Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
Doctor Strange is a near-perfect remake of Iron Man, minus the struggle, charm, and genuine emotion.
That’s… really about it. It’s a perfectly okay movie- beat for beat, it really is another Tony Stark origin story. A great formula to copy, so long as you do it right. Which they kinda did?
See, the biggest problem with enjoying Doctor Strange is that every time there’s any kind of suspense or tension, someone farts or something. Or the cape wipes his face for no reason. Or someone gets hit in the face with a frying pan. It’s tiresome, and I could write ten thousand words on why, except that during this series of reviews, I’ve mentioned Marvel’s overuse and misuse of bathos time and again, so I’ll leave it at that.
I know a lot of people who didn’t like Doctor Strange- I know a lot of people who straight-up hate it, and I think that’s unwarranted. Doctor Strange really did provide a lot of things I wanted to see in a movie:
- It had the swirly-whirly hand movey swishy-swish that I wanted and didn’t get from The Last Windpasser (courtesy of Lexi’s ex)
- It had the bendy-wendy oh-god-what-the-fucky city-twisting that I wanted and didn’t get from Inception
- It had a really great solution to the destruction porn problem that most major blockbusters are facing lately that Batman V. Superman and Age of Ultron both utterly failed to address
- Benedict Cumberbatch is pretty hot
I MEAN LOOK AT HIM
LOOK
And while he snaps his fingers (haha except he fucked up his hands so he can’t) and immediately transitions from Hotshot McSurgeonMan to Sorcerer Supreme, which is lacking in drama, he does ultimately have to fail in order to succeed, which is a really nice message coming from a Marvel movie. So far in this series, the solution is usually punching harder or engineering something or grabbing an infinity stone with your bare hands? Dormammu may not be even a little bit loyal to the source material, but Doctor Strange’s finales is one of- if not the– best climaxes in this series.
The best and most interesting climaxes to stories are not the biggest, most spectacular punch-fests, but conversations. Doctor Strange delivers this even though the hero and the villain have no relationship whatsoever, and I call that a win. It’s a shame, I think, that it winds up being forgotten because much of the rest of the movie was lacking in emotional substance.
But while it has one of the most satisfying endings, the rest of the movie is actually lacking in emotional substance, which bars Doctor Strange from entering the top-tier of Marvel movies.
Oh, well.