Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Hero(ine)'s Journey

Everything Everywhere All at Once (hereafter shortened to Everything Everywhere) is an action sci-fi movie about the multiverse, nihilism, and most importantly, family. Everything about Everything Everywhere is done almost perfectly, from its camerawork to its music. Even on my second time through, the movie left me with a stupid grin on my face during its silliest moments, and goosebumps during its most emotional. What follows is an analysis of how Everything Everywhere conforms more to Campbell's Hero's Journey instead of Murdock's or Schmidt's Heroine's Journey, even though it features a female protagonist. Heavy spoilers ahead for the one of the greatest movies of all time. Everything Everywhere All at Once is best experienced blind.

Everything Everywhere follows Evelyn Wang as she gets pulled into a multi-universal adventure to save her daughter, Joy. Evelyn and her husband Waymond run a laundromat and are struggling to keep up with taxes after an audit by the IRS.

Evelyn's Call to Adventure happens when she is pulled into a janitor's closet by a different universe's Waymond. This Waymond introduces himself as Alpha Waymond from the Alphaverse, and says that Evelyn is the key to saving the multiverse from Jobu Tapaki, who the viewer doesn't know yet. Evelyn refuses the Call because she has too much going on in her mind and sees Alpha Waymond as just some silly distraction. However, she is forced into adventure by Jobu Tapaki invading her universe, causing otherwise normal, mundane people to turn against her. 

One could see Everything Everywhere's Belly of the Whale ensuing action scenes and the revelation that Jobu is actually the Alphaverse's Joy, but the real moment of the Belly takes place when Evelyn stands up to the Alphaverse's version of her father. For some context, Alpha Waymond reveals that in his universe, Evelyn was an amazing scientist, who in the process of trying to reach other universes, caused her Joy to split across every single universe and become Jobu. The Alphaverse's solution is to destroy Jobu by killing every version of Joy in the multiverse. When the Alphaverse's version of Evelyn's father tries to get her to kill Joy, she refuses and vows to save her daughter. The Belly of the Whale is when the hero separates from the world of the known for the final time and shows their willingness to undergo a metamorphosis; Evelyn has casted aside the Everything clouding her mind and finally takes on the responsibility of paying attention to her daughter's struggle.

After Joy split across the multiverse, she gained the knowledge of every single Joy in the multiverse all at once. From this, she made the conclusion that nothing matters. Every decision she could have possibly made, leading her to become a movie superstar or the daughter of a Chinese-American immigrant running a struggling laundromat, doesn't matter because all paths must lead to the nothingness of death. Joy then decides that the only way forward is to go into the nothingness and to end it all. Everything Everywhere's Rescue from Without is not about Evelyn, it's instead about her saving Joy from the crushing, oppressive loneliness of nihilism. As Joy is about to step into the nothingness, Evelyn almost lets her go. But, at the last moment, she remembers that letting go is what her father so easily did when she moved to America with Waymond, so she reaches out her hand again and Rescues Joy from Without.

Trying to associate Everything Everywhere with Murdock's or Schmidt's would unnecessarily introduce Evelyn's gender identity into an already chaotic story. One could see Evelyn stepping into adventure as separation from the feminine and saving Joy as a feminine, maternal action, but that seems like an unnecessary complication of Evelyn's character. It's true that Everything Everywhere is a chaotic movie, but that chaos is intentional. Everything that adds to the chaos must serve an important role in the story. As flawed as it is, Campbell's Hero's Journey is the best representation of Evelyn's journey in Everything Everywhere All at Once.