The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
Bear with me for a moment on this one.
I collected comic books, making a weekly trek to my comic shop, for the majority of my life. I finally gave it up around 2010 because, simply put, I no longer enjoyed new comics. There were a number of contributing factors to my loss of interest, but one of the primary causes was the industry’s obsession with “event” stories. When I was a kid, such crossover events were rare and, hence, actual events. When a whole bunch of different heroes got together in one story (outside of team books like Justice League and Avengers), it was a big deal. Seeing, say, Batman and Wonder Woman working together was frigging cool because it didn’t happen all the time. Around the late 2000s, this changed and such events started happening nonstop.
This pissed me off for three reasons. First, it was no longer special. Second, the endless crossovers meant I had to start buying more titles in order to understand what was happening in the titles I did collect (oh, you don’t collect Hawkman? Well, fuck you because now you have to read Hawkman in order to understand what’s happening in Green Lantern). Finally, it largely eliminated simple, self-contained stories. Batman being my favorite character, I just wanted stories about Batman and Robin going after Mr. Freeze or Scarecrow or whoever. I didn’t want Batman fighting cosmic warlords and travelling through time. So, around 2010, I said fuck it and decided I had made my last trip to the comic shop.
It’s disturbing how much the Marvel movies are starting to mimic all of the reasons why I gave up on comic books and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a prime example. This really isn’t a Doctor Strange movie as much as it is a general Marvel movie. This movie isn’t a showcase for a Doctor Strange adventure, rather it is a roll of tape meant to bind together a bunch of other Marvel properties and an extended commercial for future Marvel shows and movies. In order to fully understand this movie, you must have seen all of the other Marvel movies as well as the Marvel tv shows. It can’t be enjoyed as simply a Doctor Strange movie, which will likely leave many viewers in the dark at some points (myself included). Moreso than being a film (in any sense of the word the evokes creativity or integrity), this is a textbook case study in brand building and the expansion of product lines. In other words, this is exactly why I stopped giving a shit about comic books.
Doctor Strange isn’t even the main focus of the story. That honor goes to America Chavez. Never heard of her? Don’t worry, nobody fucking has. She wasn’t even in the trailers. She was introduced in the comics about ten years ago, seemingly for the sole purpose of starting arguments on the internet. She’s a Hispanic character named America Chavez whose superpower is that she can magically cross forbidden borders between worlds (GET IT?!?!). When she isn’t telling us about her two mothers or lecturing about how food is free in most universes (again, not sure why she is viewed as a political character), she is being attacked by monsters that are trying to steal her power. Doctor Strange is tasked with protecting her and off we go to view worlds and characters to set up additional movies and shows.
It’s worth noting that the America Chavez was originally supposed to debut in Spiderman: No Way Home because god knows that movie needed more characters. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was supposed to be released before Spiderman, but production issues caused the two films to be swapped and America’s debut was shifted to this movie. That might explain why Doctor Strange often feels so directionless, as director Sam Raimi has said that he was assembling the story from studio notes as they filmed and had no idea how the movie was supposed to end. It also explains why Doctor Strange seems oddly ignorant of the multiverse despite the very recent experience that he had with it in Spiderman. There is a single line of dialogue that was added in post-production that references the events of Spiderman in an attempt to fix this plot hole, but it’s still glaringly obvious that something went wrong in the sequence of these movies. It would be like if Nick Fury had no knowledge of superheroes and aliens in the early Marvel movies despite already living through the events of Captain Marvel….
Anyway, the culprit behind the monsters chasing America is none other than the Scarlet Witch. Now, I’ve seen all of the Marvel movies, but I don’t watch the tv shows. Therefore, the last time I saw her was when she was fighting Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. I have no idea what happened in WandaVision, nor do I particularly care. Based on what I gathered here, she created two fake children (?) who then died. I guess she couldn’t just make them again and she falls under the influence of an evil book (?), causing her to lose her mind and she started Karening her way across the multiverse in search of her fake kids. To do this, she needs America’s border-crossing powers. So the great hero that I’ve seen up to now is reduced to an irrational bitch that might as well demand to speak with the manager whenever she arrives in a new universe. Great.
You might say that I’m being unfair because I would understand this better if I watched WandaVision. However, The Film Nurse loves WandaVision and she was having fucking none of this. This is a rare case when she was more angry about a movie than I was and the pure hatred that she felt toward this film was something of frightening purity. So, no, based on her reaction, I don’t think that I would have enjoyed this more if I had watched WandaVision.
Given the opportunity to explore the multiverse, the film is also oddly unimaginative. I think our characters only spend significant time in two other worlds and their visit mostly amounts to an excuse to finally introduce two of Marvel’s largest properties into the cinematic universe. Even more frustratingly, both of the huge characters that are introduced have very little to do and then are quickly killed. For one of them, this is the third time that they have been killed in a movie. I’m sure that they will both be fine. One of the other things that I hate about modern comics is that death is meaningless because characters are constantly being killed and resurrected, so this movie also checks off that box nicely. I couldn’t give less of a shit about either death because they are so clearly inconsequential.
This is directed by Sam Raimi (who directed the original Spiderman trilogy and the great Evil Dead trilogy, among other things) and his presence ultimately amounts to little more than Disney trying to get some street cred with movie fans. Despite some occasional flourishes of his style (and the obligatory Bruce Campbell cameo appearance), it isn’t surprising that Raimi wasn’t the original director on the project and he was (quite literally) working from studio notes when assembling this. For everyone that’s saying that this is Marvel’s first horror film and/or that Sam Raimi really made a new Evil Dead movie disguised as a Marvel movie: Just stop it. There are about five minutes of material here that could be considered horror and the few moments that evoke Raimi’s earlier work amount to very little. There are a few violent moments that are more graphic than what’s usually found in a Marvel, but a couple of mildly violent action scenes don’t make this akin to Evil fucking Dead.
The only saving grace here are the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen. Despite a distractingly terrible hairpiece, Cumberbatch still makes it through the film with dignity and tries to bring gravitas to a character that is often a bystander in his own movie. Olsen deserves some sort of award for this because, despite the weakness of the material and the asinine arc of her character, she is pulling out all the stops, acting like she’s inspired by Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice as she mourns the loss of her fake kids. In such a soulless product of a movie, she is fucking trying and she brings more emotional resonance to the film than it deserves. Scarlet Witch and Elizabeth Olsen deserve better than this.
As I was leaving the theater, I heard a kid reference Bruce Campbell’s cameo and say “I think that guy used to be in a tv show or something.” I wanted to punch that kid so hard that his father would feel it and apologize for the shitty job he did of raising a child. It also made me wish that Sam Raimi would go back to doing something with creativity and passion again. It also made me wish that Marvel would go back to telling stories rather than just advertising them. But it mostly made me angry and sad, which is about on brand for my post-Marvel feelings these days.
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*Please note that The Film Nurse was, in fact, enraged by this bastardization of character and magical development. Not only was there a complete lack of continuity for Wanda’s character from Wanda Vision to this monstrosity, but a complete lack of “wokeness” from a company that claims to be “progressive.” Could I go on for hours about the treatment of Wanda in the Marvel Universe when it comes to “gendering” her powers? Yes, yes I could. Will The Film Doctor delete that rant? Eh, he might be too lazy for that.
Fuck this movie.
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Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Strange_in_the_Multiverse_of_Madness#/media/File:Doctor_Strange_in_the_Multiverse_of_Madness_poster.jpg
