Commentary: ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Channels The Despair Of ‘Rick & Morty’
by Frank Martin
The multiverse is a very interesting concept to create a story from. It has the opportunity to display great hope, but it also gives the chance to showcase great despair. This dichotomy is handled extremely well in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But it also provides some insight into another multiverse story. Rick and Morty is about a sociopathic inventor named Rick who becomes nihilistic because of the multiverse’s existence. Although the animated show is completely ridiculous and revels in absurdist comedy, Everything Everywhere does a great job at bringing the nihilistic feelings of Rick to life.
The film is about an immigrant woman, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who runs a laundromat with her husband. Her life stems from a choice she made to go against her father’s wishes and seek out a life with her husband. But this has led to an uneventful existence of failures. Everything changes when she gets sucked into a multiversal war against a being embodied by her daughter who essentially controls the multiverse like a god. The only way for her to fight this being is to transcend the multiverse and essentially be all of her different selves at the same time.
Becoming a near omnipotent being who’s mind stretches across the multiverse can be extremely daunting. This type of knowledge can lead someone to believe that all choices are pointless. The multiverse is just a never-ending trial of failures and successes with all of it being meaningless. Rick has a very similar view. If he has an infinite number of universes to replace his family with, then the current family he has doesn’t matter. This is exactly what Evelyn has to go through as she encounters alternate versions of the people she cares about and ultimately has to face her omniscient daughter, who feels the same way. Ultimately, she breaks free from these emotions and the movie ends on a happy note. Rick isn’t as fortunate and continually wallows in his own despair.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is now streaming on Paramount+. Rick and Morty is now streaming on Hulu.
