Everyman, Bristol
People who like this kind of thing will find that this is the kind of thing they like. I mostly do and I mostly did.Some Marvel Movies -- e.g Endgame and Civil War -- take a lot of existing characters, put them in a bag, and shake them. Others -- Eternals, Shang-Chi, Black Panther -- present a self-contained sub-universe in the expectation it will rub shoulders with other characters further down the line. Multiverse of Madness is very much in the first category, with references to Wandavision (a TV show), What If...? (a cartoon) and incursions from Another Franchise.
To repeat myself: if you enjoyed the TV then Doctor Strange pays off on Wanda Maximoff's story arc. You might even say it reduces Wandavision to a Doctor Strange prologue. But if you avoid television, then I think Doctor Strange II does a very good job of bringing you up to speed with what is going on. You might not even necessarily realise that the powerful witch who wants to find a universe where she is happily married with twin munchkins spent three or four hours bending reality on Disney Plus (although you would twig that she has Previous with Stephen Strange). When Strange is put on trial by a Tribunal of Superheroes in a parallel world, we fans can easily identify who they are; but had they been generic characters in spandex, the scene would not have made just as much sense. So we are back to asking whether cross-overs are Tremendous Fun in Their Own Right; Personally Insulting To Every Member of the Audience; or Basically Neither Here Nor There. And where you stand on that question is a faith position.
The Doctor Strange movie character has -- much more than Spider-Man or Captain America -- grown away from the classic-era comic book persona. Curiously, though, his costume is an almost exact reproduction of the original, complete with flappy red robes and amulets of Agamatto and what-not. Benedict Cumberbatch's face, (with the addition of a silly moustache), look rather a lot like Doctor Strange's. He is good at the Ditkoesque hand movements; and the film makers have settled on a kind of visual Tai-Chi to represent magic. (Question: If his Strange's hands were too shattered to continue to work as a surgeon, how does he manage to contort his fingers into the right shapes?) Possibly Ditko's original costume design was just so darn perfect that the Marvel Cinematic Wardrobe Department can't improve on it. But while comic-book Strange is permanently aloof, wise, arrogant, all-knowing, movie Strange has a strong dose of Sherlock-esque self-deprecating cynicism. I think a touch of Ultimate Doctor Strange, who has lots of magic but not much experience in using it, may have bled through into the film. (He is, not too put too fine a point on it, quite a lot like Benedict Cumberbatch; although we know from Power of the Dog that he can play other characters as well.)
The plot is complicated, completely mad, and very comic-bookish, which I think has polarised audiences. I had kind of expected it to spin off from the last Spider-Man outing, with Strange trying to fix the multiversal damage done by Peter Parker, but in fact there are no call-backs to that story: it's a parallel-universe Doctor Strange who has arguably been tampering with the fabric of the etcetera etcetera etcetera.
The Doctor Strange movie character has -- much more than Spider-Man or Captain America -- grown away from the classic-era comic book persona. Curiously, though, his costume is an almost exact reproduction of the original, complete with flappy red robes and amulets of Agamatto and what-not. Benedict Cumberbatch's face, (with the addition of a silly moustache), look rather a lot like Doctor Strange's. He is good at the Ditkoesque hand movements; and the film makers have settled on a kind of visual Tai-Chi to represent magic. (Question: If his Strange's hands were too shattered to continue to work as a surgeon, how does he manage to contort his fingers into the right shapes?) Possibly Ditko's original costume design was just so darn perfect that the Marvel Cinematic Wardrobe Department can't improve on it. But while comic-book Strange is permanently aloof, wise, arrogant, all-knowing, movie Strange has a strong dose of Sherlock-esque self-deprecating cynicism. I think a touch of Ultimate Doctor Strange, who has lots of magic but not much experience in using it, may have bled through into the film. (He is, not too put too fine a point on it, quite a lot like Benedict Cumberbatch; although we know from Power of the Dog that he can play other characters as well.)
The plot is complicated, completely mad, and very comic-bookish, which I think has polarised audiences. I had kind of expected it to spin off from the last Spider-Man outing, with Strange trying to fix the multiversal damage done by Peter Parker, but in fact there are no call-backs to that story: it's a parallel-universe Doctor Strange who has arguably been tampering with the fabric of the etcetera etcetera etcetera.
There is an evil spell book called the Darkholme, and a good spell book called the Book of Vishanti. There's a teenager who can hop between dimensions. There's an aforementioned witch who is trying to find a happily married multiversal analogue of herself to swap places with and doesn't mind who she squashes to get there. There is a completely over-the-top trip through far too many dimensions, including one made of paint and a fight with a Chthulhoid octopus in New York. There's an alien dimension that looks quite a bit like all one of those wonderfully abstract dimensions that only Ditko could draw. There's a superhero battle which actually feels like a superhero battle in a comic (as opposed to the Jacksonesque cavalry charges that the Avengers sequence had rather too many of.) I do not think that, in the cold light of day, I could actually explain all the McGuffins and alternate versions of himself that Cumberbatch has to encounter -- this is the sort of film in which people say "No, that was the other other me". He ends up dimension shifting into his corpse from one world to confront a dark version of himself from another, who may have been one of the dark selves from the What If....Doctor Strange Lost His Heart cartoon episode, but if it was, it didn't matter. I am not exactly sure who ended up doing what to whom and why, but Strange definitely stops Wanda doing what Wanda was trying to do and puts the multiverse back on track.
I'd happily sit through it all over again, which is more than I could say for Eternals or Spider-Man.
The end credit says "Doctor Strange Created By Stan Lee and Steve Ditko". Naturally I would rather it had said "Doctor Strange dreamed up by Steve Ditko, by Stan Lee's own admission; costume designed by Steve Ditko. Really very trippy dialogue coined by Stan Lee, but we didn't use any of that in the film." "Created by..." will do.
7 comments:
I thought it was gloriously bonkers.
And Sam Raimi is back on form.
Gloriously bonkers sums it up. (And bonkers in the way the best eras of the comic book have been)
I am glad I saw it before I saw Everything, Everywhere... though.
Because although it is gloriously bonkers, it is still constrained by being a Marvel movie. Which EEAAO is not. (That film has its own problems, but they are very different.)
In the comics, I believe Strange's hands were healed by the Ancient One after Strange performed a self-less action.
We will take the Target Audience to see it this weekend
Target audience liked it a lot, as did I. It felt a little like they had a battle-siege and some scenery from Peter Jackson and a score from Dany Elfman and dementors from Harry potter ready to re-use,but in a good sort of way, and even the bits I didn't recognise (black bolt?) felt organic rather than the rather plastic wizarding world
When the Kree first came to earth they, were as it were, "uplifted" a group of humans, who live in a secret city on a mountain called the Great Refuge. (They subsequently decamped to the Moon.) It's effectively a whole city where everyone is a superhero. They are referred to as the Inhumans and Black Bolt is their leader. His enemy is Maximus the Mad who looks altogether too much like Loki.
Captain Carter is from the TV series What If, from a paralel world where Peggy Carter rather than Steve Rogers got zapped with the Super Soldier Serum. Steve gets to play with a prototype Iron Man suit made by Tony Stark's dad.
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