Everything Everywhere All at Once

The big winner of this year's Oscars is 'Everything Everywhere All at Once". Seven Oscars and Best Picture is an incredible achievement for a movie that looks so silly and almost ridiculous on the first side.

What is the movie about? (Spoiler alert: Only read if you have watched already or do not care about spoilers.)

The movie starts with an Asian women sitting at a large desk sorting out bills. Her name: Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh), wife of Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), mother of Joy Wang or Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu).

The Asian migrant family (speaking Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese is a bad mix) is owning a self-service laundry service and the mother is clearly overwhelmed with everything while her husband seems to be extremely overwhelmed with her.

Introduction of different conflicts

Bit by bit, the viewers are introduced to social conflicts (The daugther seems to be homosexual and wants to introduce her girlfriend to the grandfather.) and supernatural occurances (Waymond jumping around the laundry service as noticed by Evelyn through the security cameras.)

In this family, nobody seems to be truly happy with their decision to move to the states and start a new life there . The mother feels the threats from the tax office and tries hard to keep the laundry service but is distracted by her hobbies, she tries to identify as part-time jobs.

The daugther looks for acceptance, openness from her family, and Waymond seems to have given up and just tries to get divorced, while for the grandfather, Evelyn is a disappointment for not reaching higher fame, get wealthy, or being 'better' in general.

The secret of the movie becomes more or less revealed at the tax office when Waymond all of a sudden transformed from a shy, timid person into a very determined one, explaining to Evelyn, she needs to follow certain instructions like switching her shoes and seems to be as confused about that as the audience.

After being intimidated and threatened by the tax agent, she follows the instruction and seems to be in mirrorverse communicating with Waymond who is being killed by another tax agent through the door of a maintenance room.

Confused, Evelyn tries to make sense of what is happening and hits the tax agent in the face in her home universe, claiming to be encouraged by Waymond.

Alpha-Waymond taking over the Waymond in Evelyn's universe fights off the security officers with epic Jackie Chan moves and uses the common confusion to escape with Evelyn, when the tax officer, being controlled by a different version of herself, gets at her.

Waymond's disappointment

Thinking Alpha-Waymond has finally found the Evelyn that will be able to rescue the multiverse, he tries to teach her how to use and access the power of the multiverse. When she fails, he leaves her to die but she manages to access the powers eventually and fights off the bad tax agent.

Jobu Tupaki

Meanwhile, Joy in on her way killing one Evelyn in the maintenance room and tries to find 'the one'. She enters a hallway, in which some police officers try to arrest Evelyn and Waymond for disturbing the public order. Joy, revealed to be the mysterious Jobu Tupaki, is entering, mocking and fighting the police officers killing them in a disgusting fight. (She uses dildos for one.)

Before she can get hold of Evelyn, Joy's grandfather, introducing himself as 'Alpha Gong Gong' rushes into her and throws her into the paperwall.

Evelyn's task revealed

Alpha Gong Gong explains that Evelyn needs to kill Joy in this universe to make sure, Jobu Tupaki cannot access it anymore which would be a strategic advantage. Bit by bit Evelyn also puts the puzzle parts together that her extreme expectations for her daugther first created Jobu Tupaki out of her daugther by cracking open her ability to access all universes at once.

Not being able to kill her daugther, Evelyn now wants to become like her to safe her and tries to escape with her family from Alpha Gong Gong who sends more and more 'Alphaverse figthers' to stop her.

'Everything'

Evelyn dies but wakes up in a different universe, being a famous martial arts fighter. The downside is in this universe both she and Waymond never got married but both become successful and rich. That means that Jobu Tupaki cannot reach her here but thinks, she is dead anyways.

'Everywhere'

Being able to access all universes and switching in between, Evelyn starts to comprehend how many different choices, and decisions have led to the way, her life was only a huge disappointment. She starts to believe Jobu Tupaki that 'nothing matters' and is able to see why she put everything on a bagel in one universe to escape the pain she is feeling from most of the universes she has been to or the concept of being in all of them at once.

Evelyn's revelation

Encouraged by Jobu Tupaki's words, Evelyn signs the divorce papers in one universe that is quite similar to the one she died in but also witnesses her husband argueing with the tax agent who is showing up to arrest her and close her self-service laundry.

The tax agents lets go while Jobu Tupaki wants to convince her mother to follow her into the center of the bagel to disappear forever.

Evelyn realizes that even if nothing matters, there are people who care and make sacrifices and that she was wrong just expecting her daugther to be 'better' because she was only replicating her own trauma from her childhood with her father.

Boss fight

In the final stage of the movie, Evelyn tries to gain Jobu Tupaki's trust back and makes sure that Joy knows that she cares for her. Alpha Gong Gong's soldier's she fights off but remembers that Waymond told her that no matter what matters or not, we should be kind to each other.

She puts a pop eye on her forehead and fulfills all of the soldiers deepest desires.

