Everything Everywhere All at Once

Something that many big franchises are doing recently is dealing with stories involving the multiverse, whether it's the MCU or the DCEU, due to the complexity of alternate worlds and how you could have old versions of characters come back. That doesn't mean that smaller works wouldn't be able to tell stories involving this concept, and Everything Everywhere All at Once is one such movie. With the Russo brothers as producers and Michelle Yeoh in the lead role, there's already a guaranty of it being highly imaginative and kick ass. The story starts out simple enough with a Chinese-American immigrant, Yeoh's Evelyn Quan Wang, dealing with a struggling laundromat, a failing marriage, her ill father, having a hard time accepting her daughter's lesbianism, and being audited by the IRS. Things start to go crazy when her husband is taken over by an alternate version of himself who reveals the multiverse to Evelyn, how she can gain the skills and memories of alternate versions of herself through odd acts, and that she is key to saving all of reality. The threat to the multiverse is an alternate version of Evelyn's daughter, Joy, who grew to resent her mother for not accepting her and how the multiverse experiments caused her to experience all versions of herself all at once. With only a budget of 25 million dollars, this is a highly imaginative, crazy, and fun film that can compete with those with a budget of over hundreds of millions. The writing and directing team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert craft an absolute banger of a movie with well shot and creative action choreography and such a fresh take on a decades old trope that is used to not only be funny and dramatic, but often changes genre and style mid way through and is used to deal with themes of parental abandonment and existentialism. One big flaw with their writing, however, is that the ending and its message takes a bit forever to get to its conclusion. What makes a lot of the multiverse concept work is Larkin Seiple's incredible work in the cinematography, capturing the styles of 70s kung fu movies and the vibrant looks of Wong Kar-wai's work that exemplifies the various realities. But of course, all of that would not matter if not for the strong performances that Yeoh and the rest of the cast, such as James Hong, Stephanie Hsu, and Ke Huy Quan, all give. They all manage to give their alternate characters their own styles, methods, and personalities in such a way that no two versions ever feel the same. Everything Everywhere All at Once proves that smaller, more independent films can handle huge concepts just as well as the bigger budgeted franchise ones. Over all: 100%

2022 top list so far:

1. The Batman

2. Dog

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once

4. X 2022

5. Scream 2022

6. Uncharted