’s tempting to jump to any number of assumptions about people, where the internet makes others so easy to categorize, “we have to be kind. Please be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” The only way we as small, tiny, insignificant people can hope to make any change in this overwhelming universe is by deciding to fully see each other as people and find love and joy in that.

Oh yeah, we're taking the multiverse angle into some bizarre directions.

The Daniels don’t pretend that this is easy, but there is hope. These two weird, bizarre movies have so much love and hope for humanity in them. I cried through them both. The soundtrack for Swiss Army Man has been playing on loop in my head all week. And while elements of these films won’t be for everyone, the core heartbeat of them is so beautiful. Again, Swiss Army Man is kind of a risky recommendation, but Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? You simply need to see it. Many have been saying it might be the best movie of the decade, and, yeah, I get it. The fact that this movie was made with such a small budget and such a small team but has some of the most ambitious visuals I’ve ever seen, with the craziest plot structure, the most innovative action, wildest humour, and at the heart of it all this gorgeous view of love and goodness – I can’t not be moved while thinking of it all. It crosses genres and binaries, truly managing to be everything, everywhere, all at once. More than just some fun cameos, it uses its multiverse premise to see the world from every angle it can think of, to view every facet of the human experience, and to see beauty and hope in all of it. It meets us in our exhausting present moment and says, “there is a way out of this.”

This is, somehow, the most enrapturing part of the movie.

In short, if you aren’t currently making plans to watch Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, you are simply missing out. This is the movie of the year, and 2022 is only just beginning. That’s how good it is, on every single level. All at once.