Sam Kriss

Schlock: Everything Everywhere All At Once reviewed

The multiverse is a ready-made stand-in for having interesting new ideas

Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Credit: Allyson Riggs 
issue 14 May 2022

We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For two hours I watched characters earnestly talk about their trauma, and then fly around firing jets of coloured magic at each other, and then more pompous trauma talk, like five-year-olds playing at adult emotional life, and then more joyless beams of coloured magic. I left the cinema muttering like a deranged war veteran. ‘Someone needs to be punished for this. We need show trials. We need to make them suffer for what they’ve done.’ My friend spoke, but I could barely hear him. I stared at an empty space roughly 50 metres behind his head. ‘You. You brought me here. You did this.’

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is about a woman who has the power to travel between universes, visiting alternate realities where people made different decisions and life took a different path.

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