K-SCORE: 40
Director: Scott Derrickson
Writers: Scott Derrickson, Jon Spaihts, C. Robert Cargill
Based on: Doctor Strange by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel McAdams, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen
“a trick of light and mirrors”
Spoiler Level: Major
Marvel Studios continues to impress me with their reckless storytelling as they add layer upon layer of incompatible plot elements to the already hideous rat king of a universe they’ve created. I mean that literally. I’m impressed. This film has at least thirty hours worth of potential satire packed into a hundred and fifteen minutes of runtime. It’s like they’re just making them so that, even if the world crumbles around me, I can always fall back on my mockery of their narrative inadequacy. Doctor Strange is a film set in a kaleidoscope and its hero is a red cape with a pointy collar.
I’m sure others would tell you that this movie is good. If not that, they’ll say they were visually impressed by it. I’ll admit that it sometimes looked cool. It’s another great example that the CGI guys in Hollywood are doing the finest work while the highly paid directors and producers get a pass for their pathetic performances. The opening of the film shows promise as well, character flaws, passions, personal histories, a man at the top of an interesting field who loses everything. But beyond that, I can’t praise it much. Doctor Strange is a lot like the toy upon which its sets are based, perhaps interesting for a second, but after a moment you put it down and forget about it. It can’t offer a profound experience for it doesn’t take much to realize what you saw was but a trick of light and mirrors.
The Marvel formula is followed almost to a T in Doctor Strange except that at the end they replace what could have been an awesome fight scene with Benedict Cumberbatch negotiating with a gigantic head in outer space. They add new elements to the existing Marvel labyrinth without any regard for how they might fit into anything. Here we go: sentient objects that choose their wielders, spells that teach the body new ways to heal itself, immortality through pulling from dark energies, an all-consuming villain of the multiverse that feasts on planets (like Unicron!), another infinity stone also referred to as The Eye of Agamotto, portals that are sometimes conjured, sometimes fixed to certain museums, sometimes leading to real places and sometimes leading to not real places, astral projections of the soul that can sometimes see real people and talk to them, sometimes interact with real people, and sometimes not, sometimes exist in a normally flowing timeline and sometimes exist in a paused moment, sometimes exist alongside one another and sometimes don’t, poorly guarded locked books of ancient spells that alter and/or break the fabric of the universe, London, New York, and Hong Kong serving as keystones in a magical protection grid that supposedly covers the world (New York because it's where The Avengers live, Hong Kong to draw Chinese audiences, and London because movie studios are competing to see who can destroy London on the big screen the most number of times in a decade (My money’s on 20th Century Fox)), hallways and buildings that bend like in the dreams in Inception, sorcerers that can alter the flow of gravity, and, hardly least, good old fashioned time travel. Sure what the hell! Toss the white whale of storytelling into the mix. Who is really going to think to themselves, “Wait, if Doctor Strange can rewind time and relive moments until he gets them right, and he’s the only one, why would we rely on anyone else to solve any problem of significant scale? Who needs Thor and Ironman and The Hulk, certainly not Captain America and his stupid little buckler? Just call Strange. He’ll fix all your latest infinity stone problems. You know, the ones where you touched them or the bad guys touched them or they’re in a scepter or they’re being used to create a skybeam or summon aliens. Whatever. Strange can just zip zip, rewind, and we’re good.” A supporting character dies in a version of the Doctor Strange universe presented, and he undoes it and then makes a joke. What a ridiculous stupid mess.
It’s really tough for me to get over the plot; okay, I get that. Partly that’s because of my dedication to quality stories. Partly it’s because the plot is all-consuming in this film and others like it. When you have all that stuff shoved in there, fifty percent of what you end up watching is a conversation between two characters where they bullshit explanations for this comic book haberdashery. Forty percent is the stuff itself, characters flying around and casting glowy red spells, struggling against invisible spiritual forces with actual physical might. That leaves only ten percent for character development, thematics, comedy, background details, relationship development, establishment of settings, etc. And the sad thing here is it’s like the writers knew they were supposed to have that stuff, but can’t squeeze it in. There’s a little detail with the broken watch that almost works, but not quite. Rachel McAdams’s character seems to have something going with Doctor Strange, but she’s relegated to these literal defibrillate-the-protagonist moments and then dropped from the conclusion entirely. Any dynamic between Strange and the character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor is lost in the shuffle of circumstances. You never really know why he was following Strange in the first place, you certainly don’t understand their dynamic when Strange is learning magic, and then you don’t appreciate the significance of him abandoning whatever faction they were in by the conclusion. As for the comedy? It’s mostly jokes about people’s names. One of which is funny.
Doctor Strange will appeal to people that already like Marvel movies or those who really want to see a gifted surgeon abandon his practice for the mystical teachings of the far east. I don’t want to tell people what they should believe it, but I do think there’s something terribly dishonest and disconcerting about a film that takes modern medicine and pits it against actual practices that don’t hold well to the scientific process and then falsifies results, claiming a deep enough connection to the spiritual will grant literal superpowers. Hey, if you think you can channel your chakras all the way down the path of victory, be my guest, though you might hurt yourself. And the film isn’t so dangerous as to assert that western medicine is evil and wrong. On the contrary, I noticed that when Strange got stabbed by an ethereal dagger from the shadow realm, or whatever (while the garment hero of the film was thwarting the villains single-handedly), that he went to a damn hospital. Where, apparently, his ex-girlfriend spends all her time standing around holding clipboards, waiting for the frequent emergencies of her former lover.