Above: Michelle Yeoh in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Photos courtesy A24.

BitDepth#1398 for March 20, 2023

The quirky science fiction epic Everything, Everywhere, All at Once swept the Academy Awards, provoking a bit of a firestorm of confusion and even revulsion over the madcap film’s complete dominance of the awards roster.

Its commanding presence at the Oscars podium bounced Stephen Spielberg’s deeply nostalgic biography, The Fabelmans, completely out of contention. Something that’s almost certain to have startled the Hollywood old guard.

The man who gave us Schindler’s List offered up a Cliff’s Notes version of his life in cinema, a kind of Spielberg’s Shopping List, but its presence on the nominations lists was really more a respectful gesture than earned.

The night’s big winner, an Asian-American hybrid written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert is a frenetic mix of modern cinematic tropes vigorously blended with hard, jerking cuts and a torturous narrative line.

As sci-fi cinema, it has a noble forebear in the first Matrix film, which also used whiplash editing, a high concept story and a bold serving of kung-fu wire work to weave a quirky tale of the digital era.

The Matrix is firmly within my times, but it also premiered in shouting distance of a quarter of a century ago.

There comes a time when you need to acknowledge that entertainments aren’t made for you and belong to a new generation. The only surprise is that the film academy thought so too.

The best cinematic science fiction takes inspiration from the most adventurous novels that bleed alternative storytelling ideas into general contemplation.

Star Wars tapped into space opera world building that was old even in the 1970’s and today’s trend to explorations of inner-space instead of outer-space began all the way back in 1979 with Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a novel that manages to blend blunt rumination on slavery with uncontrollable personal time travel.

I got to that curious place through an equally odd sideways route of online recommendations which managed to intersect a casual interest in military sci-–fi the sprawling epics of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising and David Webber’s Honor Harrington series with extended readings on systemic racism that I’d been studying to prepare a young black girl for a world that still changes its expectations and perceptions across a few shades of darker skin tone.

That overlap in literary ambitions also brought me to The Wormwood Trilogy, by Nigerian-British writer Tade Thompson, who seamlessly blended his personal experiences with imaginative body terror to create an alien invasion story that began decades before only to emerge in a Nigerian town.

Thompson’s first book in the trilogy, Rosewater, won the UK’s 2019 Arthur C Clarke award and is, in its way, very much a spiritual descendant of Butler’s Kindred, weaving an alien and pervasive ‘Xenosphere’ connectivity that’s reminiscent of the immersive alternate presence of the modern Internet into a genre mash-up that blends zombie horror, virtual romance (yes, lets’ call it that) and Afropunk.

Thompson’s effortless eliding of these apparently disparate forms of fiction into a seamless, entirely unforeseen whole is accomplished through cooly authoritative literary gymnastics.

In Hugh Howey’s The Silo Saga, the protagonists’ narrative bounces back and forth in time as the mysteries of their uniquely dystopian future unravel in parallel narratives.

RR Haywood’s A Town called Discovery immerses the reader almost immediately into a chaos of time-slips and competitive meddling with the past in pursuit of a better future.

Peter Clines’ The Fold takes a measured but relentless pace to introduce the consequences of inadvertently exploring alternate dimensions.

In their way, the Daniels do many of the same things with their deeply surrealistic film, opening with a calmly paced depiction of the almost cartoonish dreariness of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) before her profoundly mundane life explodes into an abundance of often puzzling alternative universes, including the delightfully over-the-top hot-dog-fingers alt-reality.

The Star Wars generation got the Death Star run, Matrix fans got bullet time and The Daniels have gifted a new generation with the fanny pack fight.

It’s very much a film of its time and this is a time of undeniable chaos, confusion and despair.

For all its visual fireworks and occasional cheerful vulgarity, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is also a surprisingly moving paean to the potential of love and family to triumph over the consuming temptations of nihilism.

It’s easy to give up and accept your life. It’s much harder to face down its inscrutable terrors and kick it in the ass. Across the multiverse.