“And I love it so, so much.”
If you’re just here for Doctor Strange, skip down about four paragraphs to the first picture of the weird doctor, but if you care to hear my soapbox melodrama, feel free to start reading here.
The first thing I want to say is that I am sorry this I all I have this week. With everything that has been going on, both in my personal life and the world at large, it feels tone-deaf to post something as trivial as a stupid movie review. Between my friend’s passing and my small social circle having another COVID experience, to the mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo and the war in Ukraine and the slow but apparently inevitable destruction of female bodily autonomy, I feel woefully ill-equipped to talk about anything of meaning or presence. I can’t believe that I haven’t even really acknowledged or discussed the war in Ukraine on this website up until today. It feels more and more like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but sometimes it also feels like it’s just this particular stupid country. I don’t know. Maybe it feels that way everywhere. I’m sure it feels that way in Ukraine especially. Along with Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and other countries that have experienced airstrikes or ongoing conflicts this year.
Maybe it’s not my job to talk about these things, at least not on this blog? I mean, what, exactly, do I hope to get out of this site anyway? Who am I writing for, and why? I started this whole thing as a way of marketing myself and building an online presence in the hopes of finding a publisher or attracting some sort of an audience. And sure, I’ve touched on heavy topics before, like #BlackLivesMatter or climate change, but those are, admittedly, topics that I know more about than, say, gun laws, abortion rights, and Eastern European political affairs.
I can tell you pretty easily that I whole-heartedly condemn the war in Ukraine (and war anywhere else), and I can tell you that I think Russia’s offensive is a tragic conflict being spearheaded by an egomaniacal lunatic, and that the US needs to do as much as it can for as long as it can to support Ukraine, but that isn’t anything new. I can tell you how much it hurts to know that there are children who won’t be going home to their families after school anymore, or that I believe the lives of innocent people matter more than gun rights and we should have stronger gun regulations and the inaction (or outright hostility!) by the American political process is a goddamn disgrace and should be treated as criminal negligence, but it’s just pissing in the wind at this point. I can tell you that people who can give birth should be the ones making the decisions about their own bodies and the ones writing that into law, and I can tell you that I think Texas (and a couple of other states) is basically turning itself into a citizen-police-state nightmare version of The Handmaid’s Tale, but there’s no surprise there.
Nothing I have to say about that is particularly groundbreaking or novel in any way, at least to the degree that it can fit in these blogs. And, frankly, no argument I can make is going to convince anyone of anything. Any inroads I can make to changing someone’s mind will probably be done through in-person conversations. I mean, I did that one climate change thing about middle-aged conservatives as practice in persuasive writing, but I don’t actually think it made a difference. It feels like this country and this planet is tearing itself apart at the seams, and nothing I can do on this blog is going to make a difference. Sure, maybe I can make changes somewhere else, in other ways, but I don’t think anything I say here is going to make a difference. I might still try anyway. I’ve got something about Ukraine that I’ve been working on. But it’s too exhausting for me to try and write something about everything that happens and my take on it. It’s exhausting both mentally and physically, especially because I don’t want this blog to consume my life, and the more time I spend writing it is less time that I can spend writing things I care more about.
So here’s what I’m gonna do. For a little bit, I’m gonna pretend none of this is happening, and I’m gonna write about something stupid and utterly meaningless and have a little bit of fun. Hopefully, someone else gets a kick out of me showing some love for Sam Raimi, and maybe their day is a little bit better.
Spoilers for Doctor Strange follow!
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is perhaps one of the dumbest fucking movies I have ever seen. The number of times Cheyenne and I looked at each other during the movie and said “this is fucking stupid” or “that line was written by a three-year-old” numbered over a dozen. It has the coherence and pacing of an out-of-control lawnmower. It lacks any sort of human empathy or relatable characters and feels very much like a child smashing action figures together and all the emotional depth that brings. And it’s so overstuffed with fan pandering (fandering?) and fan service that it might as well just be marketing for more dumbass funko pops. And yet, somehow, against all odds, I absolutely fucking adore it. I could not tear my eyes away, and you could not slap that stupid grin off my face the entire movie, no matter how hard you hit me. Multiverse of Madness is perhaps the most fun I’ve had at a movie theater in three years and maybe one of my favorite Marvel movies. It is stupid, but it is so gloriously stupid that I cannot help but love it. And I think a big part of that is director Sam Raimi and his almost absurdist approach to everything.
