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Doctor Strange Is Not As Magical As It Seems

By | October 27th, 2016
Posted in Movies, Reviews | 4 Comments

For the longest time, Marvel Studios seemed untouchable. They were the star child, the little engine that could. A production company spinning out of its parent publisher to directly translate its comics to films. After close to a decade, now, they have produced films pretty much yearly that have brought some of Marvel’s most iconic and some of Marvel’s most obscure characters life on the big screen.

Now, it’s time for the Sorcerer Supreme to have his go as Benedict Cumberbatch stars in and Scott Derrickson directs Doctor Strange.

I want to be clear about something up front: I am writing this review after having seen Doctor Strange upon release in Britain. I understand that many of you reading this will not have seen the film and won’t see it for over a week now. Still, there will be some spoilers to this review. Why?

Because Doctor Strange is not a good movie and I’m going to have to spoil some stuff to really break it down.

Let’s start at the top. There have already been many comparisons between this film and Iron Man and they’re not entirely wrong. This film does follow the basic structure of following an arrogant and wealthy white man whose life is all but destroyed in some kind of accident and who is brought to a country in Asia to be saved before going on to become a superhero in America. It is, beat for beat, pretty much just like watching Iron Man again and that’s a problem. The film has no real identity for itself. It has no sense of life beyond this formulaic, paint-by-numbers Marvel design that means it feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of Marvel films feeling, at any given time, like a mixture of Iron Man, Ant-Man and Thor.

A lot of this has to do with the screenplay. Despite having three ‘Story By’ credits and two ‘Screenplay By’ credits, the screenplay for Doctor Strange has about as much life in it as a madlibs journal. Each and any every scene feels like something that has played out across countless other superhero origin story films in the past with little more to say than trite dialogue about opening one’s mind and expanding one’s horizons. There is no point in this movie in which you can’t see where the rest of the film is going to go. There is no point in this movie where the script tries to convince you that it has anything to say at all. For a film that was supposed to introduce a whole new side of the MCU, it feels no different from every other Marvel movie we’ve seen thus far.

Imagine this: there’s a man who is a the best at everything he does, whose life is ripped from him when he finds out that what he thought he knew is only a fraction of the universe that really is and must embark on a journey of self-discovery where he goes from being a novice sorcerer to the Chosen One and becomes the only one to save the universe. This movie not only feels like pretty much every Marvel Studios solo film we’ve seen so far, it feels like every origin story film we’ve seen. This is Green Lantern, it’s Batman Begins, it’s Fant4stic, it’s… guys, it’s Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. I swear to you that I am not lying when I say the climax of this film is recycled from, of all things, Rise Of The Silver Surfer. There is nothing here that hasn’t been done the exact same way a million times before.

At least, you must be thinking, Marvel films have great casts, right? Well… on paper, you might think yes. Benedict Cumberbatch’s casting of Strange got a lot of fanfare, but he’s arguably the weakest of Marvel’s main hero castings. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the film’s pacing seeming to be on fast forward, but the emotional crux of the movie being Strange’s feels incredibly undercooked. He’s supposed to be humbled by his training, I suppose, but Strange goes from not being able to cast a single spell to questioning everything he’s taught and stealing books of magic that he’s expressly told are too advanced for him for a reason I can’t quite fathom.

Continued below

Even in his midst of his training, Strange is still as arrogant and self-assured as he was as a surgeon. There’s no humility to latch on to. The reason Iron Man works is that Tony Stark the douchebag is on screen for about half an hour before that’s chipped away by the revelation that his actions have destroyed lives. Stephen Strange goes through most of the movie dancing between being an asshole to everyone he meets to feeling so sorry for himself that he pushes the one good person in his life away from him. Even Thor, at his most brash and brazen, was charming in his youthful arrogance. After spending an hour or so with Stephen Strange, it’s hard not to wish that the film had ended at the car crash.

And it’s not like the supporting cast can elevate Cumberbatch any because none of them have anything to do. Chiwetel Ejiofor probably comes off best because he’s Chiewetel goddamn Ejiofor, but his character is so one note that his entire emotional arc might as well have popped up on screen with him when he was introduced. Benedict Wong’s Wong is a character that was supposed to have been “reworked into something that didn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the comics”, but he ends up being a bit player with nothing to do. In trying to “rework” Wong, the film has placed him in the role of a walking exposition machine with nothing so much as an emotion to show in his entire time on screen.

Don’t worry, though, because we found it. We found the worst Marvel Studios villain. So much of the last act of this film is watching Mads Mikkelsen strain against the confines of playing Kaecillius. Every criticism that has every been lobbied at a Marvel villain on screen shows up in Kaecillius. His motivation is so thin as to be non-existent. His supposedly emotional backstory that gets brought up twice does nothing to actually explain his goals of world destruction. Kaecillius is little more than a walking parable of what Strange could have become if he had given into his arrogance, spouting the same meaningless platitudes about why the world sucks.

