Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere All at Once:

The Battle of the Multiverses and the Failures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

(no spoilers for either film)

If you go to the cinema right now, along with a cursed selection comprised of a Mark Wahlberg religious propaganda vehicle, a Downton Abbey sequel and another failed entry in the disastrous Fantastic Beasts series, you will be presented with two options for universe-hopping action-packed adventures through the multiverse. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the newest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The second Doctor Strange film and 28th feature film in the MCU comes from the legendary Sam Raimi, and follows Steven Strange on a quest to protect young, superpowered ingénue America Chaves from MCU favourite hero-turned-villain Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch. Everything Everywhere All at Once comes from the directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, better known as ‘Daniels’, after their idiosyncratic debut feature film Swiss Army Man (2016). Everything Everywhere All at Once follows middle-aged mother and laundromat owner Evelyn Wang. She struggles to juggle her failing marriage, her strained relationship with her daughter, her ageing father and trying to file her taxes, when she is recruited into a mission to save the multiverse from Jobu Tupaki, the sinister force attempting to destroy it.

Both films wrestle the same basic sci-fi concept of the multiverse; the theory in which an infinite number of alternative realities exist simultaneously, where every possible timeline is realised. However, that’s about where the similarities begin and end. The films couldn’t possibly be more starkly different in production and execution. One is an unbelievably creative and ambitious adventure built around authentic heart and soul, and is a deeply moving reflection on existentialism and finding meaning in a meaningless world. The other is a clunky, empty shell of a franchise filmmaking machine with a few desperate gasps for creative vision from a legendary director poking through the holes. I’ll let you work out which is which.

I want to use this piece as an opportunity to dismantle why and how my relationship with the MCU has changed and why I now take such a hard stance against it, to discuss the scattered production behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and why I responded so negatively to the final product. And, in contrast, to discuss why Everything Everywhere All at Once moved and excited me so much.

My relationship with the MCU is not one of pure hatred, it’s far more complicated than that. I outlined my personal history and relationship with comic-book movies in my review of The Batman (2022)

so I don’t want to reiterate too much of that. But I’ll say that I was definitely sucked into the fandom surrounding the MCU for a couple of years, and enjoyed keeping up with every instalment and obsessing over their connectivity. I think a couple of the films are quite good and I think what they did with Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), and how they elaborately built up to them over a decade, is undeniably very impressive. Achieving such a large and long-spanning interconnected web of stories and having such a satisfying and climactic payoff with those two films is something nobody else in the industry has been able to achieve, and perhaps nobody else ever will. I will always give credit where credit is due.

But the spell was broken for me post-Endgame. I was invested in following the original saga for years because it was something I had grown up with. And seeing it evolve from a fairly low-investment Jon Favreau movie into such an elaborate narrative web which climaxed in such a satisfying way was a thrill for anyone who had been following along. But once I had cashed in my nostalgia credits with Endgame, I had very little investment in anything going forward. Especially as they vastly increased the rate at which they release content, I became completely exhausted by the never-ending conveyor belt of cookie-cutter offerings the studio continued to churn out. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug and it’s really illuminating once you realize that this franchise is fueled by it and begin to view the filmmaking separate from it.

I should note before going any further that my favourite thing to come from the MCU, which I will vehemently defend, is the Disney+ miniseries Wandavision (2021). Unfortunately, it veers a little off the rails into dull action spectacle in the last episode. But for the majority of its 9-episode run, it’s so far removed in the best way from anything else in the MCU. The storytelling is slowly and deliberately paced, packed with intrigue and uniquely frightening. It makes Wanda the most intricate and compelling character in the franchise by an absolute mile and features a pretty unbelievable Elizabeth Olsen performance. I adore it and view it in complete isolation to the rest of the MCU.

I have completely detached myself from the MCU because their standard of filmmaking is so utterly devoid of vision, intrigue or style. Again, I am not claiming that there aren’t occasional exceptions, or that the films do not make for fairly entertaining viewing experiences. But it’s very illuminating to stop and reflect on what it actually is that you are responding to in these movies. Are you cheering because of a compelling narrative beat or effective storytelling, or are you cheering because they have presented you with a person/place/object that you are familiar with? They have tricked an entire moviegoing population into conflating simply recognizing or remembering things/people with the craft and intention that goes into authentic storytelling. Character cameos have become their currency of keeping fans reeled in, without any meaning behind them.

