20 Best Science Fiction Movies Released Since 2000
12. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Daniels Kwan and Scheinert confounded us all four years ago by following up their niche, farting dead man flick Swiss Army Man with absurdist multiverse actioner Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Michelle Yeoh is Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese-American laundrette owner-operator who is failing to embrace the things which make her life great, including her loving husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and gay daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). While being audited by the IRS, Evelyn is transported into various parallel universe versions of herself, discovering that her actions in the Alphaverse have turned Joy into the universe-consuming super being Jobu Tupaki. Now she must right the wrongs of her life to save the multiverse.
At the same time as the MCU was sluggishly dragging itself through a loose assemblage of interconnected universes, Everything Everywhere borrowed the hype to show how it should be done. The Daniels wrote and rendered a unique collage of worlds – including the Raccacoonie reality, in which a raccoon controls a chef from under his hat; and the hotdog fingers reality, in which Evelyn is in love with her female, hotdog-fingered IRS auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) – and mined the actors’ comic sensibilities to create an iconic piece of sci-fi cinema that goes across the universe and beyond with nary a CGI suit of armour in sight.