There is barely any connection between Strange and Kaecillius, no real sense of a rivalry. Hell, Strange goes through the majority of the film with no idea who Kaecillius is despite the opening scene setting up his plan. He just disappears for most of the movie before walking back on set because the movie suddenly remembered it can’t spend it’s entire run time on a training montage. There is so little here that even Mikkelsen can’t make a compelling villain out of Kaecillius. The MCU hasn’t had the greatest track record with villains, but at least actors like Hugo Weaving, Tim Roth, Guy Pearce and Lee Pace have been able to pull something, anything from otherwise lackluster villains. Mikkelsen spends most of this film looking like he’s still not over Hannibal getting cancelled.

Perhaps worst of all, though, is Rachel McAdams’ Christine Palmer. Just as Marvel films in the past have suffered with unimpressive villains, they’ve suffered even more by shoehorning the female lead of the movie into the role of the shocked girlfriend who just feels in over her head when the main character starts his journey. In a world in which the Avengers exist, where Avengers Tower stands proudly in the middle of Manhatten, when Christin lives in that same Manhattan that was invaded by aliens, her role in this movie should be more than simply to gawk at Strange while does his magic like she’s doing her best Pepper Potts impression.

Christine Palmer is one of two named women in this movie (neither of them interact with one another) and for her role to be reduced to either pretending to be mad at Strange’s “roguish charm” while swooning over him or freaking out over the existence of magic and screaming hysterically is simply insulting. Marvel has been at this for eight years. Doctor Strange is their fourteenth film. This goes beyond lazy writing and into wilful neglection of the women in your film to have them exist only so their world revolves around the male main character.

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Speaking of the women in this film, let’s close out with what’s really wrong with Doctor Strange. It would be easy to dismiss the film as a misfire from Marvel based on an undercooked script that has nothing new to say other than recycling structures and setpieces of prior films. It would be easy to criticise Marvel for becoming the thing they rallied against in the beginning. They were the underdog, focusing on bringing the heart of the character to the screen instead of simply cashing in on the iconography. In their growth towards a multi-billion dollar empire, they have become lazy. In their laziness, however, they cashed in on the iconography of Doctor Strange by draping themselves in the culture of Nepal with no respect.

Let’s back up. Scott Derrickson went on record saying that the reason Tilda Swinton was cast as the Ancient One was to avoid any stereotypes attached to the notion of a white man travelling to Asia to learn mysticism from an Asian man. However, the film presents Swinton’s Ancient One as firmly being attached to Asia. Strange travels to Nepal, Kathmandu specifically, to find her and the mythical Kamar-Taj. The film uses the iconography of Nepal and it’s culture as a visual language of not only exoticism, but desperation. Kathmandu’s rich, warm colour palette is meant to stand in juxtaposition to the cool, emptiness of Strange’s Manhattan apartment. His scraggly hair, unkempt beard and ratty jacket are meant to show him at the depths of his desperation as much as the act of travelling to Nepal.

As much as the film lingers lovingly over a drawer of designers watches to establish Strange as a wealthy surgeon, the film places him amongst the people of Nepal while winking and nudging at the audience that he doesn’t belong here. Nepal, to the film, might as well be as alien as Asgard. Its culture and people are never a part of the story. They never matter to the film. The architecture and design are used to drape the film of exoticism and mysticism from the temples of Kamar-Taj to the mandalas created when casting spells. The film may have cast a white women to avoid the stereotypes of the Ancient One, but perhaps it should have focused more on removing them from the screenplay.

Before I go, I want to address something that has apparently drowned out these concerns in other reviews: the visuals of the movie. Yes, the kaleidoscopic effects in the movie are visually impressive and somewhat unique. I say somewhat because they feel like what happens when you take Inception and add six years of technological advancement. I mention this only because the consensus of the film is that the visuals excuse the film’s formulaic story and rampant orientalism while the very fact that we got a Doctor Strange film at all means we should be grateful.

And this isn’t even mentioning how the visuals of the characters in the Astral Plane make them look like PS2 characters.

People, it’s 2016. We have seen Rocket Raccoon and Groot in a movie. We have seen the Avengers assemble in three different movies. We have seen Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman share screen time in the same movie. The very fact that a somewhat obscure comic book character got a movie does not excuse the laziness of the movie itself. This isn’t 2002 anymore, we need to demand better from these movies. This is Marvel Studios fourteenth movie and they’re becoming so regular that we’re seeing three a year at this point. If this is how Marvel treated a concept as simple as Doctor Strange, I worry for what will happen when Black Panther or Captain Marvel finally arrive.

The buck needs to stop here. This film is a lazy, paint by numbers attempt to tell the origin story of Doctor Strange when it could very well have introduced Strange fully formed and skipped over the actual problem instead of trying to stop gap it with more white actors. It is not only a misstep for Marvel Studios, but it is a blight on their record and an indication that for how far they’ve come since Iron Man, they are afraid to actually experiment in how they tell these stories.


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Alice W. Castle

Sworn to protect a world that hates and fears her, Alice W. Castle is a trans femme writing about comics. All things considered, it’s going surprisingly well. Ask her about the unproduced Superman films of 1990 - 2006. She can be found on various corners of the internet, but most frequently on Twitter: @alicewcastle

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