Never has there been a more deeply astute observation than Martin Scorsese’s death blow when he compared these movies to theme park rides. It’s been a few years now and the debate has been re-opened so frequently by Marvel fans who attempt laughably bad takedowns of the legend of motion pictures, but it’s such a razor-sharp observation that I still think about it all the time. It’s completely accurate. They give you a hard, fast hit of dopamine by serving you up exactly what you want based on the nostalgia you have from investing so much time into these characters. And more often than not they resemble corporate products more so than films, designed and constructed by a panel of executives before a director ever gets their hands on it.

In addition to this completely empty mode of storytelling, these movies have absolutely atrocious visual style, or lack thereof. The initial use of VFX when needed for scenes of action or spectacle in the early films, has turned into these films being literally constructed out of CGI, and not even bothering to use real locations, props or even costumes. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), a film which I enjoyed in many ways, is one of the most atrocious looking motion pictures I have seen in quite some time. Watching the behind-the-scenes footage is like a fever dream. Almost every scene in the film, even mundane action-less scenes, are shot on a blue-screen sound stage with no real locations used. It's an entirely artificial world. It still makes me laugh that they could not have even been bothered to film on a real bridge for the elongated bridge scene early in the film or film Flash Thompson at a real party or checking his phone on a real New York street or even make Tom Holland WEAR AN ACTUAL COSTUME. The Spider-Man suit is completely CG if you didn't know. The film is so ugly and is only the worst example of the grey, sludgy, artificial sheen all of these films have. The colour grading is that of nightmares and nothing looks real because none of it is.

*I am making a last minute addition to this point as I edit, because the full trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder just came out and I have to rant for a quick second. I am honestly still looking forward to seeing it in the hopes that it delivers on Taika Waititi operating at the peak of his comedic writing abilities and because I love Natalie Portman. However, my god does this film also look SO UGLY. And in probably the greatest insult of all, it is clearly visible that the helmets worn by Thor and Jane are completely CGd. THEY EDITED FAKE HELMETS OVER THEIR FACES INSTEAD OF JUST GIVING THEM REAL HELMETS TO WEAR. JUST MAKE HELMETS. It is beyond parody at this point, I can't even process it.*

We have seen time and time again the disaster that occurs when accomplished and creative directors are lured into the MCU machine, only to discover when it’s already too late that these movies are practically written and directed before they have ever entered the project. The studio performatively pat themselves on the back for hiring “real directors” while having a well-trod history of completely stifling their visons each time. We have seen this with the stories of Chloé Zhao allegedly clashing with Marvel higher-ups during production on Eternals (2021), a clunky, overstuffed film which came out the year after Zhao won Best Director at the Oscars for Nomadland (2020) and is completely devoid of the naturalistic style of her other work. Similarly, directing duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who made a handful of notable indies like Half Nelson (2006) seemed excited to be taking on Captain Marvel (2019), only for that film to be so utterly nondescript it could have been directed by an algorithm. A similar example can be made out of Short Term 12 (2013) director Destin Daniel Cretton making the dull Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) or Berlin Syndrome (2017) director Cate Shortland making Black Widow (2021). And of course, it has to be mentioned that the great Edgar Wright was initially supposed to be directing Ant-Man (2015) but left the project due to creative differences because of Marvel’s constraints.

There are of course more successful examples where it does feel like a filmmaker’s unique vision meshes with the material, at least in the script, and is evident in the final product; most notably Ryan Coogler’s work on Black Panther (2018), Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and both of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films. And it's no coincidence that those are fairly unanimously considered in the top echelon of the MCU. However, even these films still feel like products on the franchise conveyor belt which share the hideous visual appearance and general contrived narrative flatness of the MCU.