Doctor Strange 2 somehow manages to pull off the feat of being a PG-13 spectacle Marvel movie full of cameos and legacy character appearances while also being the most buck-wild PG-13-that-should-probably-be-R fantasy horror movie I’ve ever seen. Imagine Deathly Hallows but replacing the melodramatic skulking in forests and teen angst with even cooler wizard battles and insanity. This is what a fantastical dark magic film should look like. Well, to be fair, it doesn’t exactly have a “Battle of Hogwarts” level of grandeur, but it sure as hell beats out anything Voldemort could pull out of his ass in terms of sheer overwhelming monstrous evil. And it does all of that by, apparently, not giving a shit about what “is” and “isn’t” Disney-approved. This is not a kid’s movie. This is barely a Marvel movie!
Sure, you can see where the House of Mouse had to step in and pull back on the reigns, or throw in some fan service to keep things moving, but the movie just sidesteps all of this with something just as bizarre. I think this movie kept me so glued to my seat because it does away with all pretense of normalcy and throws everything at the wall to see what sticks with a wet, bloody thump. I had no idea what to expect at any given moment, and it was wonderful. Horror movie jump scares? Sure, why not. Gruesome, almost body-horror deaths? Yeah, let’s throw that in. Actual, honest-to-dog zombies? This is Sam Raimi, after all.
I don’t know how Sam Raimi got connected to this project, or how much control he had over the total direction of it (at the very least, someone in the writer’s room was also a fan), but I’ll be damned if you can’t feel Sam Raimi oozing out of this movie, in all the gross ways that’s possible. Weird, janky scenes where the camera flies around an actor’s terrified face. Several (and I mean at least three) instances where the actors look directly into the camera for uncomfortable lengths of time, both for comedic and horror effect. Just, like, straight-up Army of Darkness-style deadites. I mean, even Bruce Campbell is in it for a few minutes, which says a lot (Does that also still mean that Bruce Campbell could canonically still be Mysterio?). The whole movie just has this overall bizarre sense of playfulness and energy that you don’t find in a lot of other places. It’s the kind of horror movie that will make you laugh as much as it’ll make you recoil, not because it’s funny but because it’s just so bonkers that there’s no other emotional response besides utter bemusement. Doctor Strange possesses a dead version of himself to turn into a zombie, then grows giant wings made of ghosts by catching them and attaching them to his back. Someone says, straight-faced, they’re going to take Strange to face the Illuminati, and someone else says, straight-faced, shit like “Sands of Nasanti” as if that’s supposed to mean something. Scarlet Witch turns John Krasinski into noodles (not a joke). In what world is that not fucking hilarious?
The movie has the same horror-comedy vibe that Army of Darkness or What we Do in the Shadows or Cabin in the Woods or even Buffy (sometimes), and I’m so here for it. It treats everything with such irreverence that it instantly drew me in. I mean, even the most gruesome scene in the movie is simultaneously tense, scary, and so almost slapstick that it’s hard not to love it. In an alternate dimension, Scarlet Witch kills british lady Captain America (Captain Britain, I guess? Captain Carhartt? Captain Carter?) by cutting her in half with her own shield. She erases the mouth off of the guy with the supersonic voice and he explodes his own head from inside. John Krasinski, once again, becomes noodles. And then she crushes Captain Marvel with a statue, just for good measure. All this before snapping Patrick Stewart’s Professor X-shaped neck through his dreams. In this scene, Scarlet Witch singlehandedly became the most powerful villain in the series. Oh, yeah, X-Men Professor X is there, for about ten minutes. And it’s cool! The audience in my theater clapped when he showed up, which always feels a little tacky, but it was neat if a bit canned.
Maybe I’m lobbing too much praise at the movie, though, because as much as I love it, it also does a lot of stupid bullshit, too. It’s constantly stepping on its own toes with some sort of contrived morality message about believing in yourself and following rules and characterizing Strange as someone who doesn’t play by the rules while simultaneously making him out to be the hero but then he learns to respect the rules at the end despite literally just breaking so many rules that Hell itself is like “yo, fuck off.” That, to me, feels more like the Disney side of things than the Raimi side of things. I did like the little subplot about Strange learning to accept that he isn’t the sorcerer supreme because it was something that I, as a viewer, had been wondering myself. Why bother making movies about Strange if he isn’t the most powerful wizard, Wong is? Oh, wait, it’s because Strange is a fucking psychopath and would be a threat to everyone if he were sorcerer supreme. Very nicely tied up! In a stupid way, it gave me a newfound respect for Wong as the sorcerer supreme and those dynamics at play.
