Thoughts on Doctor Strange

I saw Doctor Strange last night. And as I said on Twitter, while it might not be the best Marvel movie ever, it may have come closest to feeling like the original comic come to life, overflowing with the trippy visuals, corny but evocative mysticism, and just a dash of problematic orientalism that pretty much characterized Steve Ditko’s original run in Strange Tales.

For a more thorough and spoilery discussion, see below the cut:

Character:

Despite the fact that having Benedict Cumberbatch do his best Greg House impression is a bit of a waste (there’s absolutely no reason why he couldn’t speak with a British accent. Hell if it was up to me, I would have told Cumberbatch to do the whole thing as a Vincent Price impression), I thought Benedict Cumberbatch was quite good as Doctor Strange. After doing Sherlock, the insensitive asshole genius bit is pretty much second nature, so it would be easy for him to coast through the role.

What I liked about his performance is that he didn’t stick to doing that bit: he gets pretty damn goofy throughout a lot of the movie, damn near doing Charlie Chaplin in moments where he’s literally running in place because magic is making the floor stretch into infinity under his feet or where the magic cloak (going to talk more about this in a bit) is tugging him around. And that goofiness nicely leavens what otherwise could be a rather leadenly pompous character. Likewise, while Strange is often pompous, you get the sense that he knows he’s being pompous and is playing with people from behind the mask. And while I actually would have liked a bit more Vincent Price nastiness under the surface (the original Doctor Strange was a bit like the Doctor in that he’s a technical pacifist who somehow doesn’t mind Worse Than Death punishments for his enemies or just people who piss him off).

Other characters:

Mads Mikkleson/Kaecilius is ALMOST as one-note a villain as you’ve come to expect with Marvel movies, with one rather interesting exception. There’s a moment in the film where Strange has almost accidentally captured him and Kaecilius does something rather unusual for a Marvel villain: he actually tries to persuade Doctor Strange that Kaecilius is the hero, that he’s literally trying to save the world, and arguably the universe, by stopping entropy itself through shifting the world into a dimension where it doesn’t exist. And while I was a bit surprised they didn’t fully draw the connection between his desire to abolish death by the fact that Kaecilius lost his entire family violently, it’s a rare Marvel villain who actually has a point.

Let’s bite the bullet. Tilda Swinton does a great job playing the Ancient One – balancing wisdom with a secret hypocrisy – but so could any number of actresses who weren’t white. Yes, the Ancient One is an orientalist trope. But the way to fix it is to write the character to be a real character that subverts and plays with those tropes. And while some people have said that this is all because Marvel wants the film to play in China and thus can’t say the word Tibet, the movie itself refutes that by just moving the Ancient One’s sanctum across the border over into Nepal. No reason the Ancient One couldn’t have been Nepalese. And honestly, I think the filmmakers realized that they’d kind of fucked themselves, because rather than having the Ancient One be saved in the nick of time, they kill her off two-thirds through the movie so they won’t have that problem in the future.

To be scrupulously fair, however, I do think the movie actually significantly improved on this very problem with two of the other secondary characters, which is what makes their decision not to do it with the Ancient One all the more strange. Benedict Wong, playing Wong, isn’t Doctor Strange’s Chinese manservant – instead, he’s the chief librarian of the Ancient One’s collection of magics, and ends the film as the master of the Sanctum of Hong Kong, making him very much Stephen Strange’s equal. And he’s allowed to be deadpan funny as well as a wise mystic, which makes him feel like more of a well-rounded character. Rachel McAdams as Doctor Christine Palmer isn’t given enough screentime, but I really like the decision to have her be Doctor Strange’s ex and stay that way through the movie, a friend not a love interest.

But above all, the person who arguably turns in the best performance of the movie is Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo. Now, Baron Mordo is a villain that only an Objectivist like Steve Ditko could have thought up: he’s literally someone who chooses to become capital-E evil, turning on the Ancient One because he wants to be the most powerful, that’s it. But there’s no reason for him to seek power – he doesn’t have any deep psychological need for power based on his life experiences, he’s not trying to do anything with the power (like say, Doctor Doom trying to win back his mother’s soul from the Devil), he just wants it in the same way that a Heel wants the WWE Championship belt.