With it being such a tight machine that stifles creativity, it really makes far more sense to just accept this and get director-for-hire filmmakers like the Russo brothers who have a steady resume of TV directing and are certainly very competent directors but, with all due respect, seemingly have no unique vision or aspirations to be inventive. Their work on Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) is successful, while they make no attempts to fight the MCU machine and completely submit to the status quo. In a bizarre way it is almost easier to accept and enjoy this outcome from the MCU than when they try and force creatives like Zhao or, as I will discuss, Sam Raimi, into the machine and chop up their vision.

Enter the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This film had an extremely troubled production and has been thrown around the Marvel production slate over the last couple of years. Believe it or not, it was originally slated to come out before Wandavision and to be the formal introduction of the multiverse to the MCU. Due to COVID throwing a wrench in production schedules, it was then pushed back to come after Wandavision and adjusted. But was still supposed to come before Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Doctor Strange and multiverses play a huge role. MCU execs at Disney wanted No Way Home to be pushed back to accommodate but Sony, who have ownership over the Spider-Man films, refused, leading to the film having to be re-written and adjusted yet again to come out after No Way Home. All of this re-shuffling is problem number 1, which leads to the film feeling very awkwardly placed in the overarching MCU narrative. They’ve spent multiple shows and films now telling us over and over that meddling with the multiverse has supposedly huge, dangerous consequences, yet we have yet to see any of those consequences actually be realised, so this all just feels so inconsequential and like it has no real stakes. In not tying the story to any tangible part of the pre-established timeline/ongoing story and having no real consequences for much of what happens, it feels completely unnecessary.

The biggest spanner in the works with this production though, is that the film was originally being worked on by director and co-writer Scott Derrickson who was behind Doctor Strange (2016). However, while they were already deep into pre-production, Derrickson followed in the path of Edgar Wright and left the project due to ‘creative differences.’ Kevin Feige and co. were reportedly and unsurprisingly unwilling to let him realise his ambitious vision for an exploration of the multiverse. Sam Raimi was very quickly hired as a replacement, having not worked on a comic-book film since his iconic Spider-Man trilogy in the early 2000s, which are honestly like night and day when you watch them now in comparison to the modern MCU offerings. In addition to Raimi, writer Michael Waldron was pulled directly off Loki (2021) where he had been head-writer, to re-write the films script. And to top it all off, the film would later have extensive reshoots, further re-shuffling its narrative.

This multi-director mess leads to a completely inconsistent end product which feels Frankensteined together in the edit. The first hour or so is awkward, over-wrought and exposition-filled setup and is shot like a commercial. It feels like Raimi had no hands on it, whether that’s true or not, as we trod through the narrative setup as if it were a chore. Then, with the inclusion of Wanda and the entrance to the multiverse, we start to get some Raimi peeking through and things get a little more interesting. However, the moments of real intrigue for me were few and far between, as we limp towards an anticlimactic ending which feels devoid of any real soul or meaningful payoff. The film is at its best when Raimi’s horror sensibilities shine through the murkiness. This is an MCU film which has jump-scares and a slasher sequence (even if it’s a mild one) which is unprecedented for the franchise. It's filled with homages to both Raimi’s own previous work with gore/horror and homages to other horror classics like The Shining (1980), and the moments where Wanda is allowed to be genuinely frightening are some of the best villain work in any of these films.

It’s really not enough to save it for me though. Despite the brief moments of horror and the fact that we get a little handheld camera and some crossfades, it's still bogged down by the drab MCU visuals, complete with some of the ugliest VFX I’ve seen recently, and has far too many cheap narrative shortcomings. The sudden introduction of the magical ‘Dark Hold’ is a really uninteresting way to quickly propel the narrative towards chaos without laying any groundwork, and nothing about how the story was concluded felt satisfying or impressive.

While she makes for a great villain out of context and Elizabeth Olsen gets to give surely one of the better performances in any of these films, the writing of Wanda is frustrating and somewhat problematic. I’d recommend Roslyn Talusan’s article for JoySauce “Wanda Maximoff in the Multiverse of Sexist Tropes” which articulates it succinctly. But essentially, Wanda was a fairly nuanced portrait of a trauma victim in Wandavision who was elevated to so much more than just a representation of trauma. And one of the most interesting parts of that show is that it allowed for a moral ambiguity with how Wanda was presented, not shying away from the antagonistic ways she could misuse her powers, while still retaining a high level of empathy for her. That nuance is flushed away here and Wanda is suddenly, and with almost no transition from Wandavision (apart from a tacked on end-credit scene from the end of the show which you cannot expect every viewer of this film to have seen/remember), presented as a tyrannical witch, mad with power. It’s a disservice to a character who has now been made extremely one-dimensional. And the way her villainy is positioned in relation to motherhood is undeniably problematic. I'm surprised that it made it through after the MCU was already famously and rightfully criticized for the way it presented motherhood and fertility in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) with Black Widow.

