Everything Everywhere All at Once

What happens when you mix some of Marvel's stinking failed comic book movies with a bit of The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, an attempt at a revolutionary depiction of a story about family values (not) fulfilling their potential and totally WTF (read modern) pop culture moments? An absolutely frenetic travesty, where nobody knows what will happen in five minutes, but at the same time nobody really cares. (03/09/2023)

The title doesn't lie. But I was more stunned than dazzled by everything that was happening everywhere and all at once, and I didn't buy on it, even at the end, when it turned out that it made sense and they obviously knew what they were doing and why. If they had only done it for maybe an hour and a half, it would have been more digestible for me. I enjoyed it, Michelle Yeoh is amazing, and the film  straddles genres in a beautiful way, as if was directed and written by Bong Joon-ho... But it's far from him. (02/22/2024)

Unfortunately for me, this highly anticipated film, which I was looking forward to as a potential movie of the year, crossed the line between quirky oddity full of playful ideas and disorganized mess where nothing matters, and not only once. While it always sort of gets back on the track and I was able to follow and enjoy it, I'm used to putting more focused films on a five-star pedestal, films where I can see the filmmakers have things firmly in their hands, and I simply didn't get that impression with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and not only because the finale completely missed me emotionally. The plot gradually gets into such a whirlwind, such a geyser of unlimited imagination, that it's really hard to find any fixed point – not necessarily "logical". Oh, and some of the jokes are trying so hard that it felt embarrassing a few times. I appreciate playfulness and originality, but I would have slowed down a gear or two. (05/19/2022)

It’s no miracle, but it fortunately is an interesting film. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a properly wild ride, where for a long time you have no idea what the they actually want to say, but the gradual unravelling and discovery is damn interesting. Partly, thanks to the awesome action scenes, the clever script, the strong emotional moments and the lots of ideas, but mostly because of the approach of both directors, who push it all into the audience almost to the point of violence. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film where you have no idea what you're going to see in fifteen minutes, alternating extremely fast paced scenes with slower ones, unafraid to go for the jugular, turning from a wild action sci-fi into an intimate drama about the most ordinary things, and then into a rip-roaring comedy. It's just too much. Two hours and twenty minutes is a subjectively untenable runtime for a film that, while it works on a dramatic level, still runs in a pretty rut despite the original visuals. And on the other hand, the moments where Kwan and Scheinert pour one wild idea after another from their sleeves start to get tiresome after a few minutes. Everything Everywhere All at Once is really interesting, but it needs someone to tell the directors where to add and subtract. Sometimes it's a bit of a drag, despite the imagination, creativity, great actors, action and emotion. (07/07/2022)

I thought such an unrestrained eruption of creativity was possible only in animation and I’m terribly glad that Dan and Daniel have shown me how wrong I was. On the other hand, no one has ever approached the medium of film with such hyperactive playfulness as they have. While their meta-work is essentially cinematic (in terms of the story being told, the narrative processes and the references), it also personifies the internet in its Web3 phase, with all of its fascinating beauty, pioneering potential, non-linear hypertextual nature and terrifying intangibleness far beyond the possibilities of a single person’s perception. After all, the creative approach of the disparate and yet extraordinarily symbiotic creative duo of Daniels fulfils the principles of decentralisation and blockchain interconnectedness. Everything Everywhere All at Once continues on the path marked out in the field of feature films by the animated movies Spider-Man: Parallel Worlds and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, but its concentration of online popular creativity, both audio-visual and graphic as well as narrative, is breathtaking and rocks the senses by adapting them to the much more production-intensive format of a live-action film. Perhaps it is thus not a coincidence that everything here ultimately revolves around family, though in a completely different and wonderfully imaginative style in terms of family dynamics in relation to the traditional roles of villains and heroes who have to evolve in order to overcome evil. In addition to that, Everything Everywhere All at Once gives Michelle Yeoh the role of her life, in which she puts the experience of all of her previous on- and off-screen roles to good use. (07/15/2022)