Everything Everywhere All at Once, released last year, won all the Oscars at the 2022 ceremony, including Best Picture. Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, this film has several labels, it is at the same time action film, adventure, science fiction and dramatic comedy. Despite the reviews, few speak of the film itself but of its technical prowess, or its Oscar awards.
A confusing scenario and a boring humor
The scenario, seemingly complex, turns out to be in reality very simple: an inter-generational mother-daughter conflict and a failed marriage against a background of parallel universes and action scenes. From the beginning, the viewer is immersed in this chaotic universe where everyone seems to be mad at Evelyn (played by Michelle Yeoh). A lot of information is then given, which will lose the viewer, who will have trouble understanding the very fast dialogues, especially since they are both in English and Chinese.
As for the comedy aspect of the film, his humour is based on the absurd. Indeed, from the first minutes, we learn that Waymond (played by Ke Huy Quan) can travel to many parallel worlds simply by performing an “absurd” task, like eating a lip balm, for example. If the film stopped with some absurd jokes, the comedy would be successful with the public. However, the crazy scenes are all too present. They are repeated in a loop, until the viewer wants to stop the film. This is the case of the parallel universe where Evelyn is married to Deirdre (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), only, they have sausage-shaped fingers, which makes the sad scenes quite funny. But, the joke is so repeated that the spectator’s smile quickly fades away to make room for annoyance.
Surprising but really necessary special effects?
Special effects are the most common element in critics' compliments. Indeed, the film, very creative, contains many scenes with ingenious special effects. In addition, the aesthetics of the film are very successful: we manage to distinguish each atmosphere of a parallel universe despite the complicated narration. The camera movements, all equally different from each other, surprise the viewer. Finally, with such a spectacular staging, we can come to wonder if it helps the narration or if it simply amazes the viewer of the know-how of the artistic team.
An award-winning acting game but still left out
The acting of the main characters has been widely awarded Oscars: best actress for Michelle Yeoh, best actor in a supporting role for Ke Huy Quan and best actress in a supporting role for Jamie Lee Curtis. Certainly, Michelle Yeoh, due to the evolution of her character, was able to perfectly show her talent as an actress. Ke Huy Quan and his many faces, has interpreted not one, but several Waymond all as endearing as each other. Jamie Lee Curtis is a great actress but was this role also mind-blowing? Did she need to be rewarded for this particular role when she had more interesting ones? Finally, we have to wonder whether the awards were really intended for actors or rather for public opinion, increasingly wanting to satisfy social minorities and thus forgetting the primary objectives of Oscar awards. Michelle Yeoh is the first Asian woman to win this award and it is this last information that we remember, much more than his acting in itself, which is a shame.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a rather pretentious film that had an explosive success in the United States but which did not know how to make talk about it in France before its awards at the Oscars. Nowadays, we can notice a certain fashion of parallel universes in pop culture. The subject, very interesting at the beginning, is now omnipresent: it is in the Netflix series Stranger Things and is even introduced more and more in each of the Marvel movies for 4 years. The film’s rather redundant humour can be explained by a cultural difference between France and the United States. Finally, can cultural difference, in an era of standardization of societies, cause the reception of a film to diverge from one country to another?
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