Everything Everywhere All At Once: genius or mindless farce?

Imagine a great masterpiece of science fiction. Now visualize a forgettable nanar with no brains. Mix these two feelings. Here, you have in mind something close to the film Everything Everywhere All At Oncein theaters this Wednesday, August 31, 2022. Carried by Michelle Yeoh, the film won over American critics at the start of the year, before arriving in France this fall.

We can reasonably understand what seduces in the film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The work incorporates the Marvel-style multiverse, martial arts and metaphysical concepts of Matrix, with a social dimension evoking the mental load within a family. And clearly: yes, there is genius in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But it’s also big nonsense.

Chapter 1: It’s Brilliant

The huge bazaar begins calmly. Our heroine, played by Michelle Yeoh, is Evelyn Wang. This Chinese-American mother is the head of a laundry, married to Waymond with whom she emigrated before having a daughter, Joy, while living alongside her sick father. But in the space of the same day, she learns both that her husband wants a divorce and that the taxes blame her for unpaid taxes.

The catastrophe. What is even more problematic, however, is when your husband suddenly turns into a ninja and announces to you that he comes from a parallel world by possessing the body of the husband from this world; all this before becoming the husband you know a few seconds later. This sequence, in the elevator, is only the beginning of a series of increasingly bizarre events. Because Evelyn is at the heart of an incredible story: in the multiverse, there are an infinity of parallel universes, and all of this being threatened, it turns out that she is the key to solving this mess.

It is on the approach of the multiverse thatEverything Everywhere All At Once is a high art. Conceptually, in any case, the ideas are simply brilliant. You can summon the abilities and knowledge of another version of yourself, but to do so you must do the improbable. You have to do or say something with an extremely low probability rate — such as cutting yourself four times in a row with paper between each finger or declaring “I love you” to your tax inspector.

Laundromat manager Evelyn finds herself mastering the martial arts, leaping down the stairs and beating her opponent way Matrix. She also travels from one parallel world to another, discovering alternative trajectories she could have taken since each choice creates a new universe.

This is probably one of the best cinematic treatments of the concept of the multiverse. It’s due high concept.

Chapter 2: It’s stupid

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a zany film and it is rather a quality. We love the subtitled dialogue between two characters who have become stones in a parallel world. We love the bagel turning into a black hole. Gags, humor and delusional situations follow one another. Sometimes it’s downright hilarious. But by force, it becomes exhausting debility. You lose the magic of sci-fi writing that turns your brain around. The meaning of the work is drowned in its heaviness.

Finally, we end up wondering if we are not simply witnessing a huge mindless farce. In sum, Everything Everywhere All At Once could have been a masterpiece if one of the parallel universes didn’t just feature humans with frankfurter fingers. which can be eaten. No no, it’s not an image: this scene is really present in the feature film.

There are too many things, everywhere, all the time. The film lives up to its title very well. This excess, not very appetizing ultimatelyborders on the weak.

We imagine very well that all this is voluntary. The allegorical power of the film, in terms of the overflowing mental load and the feeling of drowning in a doldrums of possibilities, is clearly palpable. We are almost in a total and absolute interpretation of the show don’t tell in the form of an existential fable. And in many ways, this approach is successful.

But we can’t help but be disappointed. Brilliant ideas are so overlooked that a waste results. Especially since Michelle Yeoh is as phenomenal as usual and the production is mastered.

Is Everything Everywhere All At Once a failed masterpiece?

So yes, we know: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a cinematic experience that defies genres, that dares, that shakes up, that offers something else. This is why it rightly won over most critics: it is a completely atypical film. The cinema is also a place to offer works that come out of the frame – or that play with it.

The problem is that there is nothing more beautifully organized than chaos. It’s a whole part of the art of storytelling, whether visual or screenplay, ultimately. But the chaos of this feature film is not really staged. It doesn’t tell much that is coherent as a whole and makes us drop out of indigestion on several occasions.

Neither failed nor succeeded, Everything Everywhere All At Once is ultimately conceived as a form of synthetic symptom of an era that sees itself as meaningless, in a hodgepodge where memes come to life alongside the worst metaphysical anxieties.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is in theaters from this Wednesday, August 31, 2022