As spring drifts into summer, movie fans buckle in for their busiest time of year: blockbuster season. Since 1975, when Jaws kept the public off the beaches and packed into cinemas, studios have been releasing their biggest high-concept spectacle films in the spring/summer seasons to take advantage of the months’ air of freedom and escape (and the spending power of hordes of kids with time on their hands). In recent years, it seems as though every season is summer: a month doesn’t go by without the multiplexes hosting a glossy, star-studded spectacle piece, loaded with CGI and quippy banter. The ubiquitousness of these massive studio films has created a sharp divide in the film-going public between those who can’t get enough of spandex, explosions, and fight sequences, and those who feel that these “theme park” movies have dominated the market to such an extent that they are suffocating cinema that is small, intimate, audacious, or inventive.
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Regardless of whether team spandex or team shallow-focused despair are right, this blockbuster season has given us a film that offers common ground for both; the Daniels’ multiverse dark comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once. An unabashedly silly thrill ride, the film follows Evelyn, a struggling laundromat owner whose monotonous existence is upturned by a threat to the multiverse - a threat an alternate version of her is deeply involved with. The film that follows is a maximalist mishmash of contradictions and absurdities, at once crowd-pleasing and alienating, mildly nihilistic, and sincerely sentimental.
Featuring a stunning performance from legend Michelle Yeoh and enough absurdity, post-modern hijinx, and dazzling imagery to keep your head spinning long after you leave the theater, Everything Everywhere All At Once delivers all the spectacle and chaos a high-concept sci-fi action film should, plus an innovative formalism and defiant idiosyncrasy worthy of the art-house crowd. It has made a considerable dent at the box office despite lively competition, and it has been critically acclaimed. Here’s how the film manages to find that common ground.
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The Hero’s Journey
Though the summer blockbuster was broken in by Jaws, it was Star Wars (1977) that came to define this mode of filmmaking. A long-term passion project for George Lucas, Star Wars merged two types of mythmaking: sacred historical myth (i.e. the journeys and exploits of heroes and gods from the days of yore) and modern secular myth (i.e. popular culture and modern literature, from the Flash Gordon serials to comic books to The Lord of the Rings). In this fusion, he sought to create a film that simultaneously tapped into modern technologies and concerns as well as the eternal elements of storytelling.
To accomplish this, Lucas consulted writer Joseph Campbell and his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which outlines the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey begins with a character in a status quo they are comfortable in but dissatisfied with; they are called to embark on a journey, which they initially refuse; they go through a series of trials and learn what they’re capable of; they face off with their antagonist and experience failure/a loss of hope; they experience an epiphany and face their foe, this time defeating them; and they return to the world they knew, forever changed. This formula was put forward by Campbell (in more complicated and specific terms than the generalization above) to illustrate the motifs and structures in myths that are ubiquitous across cultures. The hero’s journey taps into fundamental desires and struggles in the human psyche and provides them with catharsis.
Though Hollywood films had long employed their own versions of the hero’s journey (whether intentionally or unintentionally), Lucas began a trend of outlining a film to explicitly accommodate its structure. Most modern blockbusters can be broken down into the hero’s journey to a tee. Since fantastical genre films are the closest thing our secular society has to a myth, it makes sense that this formula would be ubiquitous in these kinds of films. These movies serve a mass psychological need. That being said, it also makes sense why lovers of more challenging cinema might be annoyed by the repetition of this formula: anyone who knows it can instantly see where a movie is going.
Everything Everywhere All At Once follows the hero’s journey closely, satisfying most of its storytelling needs. Where most films are satisfied to merely hang the particulars of their stories on this structure, however, Everything Everywhere All At Once directly engages with the hero’s journey, challenging and subverting it in key moments.
In a traditional reading of the formula, the protagonist refuses the call to adventure because of a belief in their own insignificance, and only takes it up when something dire occurs. This could be the burning of Luke’s aunt and uncle in the first Star Wars or the death of Uncle Ben in Spider-Man (2002). A catastrophic event makes the hero realize that inaction is not an option. This isn’t the case for Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Her initial refusal of the call in the elevator lines up with expectations - but her decision to embark on her journey is in response to a different sort of threat: tax auditing. As Evelyn sits in that harsh fluorescent lit room and listens to a snarky bureaucrat talk down to her while her husband grovels, she realizes that she would rather embark on a deadly mission into a world she cannot imagine. She hates her life; she hates the unending stressors, the needy relatives, the expectations and disappointments, the ticking clock that leaves her older but stuck in exactly the same place. Evelyn doesn’t leave her status quo because it is forever changed: she leaves it because it seems as though it will never change.
