Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (spoilers, obvs)

[stubbleupdate]

What did we all make of it?

My brother was thoroughly entertained throughout, I was a bit less impressed.



There's a lot of style over substance. Lots of cameos and moments popped in just for the sake of being there.I liked the Illuminati, and they were done well, but it kind of felt a bit Ready Player One. That said, after rolling my eyes for the X-Men '97 theme playing, I did sit straight up when they said Incursion.



The story wasn't massively satisfying. Wanda's tale of doing something monstrous while overcome with grief over her husband becomes her doing something monstrous while overcome with grief over her children. Not much character development or movement there. And if they're doing the "Wanda messes with other worlds because she wants her children" story it would have been nice to have had some sort of House of M spin on it. Why just make herself happy? Why not fix everything for everybody?

Leaving this film, it does feel like we're now getting in to a phase where there are a lot of plot threads left dangling, to either be picked up or not. I wanted a sequel where Mordo was more of an antagonist, as teased at the end of the first Strange film. Now we've got Clea and incursions, and Mordo still hanging around, and is Strange's 3rd eye a hangover from the Darkhold?

Maybe we'll find out in a few years.

Comments

[walkingthroughforest]

Honestly kind of underwhelming considering the hype around the multiverse. It was very cool seeing Krasinski show up as Reed, but that was really the only jaw dropping moment. I do wish we got to explore the multiverse more than we did. We really only got to see two other universes and one of them was a dead world.

I felt it could have played to the strengths of the concept a little more.

This film is going to be divisive, especially by the female audience. I’m stunned that Marvel took one of their feminist icons and turned her into a mass murderer. Even in the comics Wanda has never crossed the line this far. I don't feel there was enough build up from the end of WandaVision to MOM to justify her going from traumatized hero to full on supervillain.

In saying that, villain Wanda was terrifying and the visuals were extremely unsettling.

I don't love how some big name heroes jobbed to Scarlet Witch. Mr. Fantastic and (especially) Professor X should have put up a much more of a fight, but in saying that it was really effective to show how powerful Wanda had become.

It was peak Sam Raimi, for better or worse. The horror elements with Wanda were really effective, but a big chunk of this was a mess.

6.5/10

[lucean]

On the Sam Raimi thing, it was really weird. Before the movie he talked about how he had this creative freedom with the film, whcih turns out to be a really puzzling statement for two reasons.

First one was that the film was originally supposed to be directed by the director of the first Doctor Strange movie who wanted to give it a haunted house feeling, but Marvel had him leave the project because they didn't like his creative vision. So clearly Marvel wasn't giving free hands to the director here. Second, even if you ignore that, this movie was so forcefully a Marvel movie at times that it was impossible to consider a pure Sam Raimi flick.

[werehawk]

I don't know. I have to disagree to a small degree. Marvel at this point (and after Love and Thunder for sure) has lots of "female" icons. And maybe America Chavez (and Charlize Theron as Clea!) was expected to be one more. And I don't think that they had any other choice for an effective villain. AND, Scarlet Witch is just so broken at this point after Pietro and Vision and the kids that the only way to redeem her would have been her magic-caused white picket fence and we saw that couldn't work. Making it obvious that she is the most powerful magic user in the multiverse, albeit an evil one, I don't think from what I see is misusing a female character. And we saw a Dr. Strange who went just as evil so it could happen to anyone. But then again, I am not a woman, so I may be wrong about that opinion and maybe it was a poor choice.

[cyberghostface]

I mean we already had Valkyrie as a drunken slaver responsible for who knows how many deaths being presented as a feminist icon so it wouldn’t be the first time and Wanda has always been on the villainous side (working with a Nazi organization, then keeping an entire town hostage, etc). At least here she’s being corrupted by a supernatural force.

[lordultimus]

"I’m stunned that Marvel took one of their feminist icons and turned her into a mass murderer. Even in the comics Wanda has never crossed the line this far."

Didn't "No More Mutants" kill a loooot of mutants?

[thanekos]

Can't wait for " newuniversal " to be six episodes on Disney+ in 2024.

