a review of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The internet was really insistent i had to watch this. My watchlist plays by its own rules and priorities though, so it took me a while to finally get to this. Was the internet right? Well eeeh... kinda, maybe? It's a hot mess of a movie biting off way more than it can chew, starting out with a semi-cohesive vision before sadly devolving into your typical Scorsesian "theme park ride" complete with an overkill of matrix-y action setpieces, an abundance of self-help sermons set to a score giving you emotional whiplash. For all its (kinda forced) weirdness and (kinda shallow) musings about many-worlds-theories, what it boils down to in the end is an ambitious flick held back by its rather slick mainstream execution. A slightly more avant-garde approach to filmmaking would have done good here but then again, i'm sure as such it wouldn't have become the successful crowdpleaser that it is. It's missing the philosophical depth of a Charlie Kaufman flick or the sharp satire and commentary of Bong Joon-ho - i'd rather liken it to a Nobuhiko Obayashi film for the Netflix age, lacking Obayashi's "delirious pop art pastiche" charm but having not only his anything-goes approach in common but it also appears to come from a similarly honest place, wearing its heart on its sleeve. Ultimately it's a heavily flawed work with a muddy vision and structural problems yet there's plenty of fun to be had anyway. I can't love it for how it turned out but i like it for what it tries to do. And as far as fairly mainstream films of our time go, i'm glad about anything that isn't about wizards in spandex suits punching CGI villains.