draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

When I first saw that movie I felt like I had just watched a work in movie history that marks a bifurcation: Before and after the existance of this film. Similarly to Matrix. There's before and after. Before being a world in which such a film does not exist and after a world in which anything produced will be compared to it. On the top of the list of reasons for why I felt that way is probably how unique and unseen many of the ideas of this film have been (to me).

Because of my inability to describe stories of films accurately in few or single sentences, I'll just quote Letterboxd here: "An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save what's important to her by connecting with the lives she could have led in other universes."

I still like to see the film as this unique piece of movie history. And I will always praise it for some uncommon and daring choices, well-chosen portrayals of chaos, carelessly genius storytelling and its ability to surprise and entertain me more than any move in years, which now, after decades of watching all movies that sound interesting, itself is an achievement. I don't know what additional impression it has on Asian-Americans. (Apparently some details are easy to relate to for sombody who has grown up as an American with Chinese parents.) I also can't view it from the angle of an immigrant parent. I recognise that there are things to say about this part of the story. I can't with my experience though. But as a science fiction action film alone it has made my day, week and more when I saw it. The contrast between everyday life and science fiction action life probably plays a big role in making the impression of something that I haven't seen before. It is an overall good film. Even the fighting scenes are creative and worth watching. I often either skip parts of fighting scenes or with I has skipped them because it's enough to see who one/how many are down/whether somebody is injured or dead at the end of the scene. Most movie fighting coreography is the same moves in a new order with marginally creative new elements. This is an exception, as Matrix was, and contains some really creative stuff. (Maybe the first fighting scene is still the best in this regard though.) So many things especially the main character experiences and does are unexpected; can't be expected because this multiverse family story has never been told before.

I'm sure for most people the film will go down in history as just another science fiction film. The fact that I got the DVD a few weeks after it's cinema release for 6 €, which is as low as new DVD prices go, I think, suggests that it's not seen as an especially successful movie. I intentionally didn't look up how well it did and what most people think of it. For me it's a genius film for many reasons. And I'm not even a person looking back at my life and thinking about what could have been if I had made different choices. How good must the film be if you can relate to any of it's topics? I feel confirmed in my impression that this film is unlike any other before by the titles listed under "Similar Films" on Letterboxd: Free Guy, Guardians of the Galaxy, Barbie, Matrix

Some may think the crazy travelling-between-worlds stull was too much, because it goes on and on. But I like that. It has enough crazy ideas to not make it boring. One scene that ends in switching between worlds each frame for seconds, made a special impression with me, because it went on for longer than it has to, and then still went on for longer than I thought it might. A few seconds for which you nee 30 new ideas/images/worlds for each second, it was quite long. When looking at the individual frames I noticed that many are repeated multiple times and others are almost identical (from the same world, so to speak). I'll attach here all the different images from that scene that were shown too short to appreciate them.