Doctor Strange: Movie Review

A "no spoilers" movie review of the new MCU film, Doctor Strange. Has the MCU gotten old yet, or is the new style enough to carry your ass to a seat?

Give it to me straight Captain.

I considered calling this a “Quick Review” since I could easily say, “Doctor Strange is another good Marvel Movie” and we’d all understand, but that didn’t end up happening.

Doctor Strange is one of the few Marvel characters I don’t even have a basic knowledge in. Sure he’s shown up in Spider-Man once or twice, and he had a fantastic role in a recent Howard the Duck run, but other than that I know very little, other than his art drawing influences from psychedelic rock art of the 60s, which I can 110% get behind, if they’re recreated properly in film format. So as part of Phase Three of the MCU we have Benny Back Cumberbuns playing the titular character in action movie about dimension hopping wizards. This should be fun. 

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Doctor Stephen Strange, a wealthy brain surgeon who enjoys living the high life until a car accident gives him permanent nerve damage in his hands, rendering them useless. He seeks the help of The Ancient One, the leader of a magic society of wizards/monks who protect the world from supernatural threats. 

So let me talk about all the good stuff in Doc Strange, cause I feel like I’m going to dwell on its flaws for a bit and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about this movie being bad. The opposite, it’s quite good, 7/10, go see it when you can, but it does have flaws worth discussing. But before all that…

Visually, Doctor Strange is the best Marvel movie. No contest. Like Ant Man before it, Disney knew they had something special with a character with unique ability. See, Doctor Strange possess the ability to travel between dimensions of reality as well as bend them to his will. This results in my favorite kind of visual art: impossible space. The 3 key action scenes in the movie revolve around the character manipulating time and space in an interesting way that results in some mind-bending scenery. There’s also a scene introducing Strange to the magic world, which features the trippiest visuals in the film/MCU and is easily the biggest reason to go see this movie in 3D. The soundtrack is also a bit of a higher quality, at least as far as Marvel movies go, even go so far as to try and give Strange his own theme. And I say “try” because it simply doesn’t have enough presence (and I mean literal presence, this theme only comes in twice for 40 seconds at a time), but it was noticeable enough that I could see what they were going for, and kind of wish they went a step further with it. Aside from that all the standard Marvel movie flair is still present, everything looks clean, well edited, well cast, and it has 2 end credit scenes. Standard stuff. 

So Doctor Strange looks good and feels good, what could possibly be wrong with it? Well… it all just moves too fast. The film’s first act feels like it’s on Turbo as within about 20 minutes we get introduced to Strange, his past relationship, his career, his accident, his path towards healing, and finally, his meeting with The Ancient One. The writing is solid enough that the entire thing doesn’t feel like a solid 20 minutes worth of plot dump, but as result, we don’t get real solid grasp of Doctor Strange as a character. For instance, we know he’s rich and cracks jokes within a few minutes, and for while, he’s pretty much an exact copy of Tony Stark. It isn’t until later we get introduced to his photographic memory (the explanation for why he is learning magic so fast) and his inflated ego (via one of the funniest moments in the movie). I theorize they made his personality like this so he can go through a vague arc as he becomes the no-nonsense wizard of the comics.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the entire movie didn’t suffer a bit from this pacing. The entire second act is a sped up montage as Strange learns incredibly fast to the point where he practically masters forbidden time magic within the first hour. We barely get introduced to Strange’s cape, which apparently has some kind of magic that lets him levitate, but also has a mind of its own, but is never explained why, it kind of comes out of nowhere. 

And now we come to the real reason why the pacing hurts the movie: it doesn’t mix well with the action scenes. Now like I said, the editing and camera work gives a chance to take in the visuals and understand how it all works before they toss us into the action, but the result is that we can’t catch every single detail of the visuals. We get enough to understand the basics of what the arena or gimmick is to every fight, but not enough to soak in the crazy visuals and bask in the absolute ridiculousness of the images in front of us. So you end up enjoying every minute of what you see on screen, but also getting really annoyed that you couldn’t soak it all in before 

Is it perfect? No, but Doctor Strange is a pretty good movie that is one of those “better to look at” movies. It’s got more than enough personality that it felt like we got a little break from the more grounded Captain America and even Avengers movies by just saying “OK, fuck it, there’s magic now”. It’s well worth your time. 

TLDR: It’s a fantastic movie to look at, but don’t be surprised if the story leaves something to be desired. 

7/10: go see it in 3D/IMAX