[stubbleupdate]

[lucean]

I cannot remember the last time I hated watching a movie in the cinema as much as this one, it was honestly a drag to go through that last half. For me, easily the worst MCU movie so far with an astonishingly badly written story and absolutely no sensible character arcs to really speak of.

What bothered me perhaps the most, even beyond the endless stupidity, is that this movie felt like it had really false advertising driving it. First of all, despite the claims, not only was this not in anyway a sequel to Spiderman No Way Home, I thought those two movies contradicted each other a lot. Second, for all those fan appeareance characters, they were all in a different universe and were killed off instantly. So to me, it was like so what if they had Stewart do an appearance as Charles Xavier as in the way it was done here, it has absolutely no bearing for the larger MCU story. This has no impact whatsoever on anything MCU related and can easily be skipped.

Something that did also puzzle me is how little actual multiverse we saw. Not just that, but the movie kind of seemed to assert that everyone was kind of the same regardless of the universe. Like I get there were these actions that were different, but in many ways their personaliities and backgrounds were the same instead of actually playing around with things and characters.

[lucean]

By the way, as a comment on the post's question on Wanda's motivations, I do think it was a pretty big warning sign that there were at least three scenes that I can think of where the movie had to stop and have characters try justify why Wanda was doing what she was doing. And even then, it really didn't make that much sense as a whole.

Also I didn't think I could hate two kids as fast as I did Wanda's children, but man it felt like the only writing directive there was how precious they had to be.

[coldfury]

In regards to the Xavier bit, I'm not sure what you were expecting from the Stewart cameo. It was clearly just a fun nod, a bit of inclusion to have fun with Patrick Stewart as Xavier in the MCU briefly.

There's no way to 'import' the X-Men movie cast into the current MCU without hitting the big ol' retcon button, and they're certainly not going to do that with Stewart who is probably the busiest 80+ yearold actor on the planet.

Whatever they plan for the X-Men, it'll be a mostly fresh start, aside from any potential Deadpool shenanigans. I'm not sure how anyone would be expecting anything other than that, unless you were expecting Marvel to pull a DC and do a partial reboot of their universe.

[tinygaylaura]

I do agree that for a movie called "The Multiverse of Madness" there was not as much Multiverse, mad or otherwise, as I expected there to be

I was thinking this was going to be like the Arrowverse live action adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths where there was lots of world hopping and parallel universe cameos

[werehawk]

I really enjoyed it and at the same time was both underwhelmed in some aspects and overwhelmed in others. Keep in mind I watched zero previews so my only (minor) spoilers were headlines on CBR. That said, I 100% agree they jumped universes less than expected and the ones they did jump too were oddly different universes for "visual" effects. Like a universe where they are paint? WTF. And the main one they visited looked like the Free Guy universe at the end of that movie. So basically an online game. That said, they went all out on the Illuminati and Scarlet Witch breaking bad. I thought they were going to redeem her (or did at the end of WandaVision, but holy shit. Yes, so powerful and terrifying.

[lordultimus]

I just find it hysterical that the comics went through the effort of retconning America's backstory only for the MCU to go with the multiverse origin.

[laughing_tree]

This is the same company that, while Doctor Strange 2 is out, has Doctor Strange dead. This is the same company that was putting out no comics featuring Vision and the Scarlet Witch, not even team books, while WandaVision was on. It's clear synergy isn't a priority for them anymore.

[cyberghostface]

I’m annoyed that Stewart gave his Xavier a poignant send off in Logan only for this film to undo it. (I’m aware they’re not the same iteration.)

[tinygaylaura]

I was okay with seeing Stewart's take on the character again myself primarily because his take is one of the only times I've actually liked Charles

I am not immune to nostalgia :)

[stubbleupdate]

Didn't even get this bit from Illuminati

[tinygaylaura]

"No!" is not how I would react if I was in bed between these two ladies myself

[werehawk]

I was wondering if the Darkhold book being copied from Wundagore meant that the Darkhold book from Agents of SHIELD might still be canon (but another, maybe inferior) copy.

