Everything Everywhere All at Once review: Weird yes, but watchable?

Everything Everywhere All at Once.

SCORES

Visual stimulation: 5

Weirdness: 6

Oscars: 7

SHE SAW

This morning I watched a clip of Michelle Yeoh’s mother, in Malaysia, reacting to the moment her 60-year-old daughter won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once. I followed that up with a clip of her co-star Ke Huy Quan’s tearful acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, in which he talked about starting out life on a boat as a refugee and cried, “Mom, I won an Oscar!” Then, I rounded it out with the Best Picture acceptance speech from the film’s two writer/directors - Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert - in which Scheinert proclaimed to a cheering crowd that drag is a threat to nobody and Kwan told us we’re all geniuses in our own way. I blubbered with them through all their joy and, if you think that won’t cloud my judgment of this film, you’re wrong. I’m finally all aboard the Everything Everywhere All at Once celebration train: toot toot.

Every year during the Academy Award season, we pretend that film is still the most important cultural product in the world while it rapidly loses influence. By all accounts, young people rarely watch movies and if they do, they’ll be on TikTok at the same time - multiscreening. Still, it’s a tradition - like Santa - and we’ve all agreed to keep up the facade because some of us still love movies.

Everything Everywhere All at Once was the big winner at this week’s Oscars. It’s not hard to see why this film really captivated people last year. It’s action-packed, unpredictable, very funny, has incredible performances, takes just the right amount of effort to keep up with the plot and, in a world in which our attention is in such demand from so many competing sources, it’s almost impossible to look away from.

The Daniels had their start in music videos and that’s evident in the film - it’s a visual product first that, almost surprisingly, succeeds in creating emotional character arcs and catharsis beyond what the film’s original premise seems capable of. Simply put, it stands alone as a completely original idea, creatively executed.

Part-way through, Greg asked, “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” I didn’t but I was content to enjoy the ride. There are times - mostly in television - when the absence of information and the constant scrambling to figure out what’s going on is just plain annoying but in this film, you get carried along by the fun and visual spectacle of every outlandish and nonsensical moment, that the complexity of the futuristic, alphaverse, multiverse, simulation narrative doesn’t really require comprehension. Lord knows, if it did, this film would’ve been completely lost on us.

HE SAW

We watched it in three attempts over approximately three weeks: half an hour the first week, 35 minutes the next, and the final 75 minutes last Monday, after it won the Oscar for best picture. That is to say, we watched the first half of a regular (albeit critically acclaimed) movie and the second half of the best picture in the world, at least as determined by Oscar voters, albeit presumably including Tom Cruise.

How might this duality of experience have affected my response to the movie? I would like to say not at all, because, like most of us, I’d like to believe I’m an impartial judge who bases his criticism on objective criteria, but I know that’s not true because I always prefer wine when there’s an awards sticker on the bottle.

The opinions of movie critics are inevitably influenced by the opinions of the critics and movie-based thought leaders that preceded them, whose opinions were in turn shaped by those that preceded them, and so on and so on, all the way back to the dawn of Tom Cruise’s career.

What I’m saying is, our opinions of movies are certainly affected by the responses of others and, in this case, mine was shaped twice: by the critical consensus that existed when I watched the first half, which was that it was one of the best movies of the year, and the second half, which was that it was the best movie of the year.

The word I’ve most commonly heard used in descriptions of Everything Everywhere All at Once is “weird”. If we accept this description as accurate - and I do - is it positive or negative or neither? If this weird movie had been delivered to me on a desert island on which I’d never heard of it, would I have liked it less than I did watching it at home, months after its release, knowing it was almost universally considered at least very good? That’s difficult to say, but I do know that when I watched the second half, I was actively trying to convince myself that the weirdness was in service to a masterpiece, rather than an overly stylised piece of trash.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is streaming now on Neon.