A key point on this matter is that Raimi admitted in a recent interview that he and Waldron weren’t able to watch all of Wandavision during production and so weren’t even given the material to have a full understanding of Wanda. Raimi says he was shown “key scenes” but it clearly wasn’t enough to save Wanda from her ham-fisted downfall into villainy. It’s an odd paradox that Wanda is so clearly the highlight of the movie, while also being the most frustrating part of it, as a problematic muddling of a previously great character.

On cameos being the new currency of Marvel, this film is the darkest depths of that. No spoilers, but the portion of this film which contains a number of cameos is representative of the lowest low of this franchise to me. Just utterly empty. While I do have some issues because it’s obviously nostalgia bait, I will admit that the cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home are handled extremely gracefully and are meaningfully woven into the narrative and connected to the main characters. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, figures appear on your screen that have absolutely no meaningful tie-in and literally exist for the sole purpose of creating ‘cheer moments’ where people collectively realize “Hey! That is a character/actor/intellectual property that is familiar to me!”. The cameos are not utilised in any way past that and have absolutely no interconnectivity with the main narrative. They couldn’t be more meaningless. Additionally, while this is nothing new for the MCU, it is so obvious that these people shot footage separately without ever being in the same room together and were hideously blue-screened into the same scene. It is so egregious that there is one character who is talking to Doctor Strange and their eyelines are not even matched up so it doesn’t look like he’s actually looking at Doctor Strange. It honestly seems like he could have even been reading his lines off of cue-cards. Just shameless.

Every part of this film is utterly devoid of any soul or depth, while trying to pass itself off as having meaningful relationships or moments. We are expected to believe in, or have any investment in, the dynamic between Steven Strange and Christine (I almost just wrote “Rachel McAdams” and had to Google what her character’s name was, despite having just seen this movie) when they have absolutely no chemistry and no time was ever taken to flesh out their "love story". We are expected to feel emotionally invested in the platonic/mentor relationship between Doctor Strange and America Chavez (as they clearly try to replicate the Tony Stark and Peter Parker dynamic) despite the fact that she is introduced in this movie and then given no substantial characteristic, nor meaningful moments shared with Doctor Strange. We are expected to feel the gravity and weight of the Kamar-Taj (a name I also had to Google), a magical location (?) that is never effectively established. And any meaningful connections we did bring into this film, namely with Wanda, are squandered by the poor writing she is cursed with.

I could not have felt less emotion watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness if I tried, and only felt frustrated and offput by its blatant attempts to appear as having anything of substance beneath some Sam Raimi flair. In actuality, this awkwardly mis-matched, product of studio interference has nothing of substance to offer, and provides an itemized list of every problem evident in the MCU model.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, as the name may suggest, is an all-encompassing and completely overwhelming viewing experience. Its manic melting pot of sincere family drama, bleak existentialism and commentary on the immigrant experience, generational trauma and mental illness, mixed with martial arts, vulgar gags, sci-fi exposition and insane commitment to the most absurd jokes makes it, for better or worse, one of the most singular films to be made in a significant amount of time.

I should make it clear that my high praise for this film’s ambition is not even to say that I adored every part of it or that I think it’s a masterpiece from start to finish, because I don't. There are elements of Daniels’ unique style and peculiar storytelling which don’t always connect with me. There were a number of jokes and visual gags which I thought didn’t totally work, or exceeded my limitations for weirdness, although it’s reasonable in a movie overstuffed with so many jokes that not all of them are going to hit. Additionally, what really holds it back for me, having seen the film twice now, is that I do think the first half is a little laborious and it takes too long for things to pace and really become thrilling. The film is split into three chapters and Part 1 is vastly longer than the other chapters. Especially on my second viewing, while it’s all still enjoyable, I felt the drag of the hour/hour and a half it takes for things to really kick off. I found myself anxiously anticipating the arrival of parts 2 and 3.