In another terrible way, it also gave me more respect (or maybe appreciation?) for Captain Marvel, because this movie’s got an issue with power creep. In other posts I’ve talked about power creep quite a bit, and this movie does a terrible job of it. So, the series took, like, five or six movies-worth of post-credit sequences and sly allusions to establish how powerful Thanos is, and then two movies to both see and undo his destruction. That’s great! For all the series’s flaws, I think the movies did an absolutely perfect job of making a universe-threatening villain work. Even if there weren’t quite as many real consequences, between Infinity War and End Game, I feel comfortable with how much of Thanos we got to see, and what it cost to stop him. It made uber-powerful work, and that’s hard to do without it feeling contrived. Except then Captain Marvel shows up and wrecks shop. See, I have a thing against Captain Marvel for the same reason that I kind of hate Superman. It’s too easy. Where the hell was Captain Marvel for Infinity War? Why bother having all these struggles if she can just come in and kick Thanos’s ass single-handed, and then just toss her to the side when the story feels it’s convenient to do so? She’s not a character; she’s a plot device (at least in the Avengers movie, I liked the Captain Marvel movie itself quite a bit).
So, all of a sudden here comes Wandavision, and it’s all great and all, but then we get to the end and Wanda becomes Scarlet Witch, which comic book folks know is, I guess, one of the most powerful entities in the comics canon? I mean, both Wandavision and Multiverse says this outright. She is well-established as the most powerful magical user in existence from a pretty early point in the movie, and her threat to all things is also established several times throughout the movie. If she gets her way, she risks destroying not just one universe, but several. A whole multiverse of them, if you will. So, out of the blue, you have a big bad that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than Thanos. No build up, nothing. And the movie, to a certain degree, must know this, because Scarlet Witch fucking kills a different Captain Marvel from the next dimension over. Sorry, your most powerful hero is now dead. And Scarlet Witch is now the biggest bad. In one movie.
But by the end of the movie, Scarlet Witch is no more. And, according to the kind-of-unexplained in-movie logic, every possible Scarlet Witch is also no more. The whole thing feels very much like the MCU creating its own problem (introducing a veritable god, Scarlet Witch) and then side-stepping that problem to avoid a whole slew of problems (by destroying every Scarlet Witch). It is… frustrating, to say the least. It feels like we are now at the point (just like the comics) in the MCU where every interaction, every storyline, and every confrontation can reach mythic and universe-shaking proportions, and there’s no going back. It’s like following the big bads in Buffy, but instead of taking a step back to lower the power creep, the MCU is, just like the comics, going to chug on ahead until the heat death of the universe, or we get a DC-esque New 52 reboot or something. Everything and everyone will continue to get cranked up until there is nothing resembling characters left, only a bunch of guys in suits shouting at each other with very colorful lights.
Now, to be fair, I don’t love this movie because of its characterizations and plot lines. I think the last few paragraphs have made it very clear that it is, in fact, a very stupid movie by those regards. If I wanted a multiverse movie with a human heart beating at the center instead of The Eternal Glowing Heart of Gabagool, First of the Infinite Star Stealers and Enemy of Wizards, I’d go watch Everything Everywhere All at Once. I haven’t seen the movie myself, so I can’t say for sure if it’s a better movie than Multiverse of Madness, but everyone else seems to think that, at the very least, there’s a consistent, heartfelt message behind the action instead of a confused, muddled mess.
But Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness doesn’t need that. A muddled mess will do just fine, thanks, as long as it takes me from one frenetic battle and colorful setpiece to the next and it’s all done with the gruesome, bloody gusto of the man who put together Evil Dead. And if the visuals can make me shiver in my seat while still being PG-13, I would have loved to see a version of this movie where they really got to get away with everything.
Oh, by the way, the New Yorker review for the movie (that last link up there), despite being a pretty impressive piece of prose, is all ivory tower hoighty-toighty bullshit. Sure, it’s got some good ideas for what this movie indicates as perhaps the MCU’s unfortunate transmogrification into a cash cow and nothing else, but come on, the article reads like someone twirling their mustache and jerking themselves off while they watch Mank for the fifth time that week, muttering some nonsense about how everything’s been downhill since Citizen Kane and genre films are the death of art. They probably hate Evil Dead. Piss off.