[arilou_skiff]

Possible, though Wanda apparently destroyed all the iterations of the thing.

[arilou_skiff]

It's a very interesting movie to me, in a way most MCU ones aren't. They usually tends to end up in a fairly safe "This is fine" level, but this movie had bits I really liked and bits I really hated. On balance it still ends up as "This is fine", but I think it works.

I didn't like the tack they took with Wanda, yeah, it's kind of logical, but still felt mean. I felt some of the threads could have been teid together a bit more, and Chavez felt more or less like just a Macguffin. (though I liked both her look and her powers)

OTOH, the visuals were great. The music-note fight, the corpse-handling, al the horror-shots (which is where the Raimi influence was felt the most) Turns out Wanda is way more terrifying than the monsters she sent. My one quibble is that while the visuals were great it's not Ditko-esque psychedelic Strange.

Strange's character arc sort of worked, in that in the end his role was largely in supporting someone else while they did what they had to do.

Also, while I don't like the story itself, the actress who plays Wanda did a stellar job. Both in the horror-bits and when playing alternate Wanda and when being conflicted.

[mazway_75]

One thing to remember is that this was supposed to come out before both No Way Home and WandaVision before the pandemic interfered. So that likely changed a few bits and intriguing how it would have had Wanda in the fallout of this trying to "fix" things.

Also Rami said he didn't watch all of WandaVision when he took over the film (likely not all of it even completed at that point) and departure of Derrickson likely shifted things up. I can see a backlash and telling for ever poor review is another guy praising it.

A mixed bag but fun on cameos, do hope it means FF is coming (you don't waste Krasinksi on an one-off) and Charlize Theron as Clea is amazing and can't wait for that.

[stubbleupdate]

You say "you don't waste him in a one off" but it's also as easy to imagine "I don't want to sign up for several years of green screen heavy shoots, but I'll do a weekend of work for fun"

[stubbleupdate]

And because the film encouraged the trivia nerds in the audience, I would query whether objectively "our MCU" is earth 616.

That's the designation of the pre-Secret War universe that died at the end of Hickvengers, along with 1610.

It might make sense in the movie for Christine's numbering system to denote "our" MCU as 616, but for the audience, they have to be different numbers.

[tinygaylaura]

Some thoughts after seeing this film

- I was very surprised they made Wanda the villain. I really figured based on the trailers and the ending of the WandaVision show that this would be her and Stephen teaming up rather than her having gone completely Anakin Skywalker on us thanks to the Dark Side I mean the Darkhold taking hold of her.

- Seeing Patrick Stewart play Professor Xavier again was a moment of pure unadulterated fangirl joy

- Loved America Chavez here tho I hope that when we get the Young Avengers/America movie that the character gets more to do.

- Lots of great spooky moments here that I think really played up the horror potential of an evil Wanda's powers so that was cool. It feels like Raimi was having fun doing this

- The Multiversal Illuminati was a cool concept and it feels like a shame that they were killed off so quickly. I was actually more surprised to see Black Bolt than I was Reed or Xavier tho as I would have though Marvel were eager for everyone to forget that Inhumans ever happened

- The fact we now know there are other versions of Billy and Tommy in the Multiverse hopefully means that this will lead to Marvel bringing them back as Wiccan and Speed in the near future

- That should have been Shuma-Gorath damn it

[leahandillyana]

Actually pretty good, I liked how they utilized the concepts. Will elaborate later.

[donnblake]

You know, traditionally, when a zombie wizard wearing a cloak woven from the souls of the damned shows up...

I think MCU films could stand to plunder the tropes and aesthetics of other genres more often, in the grand tradition of superhero comics.

[deh_tommy]

More like Doctor Strange and the Singular Universe of Sanity, amirite boys?

Seriously though, maybe I’ll soften up on the film when I’ve given it some thought, but despite some things I did genuinely kind of like my initial impressions having just come home from the cinema are… ugh. I think I might have disliked this more than I did Eternals.