The conceit of Everything Everywhere All At Once is not overly complex. Boiled down, it’s probably little more than an ode to everyday life, or more accurately, contemporary everyday life. Following the life of Evelyn Wang, our protagonist, it begins with the stressful, if cinematically innocuous task of filing her taxes with the IRS. Before too long we’re thrust into a multiverse adventure worthy of one of the MCU, wherein Evelyn is quickly shown and then endowed with the ability to “verse-jump” across her infinite selves. Informed then of an impending multi-versal doom by her alt-husband “Alpha” Waymond (from the Alpha Universe), she embarks on a twisted, gruesome, and at times uproariously funny journey to stop Jobu Tupaki, who also just happens to be her nihilistic twenty something daughter (s/o) Joy. Joy, in Evelyn’s “home universe,” is not unlike many twenty somethings: saddled with a beat-up car, what we later discover is a quite well-earned sense of directionless (see: Jobu Tupaki), and some family members who are a little too concerned about her sexual orientation. We learn that Alpha Evelyn broke Alpha Joy’s brain in one too many verse-jumping experiments, and that she’s now stuck in the inconceivable misery of experiencing every single universe simultaneously. With a commitment to saving the world and her daughter, Evelyn harnesses her newfound powers to avoid multiversal cataclysm. To make a long story short, Evelyn and Joy wind up accepting the meaninglessness of this multiverse, committing to living in their home reality which, notably, is considered to be Evelyn’s most failed potentiality.

Apropos of its title, there is a lot to discuss about Everything, but, to reiterate, it’s not all that complicated at the end of the day. In fact, it’s like countless blockbusters before in that it roughly follows the monomythical trajectory of your typical “Hero’s Journey” á la Joseph Campbell. Evelyn is issued a call to adventure vis-a-vis Alpha Waymond, comes out on top in a decisive, multiverse-in-the-balance crisis vis-a-vis Jobu Tupaki, and emerges, changed, with a sense of atonement vis-a-vis her reconciliation with Joy and the multiverse writ-large. Her journey begins with frustration, unrealized dreams, and not a small degree of projected resentment toward her husband. It ends with her embracing the banality of her “most failed self” and the imperfection of her unremarkable life.

So what makes it so special?

On paper, Everything rings like an average MCU bender, though granted an R-rated one. It’s full of visual splendor, gravity-defying fight scenes, and a number of sophomoric jokes, varying in their degree of sophomoric-ness from nose-picking to dildo nunchucks. In a word, I’d be hard-pressed not to say “cringe-pilled” to a number of the scenes in this movie, were I to have just been told about it secondhand. But, on the contrary, not only did I genuinely enjoy Everything‘s gags, but I was thoroughly moved by the plot and characters. This brings me to my central thesis: That Everything Everywhere All At Once is the ultimate Zoomer movie, indistinguishable from something grown in a test tube to appeal to my 24-year-old self.

It’s hard to tell how much, if at all, this was intended by Daniels Schienert and Kwan, but Everything seems positioned perfectly for my audience at this juncture in our lives. To begin with, it’s a common theme today that folks are bombarded on all sides by an infinite supply of information, shepherded to our eyes and ears by forces designed to keep our attention. Regardless of the source of a given piece of information or even its relative veracity, we can all agree that everything, and yet nothing, is being told to us constantly. When so much is available, the most appealing option can seem to be reclusion. Why on Earth would I want to hear about monkeypox after just having dealt with a pandemic? MIT just gave the planet 50-odd years left to live? These are tomorrow’s concerns…Things I don’t want to be thinking about while I’m trying to live my life, enjoy things, and foster my own relationships. This interpretation lends perspective to Joy/Jobu’s character, who has fully leaned into her [generation’s] nihilism. It’s a reactionary sort of nihilism, the one that takes the “I don’t want to deal with this” to the extreme. She’s so aware of every conceivable path that none of them seem real, substantive, or worth caring about at the end of the day. Joy/Jobu serves as an avatar for what many of us feel, which is that there’s just too much going on right now. How can we be expected to act like normal adults in the world right now, when so much in so many different places seems to be going awry? I’m expected to just sit at my little desk and work my little job on my little computer? Please.

What prevents Joy/Jobu’s ethos from becoming all-encompassing, then, is the stubborn humanism of her mother. In a manner of speaking, Evelyn is taken on a journey through the Gen Z mindset. She understands, as a mother would, the existential calamities assaulting her daughter, but remains obstinate, as a mother would, in her refusal to entertain them with such reckless abandon. Instead, via the pretzel logic (and cinematic homages) of her multiversal love for Waymond, she opts for the simplicity of the original timeline that we’re introduced to: doing taxes, grappling with evolving sexualities, and preparing for a New Years’ celebration. At the end of the day, what brings Evelyn (and ultimately Joy) back to Earth is love.

Again, this is not the most audacious or trailblazing story ever told, but it’s one of the oldest stories we have for a reason, no matter how many times it’s reinterpreted. In my mind, it was little coincidence that, both times I saw Everything in theaters, most of my fellow moviegoers were of roughly the 20-30 year-old bracket. There’s something in the chaos, regressive humor, nihilism, and ultimate redemption of the plot that scratches an itch many of us may have forgotten we have: to be fed something that’s just nice. For all of its overages and extremities, Everything succeeds in carrying us along the emotional journey of a day in the life of someone’s fucked-up, 2020s life. In one way or another, we’ve all been an Evelyn, a Joy, a Waymond, or any combination thereof. It’s how we deal with the battery of life that determines which of them appears at a given moment.