Finally reaching her daughter, Evelyn let's Joy go into the bagel first but then rethinks the situation and saves her life by pulling her out with the combined power of her husband and her father.

How big is the multiverse?

There is a couple of logical problems and cinematic challenges to produce such a movie as 'Everything, everywhere, all at once'. One of the most obvious questions that could be raised is what the multiverse really is and how big it is, because the mobile phones Waymond and his team are using to display the different universes around Evelyn is fairly well structured and quite comprehensive while the childhood decision to not go with Waymond to America should actually be enormously far away for Evelyn given the fact, she is in her 40s and every decision opens a new multiverse. This logical inconsistency might be explained by Evelyn simply being already dead in most of the universes, either being killed by her environment or Jobu Tupaki.

That leaves us to the question how big the multiverse might extend. The answer is satisfying and dissatisfying at the same time because on the one hand, the multiverse must be finite when there is a finite number of humans making a finite number of decisions that are logically possible. On the other hand, it must be infinite if a multiverse can also exist without humans at all.

We also see that there are multiverses where humans do not exist (stone desert) or where they have evolved extremely differently. (Wobbly hands, and grabbing with their feet which led to a different kind of sex practice as well.) We also see versions on multiverses where Joy does not exist because Evelyn refused to go with Waymond to America.

The infinite nature of the multiverse is simply not imaginable for us humans, because there are too many options to make decisions, however, if a couple of these options lead to the death of one the protagonists this multiverse should at least disappear for one person.

The bagel

The bagel is an interesting concept because it has a hole inside and is resembling a black hole sucking everything inside and containing everything on it as Jobu Tupaki explains at one point. The interesting thing is that even though Jobu Tupaki can access all multiverses, she can only create the bagel in one of them but not create it of the multiverse itself. That means her powers are limited to one universe at the time, however, she jumps in between, taking clothes and other things with her.

The bagel represents dullness and boredom. It is a famous dish for breakfast in the U.S. but if you are thinking about that when you look back on your life, you will only remember a bagel, it becomes clear why Jobu Tupaki thinks that nothing matters.

Jobu Tupaki

This name wouldn't let me sleep and I tried desperately to find an answer what the meaning of these words are. Of course, they are put in for Evelyn to pronounce wrong and therefore creating a humorous effect in the movie but 'Jobu' in Estonian language means 'fool', 'jerk', or 'loser' while Tupaki has a meaning in South Indian Kannada (= 'gun', 'shoot', or 'weapon'). It might be a coincidence and unintended but if the translation is correct and we could translate it as 'loser weapon' or 'shooting jerk' or something, it would make sense as a label for Joy feeling like a loser but also being extremely dangerous because of her power.

Generation conflict

'Everything, everywhere, all at once' indicates several times how traumatized Evelyn is by the expectations of her father. She refuses to tell him that her daugther is homosexual, because "he wouldn't understand". There is also one universe where she becomes a famous Chinese opera singer but her father gets annoyed when she switches and loses her voice for a short time or makes a mistake.

Evelyn projects these expectations onto her daughter instead of confronting her father and actually making real changes, letting her daughter see her efforts to act beyond her cultural background.

Evelyn is trapped, even pushed her daughter in the alphaverse so hard that her mind cracks and she becomes Jobu Tupaki.

In the end the family conflict is not fully resolved because after confronting her father, he helps her and shows surprise towards Joy's girlfriend, and Evelyn and Joy have a conversation working on their mother-daughter relationship but apart from Evelyn being seen in the final cut surrounded by her father, Waymond, and Joy in front of the tax agent, we do not see if this one 'Aha'-moment will remain an integral part of the future family and if the conflicts are solved.

Mending the multiverse

At some point, Waymond says that with training the cracks that open between the different multiverses can be closed again. The ending indicates that Evelyn and Joy either have found a way to close them before going to the tax agent, or that they learned to control it by staying in one universe where they think they belong.

Even though there are so many open questions, I just would like to address one more point and might write another blog post about this movie later because it is loaded with a lot of questions and challenges to unpack: Evelyn, Joy, Waymond, Gong Gong, the tax agent and others can switch from universe to universe by doing something stupid, silly, or illogical. At some point, Waymond said that Evelyn even needs to take a nap or break her own arm to jump but later in the movie, she randomly swallows a frog in an office, or smears mucus from her father's nose into his mouth without even knowing which ability she might assess with that random action.

All in all, Michelle Yeoh is a great actress as well as Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, and of course Jamie Lee Curtis (tax agent). It deserves recognition, Oscars, and all the attention it got. (Michelle Yeoh even already deserved an Oscar for her role in 'Memoirs of a Geisha'.) The logical inconsistencies that are made in the movie are small and neglectible given the speed, cinematic challenges (What is the maximum number of multiverses that can be displayed without losing the plot or the audience?), and the great acting performances. However, questions have been raised and there is so much more that couldn't be mentioned in this short article. Feel free to comment what details I missed or where you disagree with me.