But once it crescendos into the absolutely devastating and poignant existential climax of the last 45 minutes or so, it’s pretty much unparalleled. I’m not a big crier and haven’t properly wept at a film in a couple of years (Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) is the last film I can specifically recall shedding tears during). The first time I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once though, I had a steady flow of tears streaming down my face for a solid half an hour. Not even because this is an overtly sad film, though there is certainly a profound sadness to some of it. But because through all of the absurdity of magical bagels and hot dog fingers and sentient rocks, this is a film which confronts you with the ultimate, all-consuming fear that underlies the entirety of human existence during our frighteningly short life spans on this earth: that nothing really matters. That life is a series of missed opportunities and regrets, as we spend our lifetimes grasping onto the idea that what we do matters and desperately pray for the existence of fate or destiny or God, before our brief moment on earth passes and we are gone forever.

This sounds incredibly bleak, I’m aware. But the beauty of Everything Everywhere All at Once is that it presents you with the insignificance of our lives and then, just as you may feel consumed by the black hole of existentialism, it teaches you to find comfort in it. It proposes that in a world where nothing we do in our short lives matters in the grand scheme of the universe, there is freedom. And in actuality, there is then an opportunity for us to give a deeper meaning to our lives in our own personal experience. Loving and being loved by another person in any capacity can be the most meaningful thing to ever occur if you embrace it as such. And freeing yourself from the shackles of regrets or what ifs, allows for complete and total acceptance of your miniscule piece of the timeline of the universe and makes each moment we are alive feel more meaningful.

I know that this sounds incredibly hefty and intellectual as I describe it and tease out the themes, but in the film, they are communicated so gracefully. These momentous themes are presented to us through the grounded lens of Evelyn and her family, and we get two different, extremely moving sequences of resolution; one with her husband and one with her daughter. Both of which I found to be impeccably written, using often quite simple dialogue to stealthily deliver such profound emotion.

In addition to the writing and unbelievable editing (which, as has been discussed much online, was done by editor Paul Rogers on Adobe Premiere Pro!!!), all three key performances are worthy of high praise. The legendary Michelle Yeoh who stated that the film was “something [she’s] been waiting for... for a long time” gives her best performance to date, especially in a role where so much is asked of her. After retiring from acting years ago due to how disheartened he felt by the lack of opportunities for Asian actors in Hollywood, Ke Huy Quan (known by most as the kid from Indiana Jones and The Goonies) gives a similarly impressive performance, having to singlehandedly carry some key moments of extreme emotion while also being incredibly funny. I was unfamiliar with Stephanie Hsu but was also really affected by her performance, which in many ways is at the heart of this film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once being released alongside Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is such a brilliant coincidence in so clearly exposing everything the MCU releases are completely lacking in, and why the machine is so broken. I believe that I would’ve disliked Multiverse of Madness just as much either way. But being able to compare its multiversal tale which trods through narrative beats like it’s ticking off boxes on a checklist with nothing beneath the surface, to Everything Everywhere's soulful reflection on finding meaning in a meaningless existence, is equivalent to comparing a drawing of a stick figure to the Mona Lisa.

It’s also such a perfect illustration of the fact that with a lower budget, often invention is born from necessity. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of dollars are dumped into these MCU projects like a black hole, only to produce the most disposable and un-impressive results. Multiverse of Madness had a reported budget of 200 million dollars. It has poor, at times borderline unfinished-looking CGI in its completely flat frames (I don’t place any blame or criticism on the talented individual VFX workers who are no doubt over-worked and given unrealistic deadlines). It’s generally hard to point to any genuinely impressive sequence or aspect of the film which feels like a worthy display of its budget, and it’s drowning in that sludgy grey MCU anti-aesthetic.

In direct contrast, Everything Everywhere had a reported budget of 25 million dollars, one eighth of the budget of Multiverse of Madness. And from its eighth of the budget and apparently only 5-7 person VFX team, a project a hundred times more visually engaging than Multiverse of Madness, which feels so much grander in scale and has vastly more compelling action and sci-fi scenes, is created.

