EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: 4K Blu-ray (A24, AGBO, IAC, Ley, 2022) Lionsgate

A woman escapes her humdrum life by succumbing to a series of bizarre hallucinations which may or may not be playing tricks on her mind and her heart. The only ones that should be laughing at the end of 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once are co-creators/writers-directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert as they have managed the ultimate ruse - to convince hackney Hollywood their woefully pedestrian tease and dog of a movie has merits as a multi-award-winning, Oscar-worthy Best Picture. As best I can deduce, the only way to get through EEAAO is to watch it in increments; about 30-mins. of interminably undigestible bits of fanny-twitching dialogue and situations is about all I could stomach, spread over 2 days of, ‘well, I guess I should see the rest of it’. There is no denying the picture as a visually-busy and bustling diatribe about its protagonist, Evelyn Wang’s quest for exoticism and escape from that mundane existence she otherwise has misperceived as a fate worse than…well…you know. Heavily relying on the sort of chop-shop editing that by now should be antique, as its one virtue is to otherwise mask the fact that without it, a movie has very little that can actually ‘speak’ to an audience, Larkin Seiple’s cinematography definitely has some ‘fun things’ in it.

But ‘fun things’ alone do not an Oscar-winning Best Picture make, even if the Academy has taken their ‘politically correct’ hits beforehand to declare it as such. And while critics are falling over themselves with high praise, I will venture a counter prediction here. Everything Everywhere All At Once will not be remembered – fondly, or otherwise, in less than ten years, but rather, is destined to become one of those head-scratching footnotes in Oscar history, full of sound and fury…signifying some navel-gazing horse manure of the glossiest order, yet never to entirely pass the ’smell test’ as genuine picture-making art. Somewhere around 2008, with the honor afforded Slumdog Millionaire – another thoroughly forgettable bit of politically-motivated tripe - AMPASS began to steadily move away from the notion that any Best Picture winner should be considered, not only for its artistic merit but for its mainstream crowd-pleasing attributes. You can put 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, 2014’s Birdman, and pretty much every Best Picture winner since in that same category. Hollywood has made it pretty darn clear it no longer intends to make movies for the audience. Rather, it’s making stuff, fluff, junk and nonsense, merely to promote another liberalized agenda or, more pointedly – to force feed its ‘cause du jour’ – as quickly discarded once it’s potential has been exhausted ad nauseum.

The New York Times has reviewed Everything Everywhere All At Once as a ‘swirl of genre anarchy’, but actually, Messrs. Kwan and Scheinert have taken their hallucinogenic ugly stick to stir in a lot of half-baked dramedy and sci-fi, with some Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-styled martial arts and Ralph Bakshi-rip-off animation; all of it meant to deflect from the fact that without the trickery run amuck their movie really has very little substance and even less noteworthy style beyond what is superficially apparent on the screen. It’s a noisy picture rather than a visually arresting one and it stinks. It took Kwan and Scheinert almost 23 years to get this one off the ground. And the resultant firestorm of acclaim and accolades since to usher it to the Oscar podium appears to bear out stubborn perseverance as its own reward. The critics, collectively to have lost their minds, or rather, hoping we have lost ours, have trumpeted EEAAO for its philosophical cogitations on existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism, adding thematic touches of neurodivergence, depression, generational trauma, and Asian-American identity to this mangled mix of tormented schlock and nonsense. Does it all add up? Hardly.

Plot wise: we meet a karaoke loving/laundry store owner, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) anchored to a banal existence. Evelyn is faced with a crisis from cold-blooded IRS auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is closeted and doomed to criticism from the family’s old-school patriarch, Gong Gong (James Hong). Evelyn’s husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is the cockeyed optimist of this troop. For no explicable reason other than to quell her boredom, Evelyn is suddenly thrust into a multi-universe where she must face her darkest fears, pitted against pseudo-replicas of people she knows in the real world, some having made radically different choices in their alter-lives, and thus to have acquired vastly different skills, while others merely desire to wipe Evelyn off the face of the planet…or rather, whichever layer of it they are presently occupying. For the next 2 hours and 19-minutes we are chained to Evelyn’s nightmare of genre-warping action/drama/comedy, as she unravels the truth about what makes her tick. At tale’s end, Evelyn ultimately returns to her husband and daughter a more complete woman than the one they remember. But does any of this make sense? No. Actually, it’s worse than that. The picture is so one-dimensionally obtuse and perversely intent on delving into multi-spheres of influence, it never finds the time to squeeze even a modicum of empathy from the audience for Evelyn’s plight to become a better woman, wife and mother. The enlightenment sought by our protagonist proves an incredibly hollow victory because what Evelyn learns from both her allies and enemies is that there is room for tolerance of each, and appreciation for their emotional baggage, not unlike her own, and, that which we inflict upon ourselves – as well as others – perhaps, unknowing of the damage it does. Again, does any of this add up? Not really. So, what we are left with is a self-indulgent visual gumbo that never nourishes as it should.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a vehicle made by, and, for those who believe an indoctrination of teachable moments are a basic requirement of the movies. Sorry, folks. It’s not! And wrapping a proto-liberal agenda into a convoluted malaise of visually truncated snippets and sound bites does not mask the fact Hollywood in general, and this movie in particular, have completely lost sight of the fact that movies – at their core – are meant to fill up our leisure with joy, escapism, and entertainment with a capital ‘E’.  EEAAO uses various aspect ratios and a barrage of conflicting stylistic color palettes to gild its wilting lily with some pretty miserable dreck.  Lionsgate’s 4K UHD Blu-ray was shot in native 4K. So, the surprising lack of fine details in this 4K disc release is…well…surprising. Never having seen the movie theatrically, I have nothing to compare with what’s here. Does it look good? Actually, it looks great – often – with deeply saturated colors and an expert handling of the various stylistic elements that veer wildly between smooth and stylish, to gritty and dark.  Difficult to assess ‘grain structure’, as it isn’t film-based but digitally recreated to ‘enhance’ the look of certain sequences. So, ‘natural in appearance’ never comes into this discussion. It looks fine and acceptable. Contrast is uniformly excellent with deep, solid black levels.

Prepare yourself for an immersive Dolby Atmos mix that is an assault on the senses. Extras include an audio commentary from Kwan and Scheinert, a 40-min. documentary on the making of the movie, another 10-min. featurette with similarly themed coverage, 11-mins. of visual effects breakdowns, nearly 14-mins. of deleted scenes with commentary, and another 8-mins. of outtakes. Finally, there’s a scant 3-mins. devoted to the music, and a theatrical trailer. Bottom line: I have officially reached the age where movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once fail to impress. Telling a movie about finding one’s self is a noble aspiration. Taking such a simple premise and turning it on end with a visual/aural mashup on the good sense God gave a lemon is, alas, quite another thing. This was 2 hours plus of my life I can never get back and never hope to revisit again. The 4K rocks the house and will surely delight those who believe Kwan and Scheinert have created a masterpiece. I believe they’re wrong. But hey, who’s to say I’m right! Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

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