as the heroine, and she has powers. (namely, the power to jump between universes, and to tap into the skills of her other selves)
Did I like it? Not really. It was overly long, and for me it was basically a waste of time. I stuck through it, though, just to see what would happen. And pretty much nothing did.
This "multiverse" idea has been played out, and this movie did come out at the right time to capitalize monetarily on the concept (anyone who enjoyed the multiverses in Dr Strange would surely love to have more of it here). But unlike some people, I've seen way more than my share of movies and TV shows where there is some kind of "controlling spacetime authority" (in this movie, it's called the Alphaverse) which tries to manage and control the permutations of various universes, and then there are the heroes (or heroines) who leap through the dimensions to save the day.
This article discusses the eventual tedium which results from repeating this concept over and over (either that, or the inability to really do justice to the idea onscreen, anyway). https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ente ... 83441.html
But the article fails to mention just how much this has been flogged to death: Legends of Tomorrow, Doom Patrol, Umbrella Academy, and Loki all centered around this idea, as did (to some extent) the Crisis crossover on the CW. And then you add in Spiderverse, No Way Home, and Dr Strange, and it just gets to be a lot.
But now let's address this specific movie. As you might imagine, I observed that the movie seemed like it had several *points* to prove. Four, in fact. They went for the grand slam intersectional statement: age, race, sexuality, and body type.
So there's that. What did I think about the aesthetic of the movie? It's visual clutter. From the messy table full of tax receipts in their apartment....to the dozen or so kung fu adversaries which clutter the screen...to the constantly changing variety of multiverses...to the scene with the packed office cubicles where furniture constantly needs to be shoved around for the action to take place...everything is about visual overload. I could take that for 90 minutes, but a movie over two hours with that kind of clutter is just too long. And to compound it, I really didn't like any of the characters that much. Raymond might be the most interesting, though, for the way he switches back and forth between simperingly feminized and a suddenly macho-and-in-control "secret Asian man".
And yes, I do understand that this movie is supposed to be "absurdist". I can appreciate good absurdist approaches over the decades, whether we're talking about growing up with Clockwork Orange and Monty Python and Zardoz and Mel Brooks, or Buckaroo Banzai and Brazil, I'm not at all against that kind of content. But this was a bit much. And I think they're very lucky that they didn't overlap with anything that Marvel did in Loki or Dr Strange - even one alligator would have caused a serious problem.
So, even though I was impressed by the technical aspects of the production to some extent (which they seemed to have pulled off on a lower budget), the story and plotting made the whole thing drag quite a bit. I would skip it unless you can see it for free.
Your opinion will probably vary, which is why we have this board, so that everyone can say their piece. C'est la vie.
