The Worst
The bland origin story
While the film certainly borrows its visual effects approach from “Inception,” it’s not the only trait ripped from the pages of Christopher Nolan. Somewhat unfairly, the director has been criticized for leaning too hard on exposition for his heady films, but frankly, “Doctor Strange” nearly buckles under its unending stream of explanatory dialogue. At least an hour, if not more, of the running time is dedicated to Doctor Strange learning his magical craft, and the audience becoming familiarized with the mystical nature of the world the story takes place in. It’s all a bit tedious, and while punctuations of humor and action keep things from completely flagging, on re-watch the first half of the movie is going to be a real chore to sit through.
Rachel McAdams is wasted
In the lead up to “Doctor Strange,” there were quite a few rumors that Rachel McAdams’ role as Doctor Strange’s love interest and colleague Christine Palmer, might actually be cover for her playing the part of Night Nurse. However, Kevin Feige scotched that chatter last month, and indeed, Christine Palmer is merely Regular Nurse, and it’s a shame. The talented actress is mostly present to toss around poorly written flirtatious banter with Doctor Strange, highlight how much of an asshole he is before he takes on his superhero mantle, and then witness the changed man he’s become in the latter half of the picture, while providing cornball reaction shots when witnessing his powers. That’s about it. I’m not sure why McAdams was required for such a flimsy part, but maybe she’ll get to patch up some Avengers in ‘Infinity War.” At least she fared better than Michael Stuhlbarg, one of our best character actors who has a nothing role here, or Amy Landecker, who kills it in “Transparent” but is completely buried under a surgical mask (presumably there was more that got cut out at some point).
Whitewashing
You could, if you were inclined, give Marvel some credit on the diversity front. They’ve usually made sure that their casts aren’t entirely white, even when they involve space vikings, and seem to be more committed to that going forward, with “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel” on the way. But you don’t get credit for being the most improved, and that they’ll finally get a non-white headlining hero with their seventeenth movie, and a female lead with their twentieth, is pretty shocking. And “Doctor Strange” shows how much ground they still have to make up. Yes, they changed The Ancient One to a woman, and made Mordo black, but doing the former only served to erase an Asian character from the movie (and the studio have alarmingly few of those so far, beyond Wong, introduced here). While we sympathize with the filmmakers’ arguments — that it would have propagated existing stereotypes — the lack of Asian faces in general in a movie set in Nepal doesn’t help their argument. White male is still the default for them, and it’s increasingly to the detriment of the series — as good as Cumberbatch is here, for instance, wouldn’t it have been a far more interesting movie if him and Ejiofor had swapped roles?
The post-credit scenes
Marvel all but pioneered the idea of the mid or post-credits scene, the appearance of Samuel L. Jackson at the very end of “Iron Man” blowing the universe wide open. Since then, we’ve had some good examples (the shwarma scene, for instance) and some less good ones (anything involving Thanos), but both of the “Doctor Strange” scenes are kind of duds. The first (which, like the “Ant-Man” post-credits scene, appears to be taken directly from a future movie, in this case “Thor: Ragnarok”) sees Strange meet Thor, but there’s not much sparkle to it. And the final one, meant to set up Mordo as a future villain in a sequel (or even in ‘Infinity War‘), is better executed to some degree, but also feels like a leap, taking Ejiofor’s character from an interestingly conflicted, to a full-on bad guy within the space of a credit roll, and making him less interesting as a result. In fact, it reminded us of Mark Strong’s similar transformation at the end of “Green Lantern,” and that’s not something that anyone wants to be playing up.
The cloak
While the tone is often well-done, there’s one more comic element that didn’t work for us — the Cloak Of Levitation. Strange’s costume here is semi-sentient, and while it proves crucial in the New York sanctum fight sequence, it also feels a bit silly and broad in a way that much of the rest of the movie doesn’t. In the more comic moments, the cloak comes across like a sort of animal Disney sidekick from one of their less movies (indeed, supposedly the magic carpet in “Aladdin” was a direct inspiration), and while young kids might find it charming, it felt a bit misguided.
There are still villain problems
On the plus side, the bad guys in “Doctor Strange” are better written and better performed than some of the nadirs of the MCU, like Corey Stoll’s anonymous corporate suit in “Ant-Man” or whatever Christopher Eccleston was doing in “Thor: The Dark World.” But almost every one of these films has felt lacking on the bad guy front, and “Doctor Strange” is no exception. Mads Mikkelsen is as watchable as ever as *wracks brain for several minutes, eventually gives in and looks character name up on Wikipedia* Kaecilius, but gets very little to play with. His motivations are sort of interesting, but we’re told about them, not shown, and though he plays nicely off Cumberbatch, he’s never especially well-rounded or even massively threatening, and neither are his followers. And Dormamu, one of the character’s most famous adversaries is a bit of a let down, even if the manner in which he’s defeated is inventive — a giant, all-powerful CGI beast who isn’t even particularly well-designed, and could have walked in from any other movie. Getting a good bad guy in origin stories in particular always feels like an afterthought, but Marvel really have to start doing better with their villains.
The structure and pacing
In some ways, this feels like one of the better MCU scripts, and yet either on the page or in the editing room, something broke down a little bit and makes the structure feel sort of wonky and lop-sided. Ironically, it’s to do with the movie’s biggest theme: time. The first half or so of the movie appears to take place over months if not years, and while it helps to build character, it’s a bit slow, and sometimes sort of repetitive in its training-montage qualities. But having spent roughly an hour of the film without much action, the second half stuffs it with fights and set-pieces. Not only does it give the film less room to breathe and give it a frantic energy, but because the action seems to take place continuously, within the space of a matter of hours, it also makes the character development feel a bit less well-earned than it did before. It’s an intrinsic issue with the origin story like this (“Batman Begins” had similar issues), but it does stop the film from feeling quite as satisfying as you want it to.
The score
Marvel movies are famous for having pretty dull, interchangeable scores, so much that they got their own video essay about the issue. And it’s totally fair — these films have tended to lean towards uniformity rather than distinctiveness when it comes to their music (Carter Burwell, for instance, was fired from “Thor: The Dark World”). But we were psyched to learn that Michael Giacchino, the composer of choice for Pixar, J.J. Abrams and various others, and one of the best in the business right now, was on board for “Doctor Strange.” Unfortunately, it’s basically as anonymous as the rest of the Marvel soundtracks have been. Somehow feeing derivative of both other MCU movies and his own work (particularly his “Star Trek” scores), there’s little of the inventiveness of Giacchino’s best work, and not much in the way of a notable original theme, just a bunch of monks chanting at various points. At the very end, it kicks in a bit, with a pleasingly proggy, Hammond organ-utilizing track over the closing credits, but it’s a little too late. Hopefully Giacchino’s next Marvel-verse score for next year’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” will be more fun.
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