The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once has been praised as one of the greatest movies of the year. It’s both a wildly entertaining ride full of action and spectacle and an intimate, existentialist drama about a woman on the brink of divorce dwelling on the road not taken. Movies usually have to choose between having fun and hitting the audience in the feels, but Everything Everywhere manages to do both all at once.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times has described Everything Everywhere All at Once as a “swirl of genre anarchy.” From comedy to science fiction to martial arts action, Daniels Kwan and Scheinert filled their multiversal epic with elements from all kinds of movie genres.
Comedy
While it’s also deeply moving, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a comedy above all. It’s the funniest movie in years, full of laugh-out-loud moments. When Alpha Gong Gong pulls a handgun on his granddaughter, Waymond says, “I think we should have a family discussion!” When Evelyn is given the classic sci-fi red-or-blue-pill choice between accepting her messianic destiny and lying down to face the consequences, she initially chooses to just lie there.
The movie also makes great use of slapstick humor. Physical comedy doesn’t always land, but it does in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Evelyn visits a universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. Alpha Waymond beats up a team of security guards with a fanny pack. One of those security guards, possessed by Jobu Tupaki, jumps butt-first onto a phallic-shaped Auditor of the Month award. And on top of all that, Everything Everywhere also has an absurdist parody of Ratatouille called Raccacoonie.
Science Fiction
Based on the premise alone, Everything Everywhere All at Once is pure science fiction. The sci-fi elements are there to reinforce the themes of the domestic drama, but it’s still a joy for fans of hard sci-fi. Everything Everywhere dives headfirst into the infinite possibilities of the multiverse (and not with the goal of setting up sequels and spin-offs like Marvel’s multiversal adventures).
The Daniels researched theories surrounding alternate universes for years as they were crafting their wonderfully complex script for Everything Everywhere All at Once. The movie introduces such wild multiversal concepts as “verse-jumping” and an all-consuming cosmic bagel at the center of the space-time continuum.
Martial Arts
Michelle Yeoh finally gets a chance to show off the full extent of her acting range in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but the movie still makes use of her well-established abilities as an action hero. In one of her other lives, Evelyn – much like Yeoh herself – is a beloved martial arts movie star. She frequently taps into this Evelyn variant’s fighting abilities to battle Jobu Tupaki’s henchmen.
The badass martial arts master variant of Evelyn paves the way for some of the most exciting fight scenes of the year, with kinetic camerawork and visceral choreography. Everything Everywhere is a martial arts movie from top to bottom, but it also subverts the expectations of martial arts movies when Evelyn decides to stop fighting. She doesn’t win the battle by punching harder than everyone else; she takes a leaf out of her husband’s book and uses love to save the day.
Family Drama
For all the sci-fi mumbo jumbo and eye-popping action sequences in Everything Everywhere All at Once, it never loses focus of the painfully relatable family dynamics at the center of the movie.
A married couple are on the brink of a divorce. A nihilistic young woman struggles to reconcile with her overbearing mother, who in turn struggles to forgive the father who abandoned her. The beauty of this movie is that all the speculative genre elements exist to visualize and explore the domestic drama at the core of the story.
Fantasy
A lot of the speculative plot points in Everything Everywhere All at Once are taken from real scientific concepts, but the Daniels occasionally veer out of hard sci-fi into traditional fantasy. Some of the dazzling visuals in the movie can’t even be explained by the in-universe multiversal exposition.
Jobu Tupaki is an omnipotent supervillain capable of doing whatever she likes at the snap of her fingers. If a cop attacks her with a weapon, she can turn that weapon into a sex toy.
Romance
Underneath all the multiversal shenanigans, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a touching love story about the struggles of long-term relationships. It opens with Waymond serving his cold, distant wife with divorce papers.
Among many other things, this is the story of estranged spouses reconnecting after years of drifting apart. Throughout the movie, Evelyn embraces her husband’s optimism and starts to appreciate his affection more.
Animation
After mixing in just about every other movie genre, just for good measure, the Daniels also threw in some animation. During the jam-packed runtime of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn visits two animated universes. One is a visually stunning anime world. The other – one of the sites of Evelyn’s verse-jumping final battle with Jobu Tupaki – looks more like it was drawn by a child.
There’s also a delightfully minimalist sequence in which two stop-motion rocks speak in subtitled dialogue while they’re stuck in a barren, peaceful universe that won’t organic life.
