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Everything Everywhere All at Once
Movie

Everything Everywhere All at Once

2022 • Action, Adventure, Comedy

Woke Score
7
out of 10

Plot

A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.

Overall Series Review

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an action-comedy film masquerading as a meditation on the immigrant experience and generational conflict. The narrative centers on a struggling Chinese-American family, whose mundane financial and familial problems escalate into a multiverse-spanning battle. The movie’s main dramatic tension comes from the mother's inability to accept her adult daughter. The film uses its sci-fi premise—a dizzying array of parallel lives—to explore themes of identity, meaning, and the unconditional acceptance of a non-traditional lifestyle. While the spectacle is constant, the emotional core is an explicit argument for subjective morality and radical tolerance in the face of existential meaninglessness. The story ultimately champions the flawed family unit, but only after dismantling the mother's cultural conservatism and traditional expectations of her daughter's life and sexuality.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics7/10

The plot is entirely built upon the intersection of race and generational immigrant struggle, centering on a Chinese-American family's experience navigating the IRS, assimilation anxiety, and cultural barriers. The main antagonist outside the family unit is a miserable white female IRS agent. The narrative's conflict explicitly relies on the protagonist's cultural background, immigrant status, and the daughter's queer identity, making intersectional concerns integral to the plot.

Oikophobia3/10

The protagonist, Evelyn, a first-generation immigrant, actively chooses to return to her messy, unprofitable life at the laundromat with her family, rejecting alternate universes where she is a celebrated success in America. This choice embraces the chaos and lack of conventional status in her current home life and family, which directly opposes the idea of civilizational self-hatred. The criticism is directed at the traditional, rigid family culture brought by her father, not American/Western civilization itself.

Feminism6/10

The main character, Evelyn, is a middle-aged woman who subverts the typical male hero trope by gaining superhuman powers and saving the world. She is a classic 'Girl Boss' who realizes her true, untapped potential. The husband, Waymond, is initially perceived as weak by Evelyn, but his 'way of kindness' is eventually revealed as the superior moral force necessary to overcome the main threat, which prevents the complete emasculation of the male role. The movie celebrates the mother-daughter bond, but only after the mother sheds traditional views.

LGBTQ+9/10

The daughter's lesbian identity is a central, essential, and non-negotiable plot point that serves as the root of the multiverse-ending conflict. The villain, Jobu Tupaki, is a multiversal version of the daughter whose nihilistic desire to destroy everything stems from the lack of familial acceptance of her identity. The entire resolution focuses on the mother accepting her daughter and her girlfriend, centering an alternative sexuality as the driving force behind the film's highest emotional stakes.

Anti-Theism8/10

The core philosophical conflict revolves around nihilism, symbolized by the universe-destroying 'Everything Bagel.' The film's resolution is 'optimistic nihilism' or existentialism, where the characters conclude that nothing objectively matters, and therefore, they are free to choose to give meaning to their lives through love and kindness. This explicitly rejects a transcendent moral law or a higher, objective truth, replacing it with a human-created, subjective morality.