This distinction in story’s catalyst is key to understanding the themes of the film. Though Evelyn’s journey is ultimately about protecting the greater good, she embarks on it because she sees her options in life becoming more and more narrow, and she is enchanted by the notion that somewhere in the multiverse, she matters - she is the most important person in existence. She craves the catharsis and order provided by the hero’s journey as an antidote to her own relentless life; but one of the key ingredients of a hero is that they do not desire to live heroically. They may crave adventure while stuck in their status quo, but it is ultimately fantasy. In framing her choice as a refusal of her own monotonous life, the Daniels set up an unusual, deconstructive hero’s journey.
The hero’s journey is ultimately concerned with the defeat of the shadow; with the overturning of chaos and evil in favor of order and good. Yet Everything Everywhere All At Once does not end with its shadow defeated: Evelyn and her daughter are still tumbling through the multiverse, and the cosmos is still a violent, chaotic, meaningless place. Instead of defeating the shadow, the characters forgo easy resolution for piece of mind. This is the single biggest distinction between Everything Everywhere All At Once and the summer blockbusters it shares DNA with.
No Marvel movie can end with its big bad undefeated (and no, Infinity War doesn’t count) - it would defeat the wish fulfillment at the center of those films’ ethos. In conquering the shadows, catharsis is provided for those of us who live in a murky chaotic world where nothing is straight forward. The problem with this and the broader notion of the shadow is that it puts us in opposition to our very existence. So long as the hero and the shadow are viewed as entities that cannot be reconciled, the shadow will prevail: chaos cannot be defeated; we cannot make the cosmos care about us. Our attempts to fit our lives into simple stories leave us in an endless spiral of regret. By ending the film in this way, Everything Everywhere All At Once exposes the shortcomings and simplicity of the hero’s journey and the countless blockbusters made in its image.
Chaos and Order
In The Power of Film, a book on the elements of filmic storytelling, film writer Howard Suber says, “…it is chaos, rather than evil, that is the enemy. Disorder and chaos are the conditions the hero fights against; unification, organization, and comprehension are the conditions the hero attempts to bring about.” This is undoubtedly true; yet one look at the aesthetic choices of the twenty-first century’s tent pole films reveals that we have a certain fondness for chaos, even if we’re rooting against it. Just about every superhero movie concludes with a third act in which cities collapse, things blow up, anonymous civilians are killed off-screen, and massive forces of good clash with massive forces of evil, laying waste to their surroundings in equal measure. Audiences can’t get enough of chaos - but we demand that, by the end, chaos is overcome and order reigns supreme.
The chaos extends beyond the actual content of the films. The soundtracks are loud and play throughout. Dramatic moments are frequently undercut by oddball humor to keep the audience laughing. The number of cuts in any given scene is exponentially higher than previous generations of films, including the original Star Wars, and older superhero movies like Batman (1989). Rare is the blockbuster that allows us to sit in one place and breathe. Perhaps this is why Robert Eggers’ historical epic The Northman (2022) has had a difficult time attracting mass audiences despite glowing reviews and overwhelming acclaim: even with its scope and spectacle, the film allows too much space to appeal to the hyperactive minds of the 2020s. In this regard, Everything Everywhere All At Once is no exception - it’s as overwhelming and kinetic as movies can get.
The appeal of this mode of chaotic filmmaking to today’s audiences offers a fascinating lens into our collective consciousness. In an era defined by information overload, short attention spans, polarization, and constant threats of random violence, these action films offer a catharsis. Superheroes, cinematic universes, and the multiverse are particularly effective ways to tap into our broader cultural ADD and anxiety - and Everything Everywhere All At Once takes on this overwhelming chaos in its story, themes, and aesthetic. The score by Son Lux is maximalist, a jumble of styles, motifs, and noise; the film is overflowing with action that reminds us just how amazing Michelle Yeoh is; the narrative structure sea saws between universes and their different story threads, filling us in on the alternate trajectories of our characters’ lives through rapid fire montages; and the story itself is concerned with a mysterious multiverse traveler with no apparent motive who is trying to overwhelm the cosmos with chaos.