Another thing so clearly illustrated by the comparison is how Doctor Strange completely wastes the concept of the multiverse and doesn’t explore any of its potential. While we get an obligatory montage of Strange entering the multiverse as he passes through different alternative universes quickly, there is only a significant amount of time spent in two other universes, neither of which are particularly adventurous or creative divergences from the original one he comes from. It’s bizarre how unwilling it is to be even slightly creative or inventive. It’s a movie which markets itself entirely on the concept of the multiverse and then in actuality, very little of it actually feels like it hinges on that concept or is interested in exploring it. Everything Everywhere, in stark comparison, dives headfirst into the impossibly vast scale of the multiverse. With the constraints of its budget, it still manages to exhibit the endless possibilities of the concept and be so creative in all of the alternative Evelyns we get a taste of.

There are two very specific comparisons I'd like to use as examples, as I think they are perfectly representative of the disparity between the films. One, I have used as my photo for this piece. It’s a comparison of a still from each film (both taken from the trailers). I honestly think it speaks for itself. We have a drab, grey frame of a smirking Steven Strange with a horrifically pasted-in CGI eye on his forehead, that ends up feeling insignificant in meaning. There’s just nothing intriguing to me about the frame in or out of context. Then, a warm and striking frame of a smiling Evelyn, tears in her eyes. You don’t have to know the context to understand the poignance of her emotion in that moment. Rather than a computer-generated replication of a real human eye, on her forehead is a googly eye, something inherently childish and silly. Here though, the use of such a silly and insignificant item in an otherwise ‘serious’ moment only epitomizes the essence of Danies’ film - You have to be able to find joy in the tiniest fragments of the life and to embrace the simplest of pleasures. Such a sincere and genuinely poignant moment being accented with a symbol of humour or absurdity is a distillation of Everything Everywhere’s all-encompassing embrace of the full spectrum of the human experience.

To move away from the visual storytelling comparison, I want to do a narrative one and use a line of dialogue from each film to contrast them. If you are extremely sensitive to having anything spoiled and don’t want to know exact lines of dialogue used, then feel free to skip this paragraph. Though these are fairly basic lines which I don’t think spoil anything from either film and have been much discussed online. I am referring first to Multiverse of Madness's “I love you in every universe”. While a sweet sentiment, it’s again a case where Multiverse of Madness goes so on-the-nose, by having this overly-dramatic line while having not laid any real narrative groundwork to support the line or give it the emotional impact it should have had. It’s a moment which you know should be extremely moving, but just isn’t because of the lack of effort put into building up to it. In comparison, there is Everything Everywhere’s “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you”. It’s a sentence which comes at the tipping point of a long and intricate set-up of the history, deep intimacies and faults in a marriage which we are experiencing through a blown-up multiversal lens. And when it hits, it is completely devastating. Again, its simplicity on the surface perfectly plays into the film’s authentic portrayal of human relationships, while having so much weight and meaning behind it.

Despite my scathing takes, I hope I have illustrated that I don’t believe that the MCU is worthless, or doesn’t have its rightful place in the entertainment canon. The decade-long run from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) will forever be a landmark feat in serialised storytelling and blockbuster cinema. And the franchise has certainly provided me with its fair share of enjoyment over the years and given *some* talented filmmakers an opportunity to showcase their narrative sensibilities on an enlarged scale. However, it’s incredibly difficult for me to view the franchise now as anything other than an unstoppable megalith with a studio-driven and anti-filmmaker, entertainment-as-products model. It has objectively done irrevocable harm to an industry I adore so much and continues to actively monopolize the market, pushing all independent or non-IP cinematic offerings out to the fringes.

The unfortunate nature of this piece is that, had I seen Everything Everywhere All at Once under different circumstances, removed from the dominance of the MCU (especially as it has been declining in quality), I still would have undoubtedly liked it a lot and been moved by it. However, it’s a shame that getting a film like it now, under the circumstances, feels like an actual miracle, and something which I had to directly contrast with an MCU project in a desperate attempt to convey why we need to expect so much more from our movies.