Double Dose: of the Multiverse

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today:  two films about the multiverse)

Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans - 2022, d. Jeff Mednikow - DVD
Everything Everywhere All At Once - 2022, d. The Daniels - in theatre, twice

I'm thinking that, like Toasty and I have been doing over the past couple years (though certainly a lot less this year) with Time Loops, that we need to do a feature reviewing the films that take place or deal with the multiverse.  I love the multiverse.  It stems from being a comic book nerd, and even more specifically a DC Comics fan where the concept of the multiverse has been a thing since Silver Age Flash met Golden Age Flash over 60 years ago.   I got deeper into comics in the fallout of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first mega-epic "summer blockbuster" Event Comic in which DC collapsed all of their multiversal Earths into a single earth and restarted their continuity to make their comics more new reader friendly.  I was a new reader, and it was very friendly, but I was equally facinated by this whole history of multiverses that seemed to shadow the new publishing efforts.  DC has spent the past 35+ years dealing with the fallout of Crisis and expanding and contracting and rebooting and reviving their history over and over again with one "Crisis" after another, and I've been there for pretty much all of it, just soaking in all these sweeping changes that are what have made DC equal parts frustrating and invigorating.

Everything Everywhere All At Once isn't some big, epic, universe-destroying multiversal epic, it's more of a small-scale, personal, quite, martial-arts epic which, after decades of DC and Marvel multiverses (and we're just in the opening salvo of the MCU multiversal epic) was a very welcome change of pace.

Directed and written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, creators of the wonderfully weird and surprisingly sweet Swiss Army Man,  the root of EEAAO is in family drama.  Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, a late-middle-aged wife and mother who is bogged down in the midst of a tax audit of the family laundromat, facing the expectations of celebrating her father's 80th birthday, and sensing the increasing emotional gulf between her and her daughter.  She doesn't even know that her husband, the perpetually upbeat Waymond (former child actor and stunt coordinator Ke Huy Kwan), is going to serve her with divorce papers.

One might wonder, given the set-up, where the Multiverse aspect will come in.  Having seen the film twice, the multiverse is set up from the first frame, but doesn't become obvious until Waymond, suddenly taken over by another multiversal version of himself, and advises Evelyn that she is the multiverse's only hope.  Disbelieving, discombobulated, and already overwhelmed, Evelyn starts to learn that through an earpiece and a team assissting in another dimension, she can tap into alternate realty versions of herself, and take from them their skills and knowledge, including martial arts, acting, cooking and more.   As she taps into these skills, we see glimspes into the lives of these other Evelyns, of roads not traveled.

The result yields some of the most ridiculous, creative and inventive fight sequences in recent memory, all of which are best left undescribed and left for the viewer to discover.  The Daniels, as with Swiss Army Man have a knack for pairing deep emotional truths with wildly absurd situational comedy and comedic action.  It's triplefold here, as Evelyn realizes that she's been experiencing for a long time a deep sense of remorse over what her life could have been, and dissatisfaction with what her life is.  As such, she's not been present, and her low-grade depression has been amplified in Joy, her daughter, who seems to feel lost in every universe.  Evelyn faces Jobu Topaki, the great destroyer, who threatens to consume all realities until there is nothing, a nihilist of the nth degree, and somehow Evelyn is supposed to be the key, to find a way to save everyone and everything, when, until now, she hasn't seemed to have accomplished anything.

Michelle Yeoh, an on screen crush of mine for decades, is given perhaps the most gratifying spotlight.  Despite central Evelyn's rather frumpy appearance in floral button down shirt with mauve polyester pants, no makeup and unkempt hair, the Daniels' camera is still infatuated with her.  It just loves her, and she commands the screen in a whole new way.  Her multiversal selves allow her her glamour shots and her situational comedy, and she once again is given a spotlight to show off her balletic fight choreography skills (see also Shang-Chi, Crouching Tiger, and Wing Chun for a trip through the decades of Michelle's amazing screen presence).  That we get an extended wuxia fight sequence between Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis (in a direly unflattering yet amazing mustard coloured turtleneck), two 60-ish women in a gloriously choreographed battle, is something incredibly fresh, and special.  I almost cried beholding it's awesomeness.

This movie is absolutely brilliant, despite its many influences looming large (Jackie Chan and The Matrix the most obvious) .  It doesn't just rest on its absurd asides, it needs them as counterbalance (and sometimes enhancement) to the emotional journey that Evelyn is taking.  As almost unforgivably silly as the "hot dog fingered reality" is, or as dangerously goofy as the "Raccacoonie" world sets out to be, during the climax of the film there's genuine beauty in these bizzare alternate realities, and, once again an emotional core to what are at best nominal side-stories that also flesh out the general thesis of the film, which if there's a moral, is about being kind and empathetic, not only to others, but to one's self.  

Far, far less poignant, and maybe embracing the silliness much more at a surface level is the Teen Titans Go! vs Teen Titans direct-to-video feature.  This pairing was teased at the end of the theatrically released -- and somehow good -- Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, and sure enough, it's delivered.

Now, a bit of background.  Teen Titans was a cartoon series that ran for 5 seasons from 2003 to 2006.  It was a quasi-anime styled action-adventure supehero series that fluxuated between episodic and serialized storytelling, but no matter how light it may have got, it always took its central conceit seriously.  It was a very good show, filled with surprising character dept, and plots that were both mature and yet all-ages friendly.  I don't know what exactly happened to turn the core cast of characters (Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Beast Boy and Raven) from this children's drama into a pseudo-spongebob style animated goof fest, but it's been the bane of any self-respecting Teen Titans' fan's existence for a decade an a half.  Rubbing salt into the wound is how much more popular the goofy, cartoony Teen Titans Go! has been.  

The Go! team get top billing here, so they are the stars of the show and it finds them being transported to a battle arena where they face their earlier dopplegangers, much to everyone's confusion.  Meanwhile, Raven's soul gem has fractured allowing Trigon, her father, to break free.  He teams up with his doppleganger Trigon together they spell big trouble for the fate of the multiverse.  

Throughout its 77-minute runtime, this movie has a lot of fun with the disparity between the two different styles of animation and tones of the respective shows.  Also the fact that it's the same cast voicing the same characters across the two different versions of the characters just adds more layers of humour and interest.  But at its core there's an actual journey for some characters, as the junior crew of Titans take influence from their more sterner older crew (Raven specifically has a lot to face in relation to her issues with her dad, which the film does a surprisingly decent job at portraying) and seem to evolve as a result.

Thanks to some dimension hopping technology, the two Titans crews bandy about the multiverse meeting many, many different interpretations of themselves, including a 60's animated style, a George Perez 80's style, the modern DC Animated Universe style of characters, and, my favourite, the late 2000s Art Bathazar-styled Tiny Titans (a big favourite of all ages in this household...their appearance was literal fist pumping moment).

So yeah, I don't love Teen Titans Go! (can't quite stand it actually) yet the filmmakers knew that tamping down the aggressive kid-appealing yelling and annoyances that TTG! is known for, and providing a bit gentler of a reentry point for the long ago Teen Titans fan would make for a wholly entertaining and palatable film, not to mention, in the climax, a dazzling display of the glories of animation.

It was in this film, however, with a big multiversal fight, that I did begin to wonder if perhaps there's too much multiverse happeing in the world, and that maybe the concept might burn itself out if tapped too frequently.  Given that it's the centerpiece of the MCU for the next two phases, and DC have a big Flash movie centered around the concept, it's only going to become more prominent.