Am I strange for not loving Everything Everywhere All At Once?
Am I strange for not loving Everything Everywhere All At Once?
Just got around to watching it for the first time tonight. We had so many people tell us we'd love it and need to watch it, so it was high on our list. Great cast, and it won so many awards.
I didn't hate it, but I was left scratching my head over all the hype. I like odd movies and books, so it's not that I couldn't handle the weirdness. It seemed like in the same vein as Scott Pilgrim, and if you told me it wasn't a bit box office but got a cult following, I'd totally believe that.
My wife felt exactly the same way. Maybe it's just one of those cases where there was too much hype for us, but I felt kind of let down.
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I've actually gotten a lot of flack from friends for disliking this movie. The plot is heavy handed, the symbolism is shoved down your throat "everything bagel is everything", changing languages mid sentence makes conversations hard to follow, and I personally did not identify with the cultural background.
Infinite universe removes stakes and motivation, there was no explanation for how or why we had these experiences. To drive the story, we had characters talking drastic action that made no sense, and had skills they couldn't possibly develop. The writers waived the ability to "show instead of tell" by using subversion of reality to keep the boring story engaging. Without rules and boundaries the subjection of reality served no purpose.
I eventually looked up what some of the characters represented because it won 7 Oscars, but it turns out that there was no deeper message than the delivered one and overstated political agedas that were forced in as well. Overall EEAAO was visually stunning but presented nothing of value.
I actually did like the mixed language conversations. I had a Chinese-American girlfriend for a number of years whose parents were from mainland China, and their conversations were always like that: they'd go between English and Chinese for sentences, or even individual words sometimes. Oh made it feel more authentic to me.
But a lot of the other stuff I agree with. Channeling a tepan chef in a fight was just an excuse for silliness (which is fine), especially since she seemed to be able to channel the martial arts master repeatedly, which likely would have been more effective in pretty much every case. It made no sense that the cuffs fell off when she challenged hotdog hands, being that her anatomy in this universe didn't appear to change, her hands just went limp.
Again, I'm okay with silly nonsense. I enjoyed it. I was just surprised by how highly rated it was.
Silliness is fine as a nod or one off, but EEAAO made it as massive of a plot point as Julia Roberts in Oceans 12. In writing your goal is clarify, mixed language conversations are a part of life but not story telling. I thoroughly enjoyed hot dog fingers, but it was overused.