Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Year 14, Day 166 - 6/15/22 - Movie #4,169 - VIEWED ON 5/17/22.         

BEFORE: This has been part of the plan all along - but I only waited about two weeks after this latest Marvel film opened to watch it.  And it played at a special screening for the Visual Effects Society at the theater where I work - only when it did, I was out sick on COVID leave.  I couldn't in good faith attend the screening if there was any chance I was still contagious - I hadn't yet tested negative, only another positive at that point.  So, I swung by the other theater where I used to work, an AMC, and I caught a Tuesday early afternoon matinee for just $6. Saw a couple former co-workers, though I might have forgotten a few names, got some popcorn, but they were in the middle of a chain-wide nachos shortage, so I only came home with nacho cheese for my wife, she had to provide the chips. 

I'd been starting to hear things about who has cameos in this film, and of course once I hear that I might as well look up the whole plot, because my brain starts building the story based on that, so every little casting announcement is essentially a spoiler, and I wanted to get around to watching it before it was too late, and that was happening very fast. So I just couldn't wait until June, I had to kind of bump this one up on the schedule, write the review early, basically I cheated. 

But if I've planned this right, both Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong carry over from "Dirty Pretty Things". And if I've planned this really right, I'm somewhere in Atlantic City right now, sitting either at a slot machine or within view of the beach, drinking a pina colada. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Doctor Strange" (Movie #2,589), "Spider-Man: No Way Home" (Movie #4,007)

THE PLOT: Doctor Strange teams up with a mysterious teenage girl from his dreams who can travel across the multiverse to battle multiple threats, including other-universe versions of himself, which threaten to wipe out millions. 

AFTER: This is "Catching up with Marvel Movies, Part 3" - so SPOILER WARNING if you haven't made it out to the theaters yet to see this one, and if not, then what have you been waiting for?  

Marvel continues to explore its multiverse, which you know, is both good and bad for me.  It's good because we're seeing a wide range of things, and up until now the Avengers-based heroes have lived in a world without the X-Men and Fantastic Four, who are conspicuously absent, because Marvel signed away the rights to those characters to other studios years ago.  BUT when Disney bought Fox a couple years ago, the theory was that it would make things easier to merge the universes, we just didn't think that it would be so literal, depicting actual universe crossover on the big screen.  Yes, perhaps you heard that a couple new Marvel characters appear in this film, and it's very cheeky to do it this way, it's almost like Disney is bragging by showing off that they got the movie rights to the X-Men back when they bought out FOX, and the rights to the Fantastic Four with the same transaction.  I think they still share Spider-Man with Sony, but they've already laid down the shared multiverse work in "Spider-Man: No Way Home". 

So that's the good - they can reboot the X-Men, there could be a Fantastic Four movie coming are way that's, you know, GOOD, after at least three other attempts that were, well, not so good.  But how are they going to do that, by physically ramming a couple of universes together?  (Yes, Marvel's done it before, in a little crossover called "Secret Wars" - twice, in fact.). That's one option, but another would be to discover that Reed Richards has been in the MCU all along, maybe he's so smart that he's stayed hidden, and didn't get involved in the Civil War or the battles with Ultron and Thanos.  But if that's the case, then WHY?  Similarly, perhaps there are no mutants in the MCU because, well, just because, but then a worldwide event could make them "possible" and then it's a chance to re-cast Wolverine and Storm and all the others.  Marvel movies have done that before, too, like when they cast younger versions of Cyclops and Storm for the prequels like "Days of Future Past".  

Then we got the "Wandavision" Disney TV series (which, umm, doesn't really air on TV), which is just as much of a lead-in to "Multiverse of Madness" as anything else, including "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and the first "Doctor Strange" film.  Scarlet Witch is an interesting character to use here, because her powers are basically whatever a writer SAYS they are - in the comics she's an Omega-level mutant, only the word "mutant" doesn't apply to the MCU, so she has to be something else, only they haven't quite said WHAT.  In the comics she once cast a "spell" that got rid of nearly all the mutants worldwide, and if she can do THAT, she can also do the reverse, I suppose, and create mutants.  But then there have been comic-book writers who have interpreted her powers differently (like John Byrne) and said that her magic spells aren't magic at all, but instead she's a mutant with the power to change reality itself.  If someone fired a gun at her, she would have the power to make that gun misfire, for example, by changing reality so that the perfect gun would have a flaw, and that would be retroactive, like the flaw would now always have been there, from the day that the gun was made in the factory.  We saw hints of this in "Wandavision", like after Vision died she just created a new reality, one in which he did NOT die, and tried to settle down in a little house in a quiet town and live a sitcom-like life together.  Also, she created two sons out of magic, or if you believe the other explanation, she changed reality to one in which she had two children.  Only clearly there were limits to what she could do - but she set out to find a reality somewhere in the multiverse that better reflected her, umm, vision of the way life should be.  

