It’s certain that everyone (especially myself) gets into that depressing existential mood, and starts having the thought: what could my potential have been if things were just a little different? If I had only made a different choice that one time, would my life be better now? Am I living out my darkest timeline, or is this just one of countless mundane possibilities for who I could have been? I’m probably opening with way too heavy of a thought right of the bat, but the way the world’s been lately, who could blame some of us for musing about the possibility for other versions of ourselves, of reality itself?

Thankfully, I lightly touched upon my fascination with time-travel stories in my recent review for The Adam Project. After all, time travel and multi-verse tropes go hand in hand–often intersecting one another depending on how meddlesome with the past some time travelers are. But while time travel has been thoroughly explored in fiction for over a century now, multiverse stories are just now beginning to scratch the surface of possibilities for what they can achieve. I completely understand why. As I’ve said before, time travel is tricky to write because of the very easy possibilities for plot holes being created by not following your own rules you set in place. But time travel usually just explores a singular timeline, maybe the more adventurous plots would venture into into a second or third timeline being created as a result of irresponsible said time travelers are. Multiverse stories however….well not only do they have their own self-contained rules they must follow, but now must be faced with the responsibility of endless possibility before them. By presenting us with multiple realities, we the audience will naturally react as “Cool, I expect my mind to be blown, my concept of existence challenged, my imagination expanded.”

Over the past decade or so, there’s been more multiverse media up to the task. Absolute props to both Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Spider-Man: No Way Home for giving us wonderful cross-reality stories while still still being great superhero films. (Though something tells me this is just a tiny taste of the awesomeness we’ll see in Multiverse of Madness.) I also want to give a special shout out to the series Community for giving us one of the best explorations of multiple timelines in the episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” — no small task in a less-than half hour segment. And of course, animated series such as Futurama, Space Dandy, and even Rick and Morty have been triumphing the genre long before most live action would dare.

I’m kind of awestruck that I didn’t have to wait for Multiverse of Madness to be released to watch the most ambitious multiverse film to date. Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that kind of came out of nowhere for me, but is absolutely unforgettable. Starring Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a middle aged Chinese immigrant laundromat owner, who is struggling to get her taxes filed. At the same time she has to deal with her rocky relationship with her lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), her judgmental elderly father (James Hong) visiting from China, and her strained marriage with her agreeable husband Raymond (Ke Huy Quan.) Things start getting a little weird when a Waymond from another universe possesses this universe’s Waymond at the IRS office, and tells Evelyn she may be the only one who can save reality itself. I really don’t want to divulge into to many details about the plot, but it involves multi-universe jumping in all of it’s glory.

I sorely regret not having seen any of director duo’s Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan’s (collectively known as “Daniels”) films. Their directing style hearkens back to so many of my favorites. The vivid imagination of the Wachowskis, the clever and fast paced cuts of Edgar Wright, the quiet inner character struggles of Ang Lee, the tightly choreographed fight scenes of John Woo, and some hilariously irrelevant humor of James Gunn. I realize that’s quite a lot to compare a single film to, and it’s already sounding way overhyped, but these were my genuine thoughts while watching it.

Usually my favorite films have an impressing ensemble cast, and this one is no exception. I of course expected Michelle Yeoh to do a brilliant job, as she always does, and am especially happy she got a role that allowed her to show off a bit of her comedic acting chops. My favorite surprise was the triumphant return of Ke Huy Quan, whom many of us grew up knowing him as “Short Round” from Temple of Doom and “Data” from The Goonies. In his long absence from western media, he learned quite a lot of new acting and martial arts tricks, while maintaining the charm we all love him for. It’s not been mentioned it yet, but Jamie Lee Curtis also plays a prominent role in the film as Deidre Beaubeidra, the staunch IRS agent in charge of Evelyn’s case. I can’t speak on her behalf, but Curtis looks like she is having the time of her life while making this film, reminding us of how fun of an actress she is to watch when she’s not being chased after by a psycho killer.

The reason I’m calling Everything Everywhere All at Once one of the best and most ambitious multiverse films to date is the amount of sheer possibilities it not only hints at, but actually shows us. I think many of this genre don’t quite want to go on the level this film did, not only for budgetary purposes, but for fear of confusing their audience and compromising the plot. I get it. Writing a multiverse film is probably the creative equivalent to herding cats. Yet the Daniels were just crazy enough to pull it off–while not alienating those of us in the audience who didn’t study chaos theory in grad school. Don’t get me wrong, this movie is still intelligent, and presents us with a fairly well thought out science fiction plot. But instead of being over saturated with pretension like it so easily could have, Everything invites as many of us as it possibly could to enjoy it, to find our own meaning. And its meaning is one of its most beautiful attributes. Besides being a science fiction, martial arts, comedy, and fantasy, Everything is at it’s core a family drama. I found myself once again balling in the theater because of a Michelle Yeoh film.

The one thing I regret about Everything Everywhere All at Once is that after seeing it, I’m going to be expecting a lot from Marvel’s Multiverse of Madness plot arc in the years to come. After all, if this independent film that came out of nowhere can master the genre, Marvel should be able to as well. I expect myself in the meantime to watch Everything again and again, as there will probably be tiny details that will take me years to discover. And hopefully, because of this film, I can find myself a little less nihilistic when that existential feeling starts possessing me.