The story begins with the busiest day of Shuryen, an ordinary woman who runs a laundromat.
On this day, she had to complete the tedious tax declaration work, deal with the old father who came from afar, and a bunch of laundry matters waiting for her to solve.
At the same time, she has to deal with emotional problems with her rebellious daughter Joy, and her weak husband, Weiman.
However, when Xiulian was the most anxious, her husband suddenly changed his temperament, and seriously told Xiulian that a demon who crossed the dimension was about to destroy the universe, and Xiulian was the only hope to save all time and space! ?
Female Fighter Superspace Connection
Have you ever thought that you can be different? Have you ever felt that if you had made a different choice then, you would not be as ordinary as you are now?
Maybe the self in another time and space will be a more powerful and remarkable character?
Jaco Van Dormael’s “Mr. Nobody” tells you that no matter how many times you rewind your life and what choices you make, life is still full of flaws and regrets.
The director and screenwriters of the film, Daniels and Daniel, are thinking: If we can make Xiulian connect with the self in each parallel universe, can we defeat the interdimensional demon king?
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the most powerful, and also the most creative idea that can surprise and entertain the audience, is this “Overtime Connection”:
Xiulian must find another self with unique skills in countless parallel time and space in order to deal with a series of crises caused by the Great Demon King.
You will see that not only the martial arts stance of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, the action comedy of Jackie Chan movies, even the clown tricks of kanban, or the stunts of Teppanyaki chefs, can become the tactics of battle. ; And thunderbolt pockets, little fingers, pet dogs, can also be said to be deadly weapons!
What’s even more fun is that Daniels has designed a “cosmic shake” setting. If you want to connect parallel time and space, you must make absurd actions at random.
So in the film, before everyone starts to fight, they have to do some crazy things like crazy, like someone suddenly starts eating lipstick glue, confesses to the enemy, or even destroys their own anus, etc., which makes the story full of unpredictable hilarious plots .
Of course, although a lot of various spoof elements have been added, it will not detract from the smoothness and neatness of Michelle Yeoh and other actors when they fight.
I even think that the fight scene in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the most exciting and funny action scene we’ve seen in recent years.
In addition to the humorous action scenes, the process of “traversing parallel time and space” is also the main part of the film’s imagination.
We will see the same Michelle Yeoh, split into two pieces like a broken glass, existing in two different spaces at the same time.
Or see Michelle Yeoh turn into a stone, turn into a sausage finger, one second is a kung fu girl in a bamboo forest, the next is a paper candy doll Pinata…etc.
And it all happens in the same scene.
The big devil is stronger, and with a simple gesture, he can instantly jump to different time and space, and change the reality at will;
So, we went from the empty ancient wilderness, to the laundromat and the IRS that bound Xiulian’s life, to the “Begory Black Hole” temple.
Xiulian, on the other hand, has to experience a life of “different Xiulian” with her husband, no husband, being a chef, practicing martial arts, and flirting with lesbians with hot dogs.
The film is just one and a half hours long, but the audience seems to have received information from three or four different movies and traveled to more than a dozen different types of worlds. in the brain.
At the same time, the creative team also made good use of avant-garde costumes, saturated colors of lights, and fast and dramatic editing and scene transitions, adding to this already “brain-opening” story. Less magical colors.
Want me to say, in the process of watching “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, it is really like taking psychedelic drugs and high, like riding a comet Nebula roller coaster, taking your head to break through the dimensional limit, Run in thousands of galaxies!
Seriously, a refreshing idea may make a movie interesting, but to make a movie have thickness and weight, it still has to rely on deep character emotional characterization.
And this is the real strength of this film. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is not just a funny film full of fantasies. Behind this Michelle Yeoh’s brain hole story of “traveling through time and space and saving the universe” is actually very accurate. It depicts the value conflict and confrontation mentality between parents and children in Chinese families.
As the head of the family in charge of the household, although Xiulian is a capable “wife/mother”, she is also a typical “Asian parent”.
She is bossy to her long-term partner and doesn’t care about the other person’s feelings in the slightest; love poses an authoritative high-profile gesture to point at her daughter who “does not agree with her”, believing that she does not meet her expectations.
More importantly, she believes that the world should function in what she considers “normal”, that everything should be under her control, and that it is her responsibility.
Of course, this hard-working mother not only caused herself a lot of pressure, but also caused the mother-daughter relationship to fail because she could not accept her daughter’s life choices.
From the perspective of daughter Joy, when parents do not take into account their children’s feelings, they give too many requirements and expectations of “what you have to do is right” and “you have to be a certain way”.
And this expectation becomes a huge pressure. When the child is unbearable, the extremely strong “resistance” mentality is likely to lead the child to an extremely negative “nihilistic” position.
Why should I agree with the set of “universal values” you define?
If you insist on telling me that money, status, and worldly vision are more important, then I will say that the world you care about is not important at all!
If “my feelings” are insignificant in your eyes, then the entire universe will cease to exist, and it should not matter to you and me!
This is why, I think many Chinese children living under this kind of pressure have some sort of “self-destruction” factor in their hearts.
Even if “The Great Devil Destroys the World” seems like an entertainment movie, villains often come up with bad reasons.
But in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, because we can deeply feel the pull and confrontation between the heroine Xiulian and her daughter Joy.
Therefore, it is easier to understand that when the big devil said “let the bagel black hole swallow everything”, the emotion and motivation behind it were the anger and reactionary mentality of Chinese children towards their parents.
So looking back at it, in fact, the heroine Xiulian has been under the pressure of her father saying “you are very worthless”, and even was directly denied by her father.
She wants to be “good for her daughter” so much because she has not lived a (socially defined) “successful life”; her control and restrictions on her daughter come from not understanding her daughter, and fearing her daughter Follow in your own footsteps.
However, after watching so many periods of her life, Xiulian gradually understood that her desire to control “as a mother” is to keep pushing her lover away, driving her daughter to a dead end, and allowing herself to live a little bit more. Not happy.
It turns out that sometimes, when people live, they don’t need to have so many “what must be”.
“Nihilism” denies authoritarianism and the meaning and essence of “worldliness”, but this does not mean that everything we experience and care about is completely unimportant, and we really can only escape into nothingness.
If we are willing to accept the best of each other now, cherish the people and things we have experienced and owned, embrace all the ups and downs of life, and let ourselves go to live in the present, no longer afraid of the infinite possibilities of the future, then Perhaps, in this vast and ruthless universe, we can find a little warmth in each other with the most sincere emotions and create our own meaning.
In the end, Xiulian finally set her daughter free, and she also rolled down the mountain with her daughter. This is not only to let her daughter become herself and walk on her own path, but also to free herself from regret and self-denial. come out.
And such “letting go” is not because of “don’t care”, but because of “more conscious ‘love'”.
On the surface, this film is a sci-fi action comedy with a big brain.
If you take the plot out of the cocoon, you will find that this story, to a certain extent, deduces the dialectical process from “negative nihilism” to “existentialism”.
But the core of it is actually a mother who loves her daughter deeply and learns to “let go”.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is full of creative whimsy, with hilarious humor and good-looking martial arts scenes, and the emotional depiction of the “Chinese family” in the story is also very profound and moving.
Related Post: Michelle Yeoh’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” Northern America tops $20.5 million.
