Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Productions, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s movie was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and I was seeing it in a theatre with a group of people who were far more up to the ins and outs of the Marvel universe than I. I’ve seen (and liked) a few of the Marvel movies, including the ones featuring Spider-Man and Iron Man (solo), but I haven’t seen the Avengers films and so when I joined Bears San Diego for a previous movie night in which we watched Black Widow (the recent one about a female Marvel assassin, not the ones from 1954 or 1987) I was perplexed by a post-credits sequence showing someone laying flowers at Black Widow’s grave, since she’d survived the events of the film we’d just seen. (Later someone explained to me that she had sacrificed her life to defeat Thanos, the Avengers series’ principal villain, in the final film of the series.) I was not surprised that this film was accompanied by the usual blurbs claiming it to be “The Greatest Marvel Movie Ever Made!” That’s a claim that’s also been made about the latest Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home (which I ordered on Blu-Ray from Amazon.com but haven’t been able to see yet because my Blu-Ray player met an untimely demise just when I’d ordered a whole bunch of stuff so my husband Charles and I could watch on the nights of his recent vacation), though to my mind Black Panther is by far the best Marvel movie (at least of the ones I’ve seen) by a wide margin.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (and note that the conjunction in the title is “in,” not “and” as I had assumed from the TV ads for the film) is the usual farrago of exciting action scenes and bits of ponderous exposition in between just to set them up, though at least this is one superhero film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. For my mind, the two best bits are a scene in which Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, who like Basil Rathbone is equally adept at playing super-villains and superheroes) throws up big-time just as one of the film’s female leads, America Chavez (Xochiti Gomez), has transported him from one universe to another (where,among other things, red lights mean “go” and green lights mean “stop,: a change Mao Zedong once tried to make in China on the ground that “red is the forward-moving color of revolution”), and the altercation he gets into with a hot-dog vendor in this alternative world in which he takes a hot dog without paying for it (because he thinks he’s in an alternative world in which everything is free), the guy squirts mustard on him, and Dr. Strange retaliates by putting a curse on him that will force him to keep hitting himself for three weeks. (In the final post-credits cut-in sequence we see the poor guy at the end of the three-week period in which he expresses relief that he’s finally free of the curse.)

This film is a sequel to the 2016 Doctor Strange, also starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Black actor Chweitel Ejitofor as his sometimes enemy,sometimes friendly rival Baron Karl Mordo. In the previous film (which I haven’t seen) Doctor Strange had a relationship with a woman named Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) which ended badly enough that at the beginning of this film she’s about to marry someone else. Dr. Strange gets an invite to her wedding and for a brief moment I was hoping he would sweep her away from her husband-to-be (who, if we ever got a look at him, I must have missed him) and cart her off to a new life à la The Graduate. But no such luck: instead Dr. Strange ends up taking care of America Chavez, who has the power to transport herself from one universe to another in the multiverse, but doesn’t know how this power works and is certainly unable to control it. She’s being pursued by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson), who apparently in the comics and the earlier film was on the side of good but here she’s embraced evil in the form of the Book of the Darkhold, which turns everyone who uses it evil even if they consult it with good intentions.

Aside from my usual frustration with Anglo writers who don’t realize that male and female Slavic names end differently (she should be called “Wanda Maximova”), the fact that this character of good in her previous film, WandaVision, turns evil in this movie and becomes the principal villainess, the Scarlet Witch, seems to have bothered most people in this group of bigger-time Marvelheads than I. Michael Waldron (https://ew.com/movies/doctor-strange-multiverse-of-madness-spoilers-michael-waldron/), the sole credited writer, gave an interview explaining why he did that to her: “I guess, in the sense that I knew how great WandaVision was because I had read it and was watching cuts. But at the same time, I knew that meant that we had to take a big chance and try to evolve the character and not just do the same thing. It felt to me like we had a good point of view for how to do that, her being driven to get her kids while being influenced by the dark power of the Darkhold. It's always scary when you do that, but Lizzie's so good, and we work closely together, and we always felt confident in what we were doing.” Speaking of Michael Waldron, I’m surprised that a movie this big had just one writer, though this disconfirms my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers (this film seems as cut-and-pasted together as a lot of multi-scribed superhero films).

The film was directed by Sam Raimi, who made his reputation by directing The Evil Dead in 1981 and this film is full of the grotesque horror imagery he’s been known for ever since,including the giant land-based one-eyed octopus who’s chasing and trying to kill America Chavez in the opening scene – which Dr. Strange kills by spearing it in its one eye (so at some point Michael Waldron had read The Odyssey). The film flits back and forth between different universes so much that at times I felt like I should be taking notes and worrying about how much the upcoming quiz is going to be worth for my final grade. Among them are the Book of Vishnu (or at least that’s what it sounded like), which is supposed to be the good book to counteract the evil Darkhold book but which burns up about two-thirds of the way through the film; the third eye Dr. Strange develops in the final sequence (that is apparently there to set up Doctor Strange 3), the power of “dreamwalking” between the universes you can develop by using the Darkhold spells and which can create “incursions,” unauthorized contacts between different universes that result in the total destruction of one or both universes involved, a secret redoubt of good sorcerers headed by Wong (played by an actor whose real name is Benedict Wong) which Strange inadvertently leads the Scarlet Witch to thinking she’s still nice little Wanda from WandsVision, and an overall army (literally!) of effects people working on the film in countries throughout the world, including Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Italy and various locations in the U.S. and England.

This is the sort of movie that, in the words of a Los Angeles Times critic I read decades ago, doesn’t entertain an audience so much as bludgeon it into submission, and nicely honed performances by Cumberbatch (who plays several Doctor Stranges and in one engaging scene has a confrontation with himself, though since the two Stranges are in different parts of the screen it was an easier effect to do than if they’d actually physically confronted each other), Allen and Gomez don’t make up for a film that delivers the goods audiences for this sort of thing want but doesn’t really offer anything that special.