Review : Doctor Strange And The Limited Multiverse Of Mild Befuddlement

This a very preliminary review because I have to say I fell asleep during several parts of the film. I'll revisit this in due course. The following contains information about things that happen in the movie but no spoilers.

I generally do like Marvel movies but I have a particular fondness for Doctor Strange. I felt that its philosophical leanings were a lot more interesting than one can generally expect for a comic book movie and the artistry of the special effects reflected that very well. "Not everything makes sense. Not everything has to." Plus the humour and Benedict Cumberbatch fit together perfectly.

I also like Sam Raimi, with Drag Me to Hell being absolutely hilariously superb. So when everyone says that this is much more of a Sam Raimi than a Marvel movie, I had naturally high expectations.

Unfortunately I have to be somewhat of a lone voice - friends and critics alike tell me this is a a great movie, but I was rather disappointed. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I thought it could and should have been an awful lot better. There are some good moments, but nothing like the truly unhinged wildness I was expecting. Although the movie does go more Raimi as it goes on, for about two thirds at least it's very much mediocre Marvel with nothing very distinctive about it at all - it's rather humdrum. I'm forced to give it 6/10, maybe even 5/10 if I'm feeling harsh.

The first Doctor Strange was about as self-contained as a Marvel movie can be. This one really, really isn't. Fair enough that it expects you to have a working knowledge of the Marvel universe and to have seen at least the first Doctor Strange movie. Less reasonably, you also really need to have seen WandaVision, which I haven't. From the bits I have seen, it looked like a weird, experimental, extremely slow-burning piece which couldn't possibly be important in the grand scheme of things. And Wanda herself, to me at least, is never portrayed as a character of great importance despite being extremely powerful.

In this movie though, Wanda is crucial, and worse, has changed drastically from the last Avengers movie. This reasons for this are just not sufficiently well-explained for me to ever fully accept this - it keeps feeling very forced. Just being told the reason for the change is nowhere near as effective as having actually experienced that development, so just being asked to take it on faith isn't really good enough. So the whole main plot of the movie is left feeling extremely hollow.

It could be argued that the Marvel universe is now just too darn big. To follow future movies, viewers are also going to have watched not just the horde of movies but also the swelling plethora of TV series, and that's just too much for most of the audience. There's probably some merit in that but I am not convinced this is at all unavoidable. 

For instance here, you might remember that the end of the first movie sets up Mordo as an obvious future antagonist. This is referenced in the second film but this plotline just doesn't happen. To me that doesn't feel like a good narrative choice : you've given yourself an opening for a future self-contained villain but then ignored it. Now if you want to make a movie that's about Wanda instead, go full Wanda. Give her her own movie. Call it the Wanderverse or something. Don't merge it with Doctor Strange, who already has the next villain to fight... or at least, wait until the third film before you do that. Skipping the development from the end of the first film is almost like retconning. I can't think of any reason Mordo couldn't have been the villain for this piece while doing essentially the same plotline.

And if this movie might possibly have been better titled if it had had "Wanda" in it somewhere, it definitely shouldn't have been called the Multiverse of Madness. The existence of the multiverse is almost incidental to the plot, which is especially disappointing because Doctor Strange exploring the philosophical implications of a multiverse is something I would absolutely love to see. We don't get that. None of the character interactions depend on the existence of parallel realities in a way that couldn't otherwise have happened by some different mechanism*. As for madness, there's precious little of that. Rather than a gloriously anarchic ride through a myriad of different possibilities, we get a single, too fast sequence of seeing a few different worlds (admittedly quite nicely done about from being too rapid - not too short exactly, but too fast to see anything clearly) and that's about it. There's a lot of missed opportunities here... infinite, in fact.

* See the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth series for a case where parallel realities are genuinely crucial to the plot.

I also felt that some of the effects sequences were unnecessary - yes, it's a Marvel movie, but even so, they should serve some purpose. It all feels a bit ad-hoc. And none of them had the artistic flair of the first movie - they're nice enough, but very generic.

This isn't to say the movie isn't without some moments of brilliance. I did enjoy the finale very much, but there needs to be much, much more like this in the rest of the film. Generally the pacing doesn't feel quite right, like the movie is focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time, introducing too much of the wrong things while neglecting what it's already got to work with.

Oh well. I guess my homework is to watch WandaVision and then re-watch this movie and not fall asleep. Apparently I missed some of the best bits, so maybe I'll yet change my mind about this completely. We'll see.

EDIT : I finally watched WandaVision (which, though a very slow burn, ultimately does ignite rather ferociously and is excellent) and re-watched Doctor Strange 2, so I have to revise my opinion considerably. DS2 is a good movie which I'll happily upgrade to 7-8/10. I still think it could have used Mordo instead of Wanda, and there's not as much use of the multiverse as there could have been. But it's fun, clever, spectacular, and develops nicely from WandaVision (see also Spider-Man : No Way Home, which is great, but definitely don't watch without WV first). 

But though it does deserve to be called "Multiverse of Madness", it doesn't have the mind-warping vibe that the first movie did. Doctor Strange felt like an accessible way to explore different concepts of reality, presenting the starkly (no pun intended) materialistic neurosurgeon in contrast with the idealistic (in the philosophical sense) mystics. DS2 doesn't really quite manage this. Yes, it's integral to the plot, but it doesn't really ever try to use it to get the viewer to question their own world view. What it does, it does well. I just think it could have done just that little bit more.