All this kind of makes her the villain of the piece, not the usual evil sorcerers that Doctor Strange is used to fighting, like Baron Mordo or the giant demonic entities like Mephisto or Dormammu, or even Shuma-Gorath.  She's a villain because she's seeking a better life for herself, not acting as a hero trying to save the world - after getting a taste of how much better her life COULD be, she'll act in any way to make that happen, even sacrificing others to get what she wants - as opposed to Doctor Strange, who's willing to sacrifice himself and the life he could be living, just to make the world a better place for others.  So he and Scarlet Witch (I don't know why there's a movement afoot to not call her by her superhero name) are like opposite sides of the same coin, or one's a dark reflection of the other.  She seeks out the Darkhold, a book of black magic that enables her to see what's taking place in other realities - there's also a version of Doctor Strange here that has been corrupted in the same way, by looking across the realities using black magic. to do so. 

Dr. Strange has allies, though - most notably America Chavez, who was introduced in the comic books in the "Young Avengers" series, on a team with grown-up versions of Scarlet Witch's magically-created children (Wiccan and Speed), the Kate Bishop Hawkeye, Iron Lad (think Iron Man Jr., but from the future, also a future villain), Hulkling and Patriot (grandson of the original, secret African-American Captain America), and later on, Kid Loki (just the original one, only smaller) and Ant-Man's daughter, Stature (like the original, only bigger).  These junior versions of the more famous heroes were introduced at times when the originals were thought to be dead, but then they got better, so for a while there were several Hulks running around, two Hawkeyes, and so on.  When she was first introduced, it looked like she was another riff on Captain America, but really, that's just her first name, there are no other similarities - instead of carrying a shield, she can "punch" star-shaped holes in reality to teleport, even to other realities in the multiverse.  Like the comic-book version, America has two mommies, so good on Marvel/Disney to include that, even if it makes the film non-marketable in China. It's kind of unclear if she's a mutant or not, or if her powers instead come from somewhere else.  She also had a crush on Hawkeye (the teen female one), and who knows, maybe this will be depicted in a future Avengers movie, or maybe they'll set up Kate Bishop with the Black Widow's sister, who can say?  I think there was definitely something between them as frenemy lovers.  

This Doctor Strange sequel was originally going to be released before "Spider-Man: No Way Home", and it's still possible that the events depicted in this one take place before that - that would explain why Stephen Strange knows so much about the multiverse when he tries to help out Spider-Man.  In the Multiverse of Madness, he learns there are other Doctor Stranges out there (Doctors Strange?), some of which are evil and some of which are dead.  I guess across the board, that's just how it goes - but it also suggests a potential cop-out way to bring back dead characters like Iron Man and Black Widow to the MCU, just substitute them with their doppelgangers from another dimension, or have a "Secret Wars"-type universal events that collapses several realities into one.  It could happen.  

But here we're also treated to a cross-universe jaunt, thanks to the powers of America Chavez - in the most relevant alternate universe, it wasn't the Avengers who defeated Thanos, it was the Illuminati, whose members included alt-Mister Fantastic, alt-Captain Marvel, alt-Professor X, alt-Black Bolt, and alt-Captain America - oh, and a version of Baron Mordo, Strange's main nemesis.  That group of heroes executed their reality's Doctor Strange for, umm, reasons and they're not very happy to see him again, or another version of him either. Then Scarlet Witch appears on the scene and, well, it does NOT go well.  It's going to take a lot more than that to convince Scarlet Witch that she's acting improperly.  There is a version of the Illuminati in the main Marvel Comic Universe, but its members are different - it's Mister Fantastic, Professor X, and Black Bolt, but also Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Black Panther and Namor/Sub-Mariner.  Note that the line-up is all male, and mostly white ones at that - this wouldn't really fly in the MCU of today.  But in the comic-book universe there's room for both the Avengers AND the Illuminati, why can't the cinematic universe work the same way?

This is probably a much BETTER use of the cross-dimensional multiverse hopping than what was seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home", which seemed to exist just to explain why we all remember three actors playing Spider-Man, and why we shouldn't discount the Tobey McGuire or Andrew Garfield movies, just because Sony appeared to do so.  How very mercenary of them, but also, how blatantly enterprising of Marvel/Disney to say that ALL the Spider-Man stories are valid, even if there's no Doctor Octopus or Green Goblin or Lizard for Peter Parker to fight in the MCU - not yet, anyway.  But to me, as with "Eternals", the best part of the movie might be the mid-credits sequence, here that teases the next adventure for Doctor Strange. 

Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "In Secret"), Xochitl Gomez, Rachel McAdams (last seen in "A Most Wanted Man"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Patrick Stewart (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "The Duchess"), Lashana Lynch (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Anson Mount (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), John Krasinski (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Julian Hilliard, Jett Klyne (last seen in "The Humanity Bureau"), Topo Wresniwiro (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Sheila Atim, Ako Mitchell (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Eden Nathenson, Vinny Moli, Charlie Norton, Ruth Livier, Chess Lopez, Michael Waldron, and the voices of Adam Hugill (last seen in "1917"), Ross Marquand (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), with cameos from Bruce Campbell (Last seen in "Oz the Great and Powerful"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "The Old Guard").

RATING: 8 out of 10 cracked mirrors