Apr 28, 2023
This weeks movie review (sorry about missing the last couple of weeks. We were hacked badly). Everything, Everywhere, All at Once! (E,E,A,O). “Nothing Matters.” Or does it? Certainly, it does.
I loved Ky Quan in Indiana Jones, and in the Goonies. I loved watching James Hong in so many appearances. But I don’t love “E,E,A,O.” Why? It was actually so much fun to see them together, with such subtle references with the flash cut of Michelle in Crazy Rich Asians, and more.
And that’s how it’s done folks; take good actors with a history of fun or action-filled films; take it to the next level visually, violently and comedically; and then stir in slowly the dead-end, pernicious philosophical ingredients that many people will actually be referring to in their brains in the next crisis they encounter. This is, as they say, the leaven that leavens the whole lump. And there’s a lot of leaven in E,E,A,O.
It’s just really sad to have to call out the logical conclusions of the films presuppositions, when you’re rooting for these actors. But, it has to be done. There is more at stake here than having a temporal good time. .
In fact, I can just hear many people saying. “Let’s don’t rain on the party. Have fun. It doesn’t matter” — until it does. Life’s daunting reality has a way of getting us to discard failed philosophies, until the searchers find true stability. People want to stand on a rock during life’s storms and not get swept away — at least the ones the ones who want to live.
Our confused and somewhat unstable society today is ripe for such added dilemmas. The film’s answer to the seemingly endless real-life confusion many of our young Americans are experiencing, is E,E,A,O’s mantra of “nothing matters.”
Why doesn’t anything matter? Because, as the script explains, all possibilities of the various versions of yourself are being played out somewhere in the multi-verse, from being a dumb rock to being a kung-fu fighting legend. So, let’s hang on to what you’ve got in this universe, accept it and move on. It doesn’t matter.
Wow. What a solution to our problems that, asTeyve sang in Fiddler on the Roof, “would cross a Rabbi’s eyes.” This film’s solution is not a solution at all, and that’s why the other elements I mentioned are needed to mixed in to make it palatable. Without those distracting, comedic and flashy elements, this film is just plain depressing
To somehow salvage Everything, Everywhere All at Once is for the viewer to relegate it to the realm — or multi-verse if you will — of simply brief, mindless entertainment, nothing more. This film is Brain Candy and ingesting too much of it will make you spiritually sick.
The question about the movie is, rather, why bother with it at all? Are you that desperate for a break in life to risk spiritual diabetes? If that’s the case, search and you WILL find a much more excellent way that leads to real life, and not mere surrendering to circumstances ala the dreary deaths of E,E,A,O.
Sorry Ky Quan, et al. That’s what I really think.