How Michelle Yeoh’s ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Tackles the Multiverse Differently Than the MCU
A few years ago, the idea of the multiverse as the central focus of multiple big-budget movies seemed laughable. However, with MCU movies Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the completely unrelated Michelle Yeoh Everything Everywhere All At Once, audiences are becoming very familiar with the multiverse. However, the Yeoh movie takes the craziness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies to a new level.
What is ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ starring Michelle Yeoh about?
While the MCU tentatively introduced the multiverse one step at a time, Everything Everywhere All At Once throws audiences into the absurdity with little time to adjust.
Out of all Michelle Yeoh movies and TV shows, Everything Everywhere All At Once proves the wildest. Yeoh plays Evelyn, a woman who just wants to finish her taxes but finds herself thrown into an over-the-top adventure.
When we meet Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn in Everything Everywhere, she finds herself dealing with her aging father (James Hong), struggling to connect with her lesbian daughter (Stephanie Hsu), and trying to manage her marriage to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). All this falls on top of being audited by an IRS agent played by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Oh yeah, also, the multiverse is real, and Evelyn has to save, well, everything now.
‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ deals with the multiverse in a very different way compared to the MCU
While Marvel presents each universe as wholly separate, Evelyn can access her other versions’ memories and skills.
In Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, alternate versions of characters exist wholly separate. They have their own lives and can meet other Variants with no problems.
Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once has very different crossovers. Her other selves are connected on a deeper level. She can see their memories, and access their abilities and life experiences to use in her own universe.
And the main Evelyn, in particular, is the one meant to use this ability to save the multiverse.
Could more multiverse movies make their way to cinema?
In the past few years, shows like Rick & Morty have fully embraced the multiverse as a concept. Sci-fi titles like Doctor Who and Star Trek explored the idea years ago. However, while the multiverse has existed in storytelling for years, it has gone mainstream thanks to the MCU.
Michelle Yeoh’s Everything Everywhere All At Once shows how many different ways filmmakers and writers can use the concept.
“When I think about an infinite number of universes, I just think about meaning and narrative breaking down,” writer Daniel Scheinert said (via USA Today). “But there’s something about the multiverse that’s relatable these days, when everybody is living out multiple lives on the internet, depending on which username and platform you’re on, and you’re also stumbling into other people’s bubbles and subcultures.”
To the creators of the Michelle Yeoh movie, the multiverse is present in our everyday lives, not just for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.
“There’s something about it that feels not that high concept,” he continued. And fellow writer Daniel Kwan commented, too.
“We’re already living in the multiverse,” Kwan said.
