Everything Everywhere All at Once

2022 - 4 - 9

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Image courtesy of "Variety"

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Multiverse: How to Understand Timelines ... (Variety)

Multiverses are all the rage in 2022. Here's your guide to the MCU, DC Universe, 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' and more.

On “Picard,” the characters are transported to their alternate universe by the omnipotent being known as Q (John de Lancie) with their memories of their actual past fully intact. What Is Its Multiverse? Not to be outdone by Disney and the MCU, Sony has started developing its own shared world of Marvel characters, pulled from its decades-long claim to the movie rights to Spider-Man and roughly 900 other characters who’ve appeared in Spidey comics. What More Is In Store? Its unclear whether Vulture and Morbius will end up actually teaming up in a movie down the road, but Sony is moving ahead with several other SMU films. (There are also countless episodes of “Trek” involving space-time distortions and anomalies that bend, break, or shatter the natural flow of time — and then fix it.) In “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Barry appears from the future to warn Batman (Ben Affleck) about a horrible event involving Superman (that never ended up happening once Snyder left the franchise). What More Is In Store? “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” as the title implies, will further scramble the MCU’s timelines. Originally conceived as a single storytelling universe starting with Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” the DC Universe effectively fractured after Snyder left the franchise with 2017’s “Justice League” and Warner Bros. (kind of, sort of) went back to square one. What More Is In Store? After premiering at SXSW and enjoying a successful limited release, “Everything Everywhere” is opening wide this weekend. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” further shattered the timestream when a Doctor Strange spell backfired and caused the versions of Spider-Man played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield (as well as many of their villains) to zap inside the MCU and team up with Tom Holland’s web slinger. How Does It Work? The time-travel heist in “Avengers: Endgame” sent the first crack through the multiverse after Steve Rogers traveled back in time, reunited with Peggy in the 1940s, and spent a lifetime with her. From 2012’s “The Avengers” through 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” there were dozens of MCU characters who headlined their own standalone films while existing together in a single, unified timeline. Below, you will find a handy guide for all the biggest multiverses currently unfolding in film and TV, and how to make sense of them.

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Image courtesy of "CBR"

Everything Everywhere All at Once's Fight Scenes Set the Bar High ... (CBR)

This allows Evelyn to access Michelle Yeoh's formidable wealth of combat skills and fight back against the controlled version of Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). And ...

The other element of Everything Everywhere All at Once is that the fight scenes are hilarious. It's purposefully ridiculous and bizarre and doesn't detract from the natural tension of the well-constructed fight scene. There's a keen awareness of surroundings and tools in the fight, allowing the filmmakers to highlight their combat skills with unlikely tools.

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Image courtesy of "ABS-CBN News"

Michelle Yeoh on playing lead in 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (ABS-CBN News)

Michelle Yeoh takes her first lead role in an American film in the genre-bending movie 'Everything Everywhere All At Once.'

"Truth be told, my reaction was that Michelle Yeoh was gonna star in the movie and they wanted me to play opposite her in this interesting, strange little part of Deirdre Beaubeirdra, and I simply said, 'Yes.' I may have read the script, I don’t even remember. I hope things will change very, very dramatically, and very quickly and give us more opportunities to be the lead. This is her first leading role in an American film.

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Image courtesy of "Polygon"

Everything Everywhere All At Once has a fantastic secret director's ... (Polygon)

Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert appear often in their own work, and they show up several times in their new cosmic multiverse martial-arts movie.

In a movie this full of gloriously weird ideas and fast-paced special-effects trickery, the idea that one of the directors played an entire army of hot-dog-fingered apes just seems par for the course. At that Chicago Q&A, he described how he “spent the whole day running around that ridge,” making triumphant hot-dog-ape gestures in various positions and from various angles so he and Kwan would have footage they could digitally stitch together to make one ape look like a troupe of them. Scheinert says the production only had two ape suits, so he isn’t just the lead ape in the sequence — he plays almost all of them. At a Chicago screening of Everything Everywhere, the Daniels talked to me about those scenes, and said they aren’t modeled after one specific scene in particular — as Kwan put it, their cinematographer, Larkin Seiple, has bristled a bit about critics specifically citing In the Mood for Love as the only inspiration there, and wants people to notice that the lighting and key color schemes don’t match that movie exactly. In that 2001-style scene, the Daniels visually explain the origins of a universe where everyone has hot dogs for hands. A lot of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s follow-up to Swiss Army Man goes by at breakneck speed, with pop-culture references, goofy cameos, and effects-driven visual gags that beg for the home-video freeze-frame approach.

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