Everything Everywhere All At Once - Cheap Thoughts

There’s nowhere to begin with this movie. It goes everywhere and encompasses everything. Comedy? Action? Existentialism? Family? The film becomes everything and leaves nothing except…nothing. Which is in itself the question, when you have everything, when you experience everything, what is left except nothing? Describing the plot is a little hard, to describe the themes is to address everything. A grandiose piece of philosophy and godhood, what matters? Does anything matter? Does it matter if nothing matters? Did you file your taxes properly?

Within all those questions is simply a mother regretting her life, a father unable to fight for what he loves and a daughter feeling unseen and unheard. How can you matter to the universe if you don’t matter to your mother? Can you fight for what you love without fighting at all? Is every decision you made the wrong one? Artists and philosophers have asked these questions and their variants since history began. We’re a species obsessed with finding purpose in a universe of random events and our attempts to find answers simply leaves us feeling smaller and less significant with every development.

Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert somehow find a new way to ask these questions. They present us not with a filmed thesis but with a multiverse hopping action-comedy that sees average joes become martial art stars, sausage fingered humans, infinity bagels and googly eyed rocks. The adrenaline fuelled nonsensical creativity is a staple of The Daniels style as seen in their directorial debut Swiss Army Man, another film that layers deep introspective questions over farcical comedy and vulnerable people. The film is a joke, it is ridiculous down to the bone but doesn’t act like it. It’s silly to us, but not the characters, this is their lives, their norm, there is nothing to laugh at and so they will commit everything and present it with just sincerity it’s amazing how well they blend these ludicrous set-ups with such genuine human emotion (Human being optional). This allows the action to flow with such intensity and violence, it makes for some truly wonderful fight scenes. Likewise the comedy is creative and highly entertaining, after all who wouldn’t find a woman using a dog as a pair of nunchucks hilarious? Then finally throughout all that, the sci-fi jargon, the stellar action and the surreal premises, it’s simply a film about a family, a family trying to find purpose, to find meaning and to find love.

We are so small, and we are getting smaller every day and one day all of us will be gone. But a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts, or because it’s big or because it’s easy. You do not have to be the most important thing in existence to be important, you just need to be important to someone, that is what makes you matter. So what does the film suggest we do to make that happen?

Be Kind.

-Danny