Warning: Mild spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
A24's new science-fiction adventure comedy, Everything Everywhere All at Once, is a multiverse movie that shows the MCU has been wasting the potential of infinite universes in its movies. Chinese immigrant Evelyn Wang struggles to get her life in order and keep her family together in Everything Everywhere when she is recruited to save the multiverse from the entity Jobu Tupaki. Evelyn learns to verse-jump, accessing other universes and even gaining her skills and memories from those alternate dimensions. This Evelyn isn't from a special universe where she is the groundbreaking scientist who invented verse-jumping, in fact she isn't really good at anything at all. Yet, she verse-jumps her way to the ultimate meaning of life and the multiverse.
While the basic version of the premise is similar to that of other movies, the concept of a multiverse is expanded further than before as the film explores ideas not seen before in traditional multiverse media. Not only do the Everything Everywhere All at Once meet their alternate counterparts, but the film also addresses the endless possibilities and ultimate consequences of the existence of a multiverse. It all underscores how, despite the exciting premise of the multiverse, the full extent of its possibilities hasn't yet been harnessed by comic book movies and TV shows.
Everything Everywhere All at Once improves upon the basic multiverse premise many superhero movies have covered and progresses past merely gathering different characters to one universe in order to portray what a multiverse film is capable of doing. Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn Wang gains powers ranging from martial arts to reality warping by verse-jumping to her multiversal counterparts. Universes where Evelyn is a hibachi chef, a famous singer, or exists only as a rock all encom the scope of multiverse potential and become integral to Evelyn's story in Everything Everywhere All at Once. It underscores how, so far, the MCU has only scratched the surface of potential with the multiverse, especially how it personally affects its characters.
Whereas Tilda Swinton's Ancient One when Hulk tries to take the Time Stone, but no consequences come of it. On the other hand, Evelyn struggles to come to with how her life would have been different, better even, if she had not eloped with her husband, Waymond.
The Wang family and Jamie Lee Curtis' stern IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra all get to transform into different and sometimes extreme versions of their characters. Spider-Man: No Way Home sidelined some its villains, namely Lizard and Sandman, and Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's versions of Spider-Man were hardly different from Tom Holland's portrayal. Granted, the MCU's variants for Tom Hiddleston's Loki, such as Kid Loki and Alligator Loki. However, Everything Everywhere All at Once still portrays the greater range of outcomes that multiverses allow, with Evelyn even entering a world where she is married to Deirdre and everyone has hot dogs for fingers.
The possibilities Everything Everywhere All at Once explores about the multiverse are definitely one of a kind. The film brings novel ideas to the table and puts its own spin on multiverse theories that were already in place. For now, Everything Everywhere All at Once is in a league of its own. Perhaps the release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness can change that and be the first MCU installment to go past the surface level of what the multiverse concept has to offer.