But Ejiofor’s Mordo is something entirely different. His Mordo is a hero for 9/10ths of the movie, a devoted lieutenant of the Ancient One, the one who brings Doctor Strange into the Sanctum, who teaches Doctor Strange to fight back against evil, and who gives his all in the service of the ideals of the order he’s dedicated his life to. The problem is that he’s so inflexibly devoted to those ideals – imagine Javert as the Instructor for Dark Arts – that when he finds out that the Ancient One has been bending the rules by tapping into magics she herself has forbidden, because magic is all about bending the rules for a higher purpose, he rejects the order, because he argues that there are always consequences. And by the very very end of the movie, he’s decided that the way to ensure that there are consequences are for him to wipe out all the sorcerors in existence. And that kind of villain is so good that I really don’t care that Kaecilius is mostly rather dull, because Mordo has the potential to join Loki in the otherwise-empty (mostly because good villains have a habit of dying in Marvel movies) pantheon of actually interesting villains.

EDIT:

Oh, right, the cloak…forgot I was going to talk about the cloak. It’s one of the best bits of the movie – think the carpet from Aladdin by way of tinyGroot in Guardians. It’s playful, protective, useful, and it both looks really damn cool but also is willing to play with the goody side of it. There’s a little moment where Doctor Strange pops the collar and the cloak almost materally wipes something off his cheek and it got the biggest laugh of the whole movie. So here’s my note for Doctor Strange 2: like 10-20% more cloak. Not so much that the joke gets tired, but more.

Story:

I’ve heard some people complain that the story in Doctor Strange is a bit rushed, that it rushes through too much of the Hero’s Journey too quickly so that it can get to the big fight at the end. I find that a bit odd – right now, the movie is a fleet-footed hour and fifty-five, if you tried to make it longer, it would start to bog down, and the potential holes (why did Kaecilius wait around until Doctor Strange was advanced enough in his training to fight back to cast the ritual to summon Dormammu?) would get bigger.

What I liked about the story’s speed is that it felt like a comic book, where you only have 16 pages to tell a beginning, middle, and end. So yes, brush through the early stages of the Hero’s Journey because we’ve seen it all before and because they’re the most boring parts of it – again, one of the best parts of Captain America: Civil War was that they did both Black Panther’s and Spiderman’s origin in two-three scenes apiece.

And specifically, it felt like a Doctor Strange comic. See, early Ditko Doctor Strange stories always went the same way: Doctor Strange is confronted with some new magical threat that would put him in an impossible position and figures out some trick to overcome that threat. They really weren’t action comics or character studies but more like drawing-room mysteries where the fun is in seeing how Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple solves the puzzle. So when the big setpiece ends with Doctor Strange first using a forbidden ritual to turn back time and undo the destruction of Hong Kong and then realizing that if he brings this spell into the Dark Dimension of Dormammu where there is no time, he can drive Dormammu nuts by sticking him in a time loop where Dormammu kills Doctor Strange over and over and over until Dormammu goes nuts and promises to leave our dimension alone if Strange freeze him, that is a uniquely Doctor Strange plot that Ditko would have written.

Indeed, it even has Doctor Strange doing something a bit morally dark, by banishing Kaecilius to the Dark Dimension he’d been trying to pull the entire Earth into, where Dormammu promptly turns him into one of his Mindless Ones.

Visuals:

Yes, the visuals are every bit as amazing as you’ve heard, although honestly I think people have undersold them somewhat by saying that the director swallowed Inception whole. Yes, the movie does the whole bending city-scapes thing, and the changing gravity thing, but it does so so much more (I would argue it actually does that trick with a bit more panache than Nolan did). There are whole chunks of this movie that are literally Steve Ditko’s psychedelic panels come to life:

It is so visually distinct from every other Marvel movie ever made that anyone after this who says that all Marvel movies look the same is a damn liar.

And while I don’t know whether or not the movie looks any better in 3D, I will be very curious to see if audience responses change after Prop 64 passes in California…