A few things make Everything Everywhere All At Once unique in its treatment of chaos. For one thing, it is audacious in a way few films are. While the MCU has been praised for taking strange and comical turns in its own films, only the most gonzo moments in that franchise (Yondo and Rocket multiverse hopping in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for example, or the Thomas the Tank Engine fight in Ant-Man) can come close to the sheer insanity and silliness on display in the Daniels’ film. There are sex toy fights, an alternate timeline with a culinary raccoon voiced by Randy Newman, an alternate version of 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968) with an atonal Also Spoke Zarathustra and hotdog fingers, and an everything bagel that contains Everything.
While many high-concept sci-fi films become little more than fibrillation of expensive CGI for stretches of their runtime, each action scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once is unique and carefully designed - the cuts come quick, but you don’t get the sense that the editor is chopping randomly through coverage of the scene. Each shot leads meaningfully into the next to sustain the rhythm and energy of the film. The chaos is not merely an attempt to keep its audience engaged. The form of the film is a manifestation of its themes, and without putting the viewer through that sensory overload, the idea of being overwhelmed by a world that is too big would have less impact.
Where some blockbusters suffer because their constant jokes undercut the audience’s emotional involvement, the Daniels’ film genuinely examines the relationship between humor, absurdity, and nihilism. At times the jokes are funny; at others, they become vehicles of despair in a world where nothing really matters and everything is a stupid joke with a horrible punchline. Genuine sentiment exists alongside absurdity (particularly towards the end), such as the visual of two googly-eyed rocks on a lifeless planet embracing, reinforcing the theme that love and connection can still be meaningful to us, even if we are meaningless.
Rather than allowing its audience to feel the excitement of chaos and then safely resolve it, Everything Everywhere All At Once acknowledges that we are, in many fundamental ways, powerless and at the mercy of an indifferent universe. Rather than attempt to change that fact (which is an impossibility), all we can try to do is stay present and love.
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Simple Answers to Complex Questions
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Ultimately, where the blockbuster and art-house crowds differ is in their feelings toward how a film garners and presents meaning. The blockbuster crowd would argue that ambiguous, confrontational films merely leave the audience in a state of confusion and ill-ease - if we’re already getting that in our day-to-day lives, why should we get it in our entertainment? The appeal of these massive good vs. evil films is that they are morally uncomplicated and allow us to project our own ideas of what is good and what is evil, offering a sort of resolution. Despite their maximalist aesthetics and monolithic runtimes, their messages are generally quite simple. They are sentimental and life-affirming; they don’t tell us anything we haven’t already heard, but who cares when they feel so good?
The art-house crowd would argue that the point of cinema is not merely entertainment - it is a window and a mirror to help us cope with our own lives. To them, any film that reinforces reductive ideas merely contributes to one’s inability to cope with reality, forcing us further into fantasy as we attempt to live our lives by fictional principles. The appeal of individualistic indie films and auteur cinema is their ability to make us look at the world through a unique perspective, leaving us to match the film’s conclusions against our own. They are sometimes sad, sometimes difficult, and sometimes confounding; but who cares so long as they make us think?
Once again, Everything Everywhere All At Once manages to have its cake and eat it, too. Its messages about regret, love, and meaning are simple and familiar. It is a sentimental, life affirming film that never succumbs to the kind of despair and nihilism some auteur films are willing to go to; but in sharp contrast to the majority of blockbusters, Everything Everywhere All At Once is more than willing to let its audience know that life is brutal and pointless - that it has no inherent meaning, and that nihilism, resentment, and despair are perfectly reasonable responses to confronting this fact (though they’re not particularly helpful, and no more valid than choosing love and kindness).
For fans of Gaspar Noé or Claire Denis, this is a walk in the park; but for those of us who have grown up on a steady diet of superheroes, space travelers, and other symbols of fighting the good fight despite considerable difficulty, the blunt acknowledgement that what we do doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things and that chaos cannot be conquered (and probably shouldn’t be) could come as a shock. The sentimentality of Everything Everywhere All At Once does not refute nihilism - it exists alongside it, responds to it. This is not a reductive simple message; it is a message that acknowledges that everything is far more complicated and terrifying than we could ever comprehend, and that what we need to keep on living might just be simple philosophy and sentiment.
It also doesn’t offer easy resolution - by the end, Evelyn has chosen to be present in her many lives because of the cherished moments that occur in between the walls of white noise and suffering; but she still experiences everything, everywhere, all at once, and that is still clearly as difficult as things get - there’s no certainty that her resolve will last. The point is, that coming to the conclusion that life is worth living doesn’t fix the many problems we face every single day. Life is still difficult, still too much, still silly and absurd and pointless; but so long as we can find those moments when we are truly present with the ones we love, here, in this rare moment between nothings where we exist, life might be worth living. Maybe.
