Everything, Everywhere, All At Once Review

7/10. Spoilers, again.

Yes, I was crying for basically all of it after Waymond gave his little speech. Now usually I would give movies that make me cry a really really high score (because part of what makes a good piece of media to me is its ability to make me feel things), but in this case I think I only cried because the theme or the moral of the movie was really topical to my life at the moment. It's kind of cheesy, in general, and so I don't think I can give it a high score.

Let's talk about the good parts, ie. why it reduced me to tears. I strongly agree with the theme of the movie. Something along the lines of choosing to be happy and kind and loving others despite the meaningless and insignificance of life. Absurdism, basically. This just so happens to be my life philosophy, which is something that I formalized like a month ago, so it's hitting particularly close to home. I also think that because it's sort of related to my philosophy, I might be projecting certain ideas into the film that might not actually be present, but whatever, it lets me talk about my philosophy, which is the original aim of this blog anyways.

To have access to every single universe renders each individual universe meaningless. By whatever logic and reason they presented in the show, we reach some kind of conclusion that the life that we're living right now is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Cosmic nihilism. Except I'm not particularly effected by cosmic nihilism because I don't care much that we are but ants in some giant's playground or smth (I'm just pulling words out of my ass, because I don't care much for cosmic nihilism). I mean, it doesn't bother me as much as it bothers Juju. The takeaway, or at least my takeaway for you, is that the things that are important to us and make us happy is arbitrary. It's just a result of random choices that put us where we are. There's nothing special that distinguishes one multiverse from another, in the grand scheme of things.

But that's precisely what makes the beautiful so beautiful. That's why I was crying for the second half of the movie. There is no reason (or at least reason that we can comprehend or reason about or something) for us to care so much about our family and the people around us. It doesn't make sense for Evelyn to push herself over the edge to follow Joy into the abyss, and yet she does. Waymond is confused all the time, but he chooses to be kind to other people. He doesn't need to, but he does.

In a desert, even a single flower blooming is breathtaking. That there is order in the white noise that is our world, our universe: that is beauty.

That's why I like music. Why do these pitches played together in this progression invoke vivid emotions in me? I suppose that you could say something about experience and conditioning, but that still does not explain the attraction that humans have in general towards music. Maybe the notes that we like are somewhat arbitrary (Baroque tuning is about a half step down from what we use today, and music of different cultures use a variety of other scales), but they have meaning.

That's the general idea of my understanding of beauty. I also think it's important to love everyone. I haven't really thought it through why exactly I believe this to be important, outside of a really shallow reason, and that is because I admire people who have love for everyone (cough cough Elysia cough Seele). The climax of the movie was literally Evelyn falling in love with everyone, and helping them find happiness, albeit in a very cheesy way.

The whole Deirdre motif was one thing that I really liked. The whole journey starts and ends with Evelyn loving Deirdre. I mean, think about it, the story really starts when Evelyn tells Deirdre to initiate the dimension jump or something. Great bit of foreshadowing that I was not expecting to return. I mean, there were so many random things happening throughout the story, and a lot of things came back at the end, which was really cool! I am a sucker for those moments. It's like a nice bow being tied at the end.

Anyways, reasons why I didn't like it: a lot of the random, weird things that happened felt like they happened for the sake of being random. I'm not saying that it has to have some kind of meaning, but there were a lot of weird things that felt like it was there for the sole purpose of being shocking. This was the general vibe that I got from the movie. That is not to say I don't enjoy it when things are random. Maybe a day or two after watching this, I went to watch a production of Doctor Faustus: Lights the Lights. That was also very very random and chaotic, but I loved it (watch out for a review of that later?). I was sitting front row and my mouth was agape the entire time. Also, the costume design of the production was really really good, and honestly better than Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. They had similar vibes, and I genuinely think that Lights the Lights did it better. Yeah, it's hard to explain exactly what I mean when I say I didn't like the vibes.

My last gripe with this movie is that it felt cheesy. I felt like I could predict a lot of the moments, plotwise. I generally like media that subverts expectations, whether it be in music or storytelling or art. I didn't get a lot of that here. Not to say that it can't be a good movie because it does not do this, it's just that I don't love it.