Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
dir. Sam Raimi
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Marvel Studios
It seems like advertising is a good enough place as any to start. Maybe that’s because MCU movies themselves are starting to feel less like the art/entertainment that the marketing and advertising is designed to support and more like merely an extension of that marketing and advertising. On the day Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was released, May 6th, I saw an online ad for it. The text of the ad read, “The Marvel universe will never be the same.” I had already attended a press screening for the movie four days earlier, so I knew that claim was basically bullshit.
Things happen in Multiverse of Madness. There’s even a major development in the movie’s final minutes that does promise to change Dr. Stephen Strange in a fundamental way. But, as is increasingly the issue with these movies, the entirety of what comes before that moment feels like a flimsy excuse to get us there, not so that we can marvel (pun completely intended) at the development within the movie itself, but so we can be excited for what this change will mean for future installments.
It’s a lot of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.
In the effort to make the big-screen entries of the MCU as stunning as possible, the Marvel overlords – headed up by MCU puppet master Kevin Feige – have abandoned storytelling for spectacle. The result this time out is a movie that’s terminally boring. I mentally checked out after the sixth or seventh earth-shattering action set piece.
We begin, as is often the case, in medias res, dropped into the middle of the first action sequence. A young girl we’ve never seen before – who’ll we’ll learn is named America Chavez – races across a disorienting landscape with Dr. Strange. Both are fleeing from some sort of giant alien creature. Strange is killed during the battle, and America is able to open a portal from this mystical liminal space into another dimension, dragging the body of Strange with her.
America has the power to travel across realities within the infinite set collectively known as the multiverse. In her attempt to escape, she lands in the universe with which we’re most familiar. Known as Earth-616, this is the reality we’ve been watching on screen for the last decade-and-a-half. The Dr. Strange on Earth-616 – our Dr. Strange – learns from America, after saving her from another giant alien creature, who she is and why she’s in danger. The creatures hunting her are demons. They are after her because of her abilities to move between universes.
After initially seeking out her help, Strange learns that Wanda Maximoff is the person behind the attacks on America. She is desperate to be reunited with the children she conjured during the events of WandaVision, and she believes she can use America’s powers to find a universe in which they still exist.
In the early days of the MCU, the movies were where the biggest and most thrilling developments happened. Seeing Iron Man do his thing or seeing the Avengers assemble were exciting, not-to-be missed events.
In their quest for world domination, Marvel also began rolling out television properties, like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
That show served to keep the audience engaged in between the movie releases. It felt like the minor leagues, to use a sports analogy, where less consequential events could be explored and tie-ins to the blockbuster movies could be threaded into the show’s storyline, usually as the season finale. For hardcore fans, like with baseball fans who enjoy the sport so much that they watch minor league games, it was a way for them to get their fix while waiting for the next theatrical release.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. followed a formulaic problem-of-the-week format that was no match for the excitement of the MCU movies. Slowly, though, things have changed. With the launch of the Disney+ streaming platform, Marvel has begun focusing on limited series, usually not more than six or eight episodes per season.
These more compact series, often with fantastic production value, have started to emphasize character study and emotional resonance instead of merely wringing the life out of their characters/premise with 20+ episode seasons. WandaVision, Loki, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are probably the best examples of this approach. Since the beginning of 2021, for storytelling and pathos, the Marvel Studios television series have been more of a draw for me than the tentpole blockbuster movie releases. (I got more confirmation of this when I started Moon Knight a few days ago.)
An excellent case in point is the disconnect between the emotional resonance of the Wanda Maximoff character as explored in WandaVision versus in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. WandaVision explores the themes of grief and loss with a richness and depth that is incredibly emotionally satisfying. The events of WandaVision are fundamental to what happens in Multiverse of Madness, but the layered emotional subtext is – while not missing completely – stunted and unsatisfying. The movie has to abandon the sort of nuanced emotional exploration of WandaVision because its raison d'etre is larger-than-life battles featuring orgies of CGI wizardry. The effect is numbing and ultimately banal and boring.
It might seem perplexing that the snooze-fest Multiverse of Madness was written by Michael Waldron, because Waldron also created (and wrote two installments of) the six-episode first season of Loki, one of the most entertaining and thematically dense Marvel properties produced to date. It’s less perplexing when you realize that Waldron was hemmed in by the systemic imperatives of the MCU blockbusters.
Spectacle eclipses all, including character development. Sorry to rip the scab off of an old wound, but Saint Scorsese was right, at least where Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is concerned: this movie has more in common with an amusement park ride than fulfilling storytelling.
While not quite as disappointing as Eternals – director Chloé Zhao’s entry into the MCU – a different director with a strong authorial flair and unique cinematic voice is swallowed up by the ubiquitous Marvel house style. As with Zhao, you can see director Sam Raimi’s distinctive sensibilities peeking through in Multiverse of Madness, but only barely.
This is the first movie from the iconic horror director – I cut my shoe-string-budget-horror-movie teeth on Raimi’s Evil Dead series when I was in high school – since 2013’s underwhelming Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi signed on to direct this Dr. Strange entry after the first installment’s director, Scott Derrickson, stepped down from Multiverse of Madness because of creative differences with Marvel.
Derrickson reportedly wanted to make a “no-holds-barred weird, gnarly, scary movie” in the vein of Robert Eggers’s The Witch. When Marvel decided that wasn’t the direction they wanted to go, they hired the guy who directed The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell instead. Weird flex.
Raimi worked with Waldron on the story idea, and his influence presents itself with a fun, throw-back vibe. The Darkhold – also known as the Book of the Damned – an ancient book of spells that Wanda uses in her pursuit of America’s power to travel across the multiverse, is practically the Necronomicon (or Book of the Dead) from Raimi’s Evil Dead series. We also get a handful of what are affectionately known by his fans as Raimi-cam shots. That’s the visual motif wherein the camera tilts and pans wildly and at a fast pace, approximating the POV of an evil spirit menacingly floating around the setting and characters. Those moments come amidst a few other inspired bits of horror staging. They probably represent the outer limits of what Marvel would allow their hired-hand auteur to get away with.
Aside from those two distinct elements, though, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness doesn’t feel unique from any other MCU entry. It’s a further example of how MCU movies feel like a product; they are the end result of a carefully calibrated formula that yields a very specific – and, consequently, boring – entertainment unit.
It’s no fault of the movie, but Multiverse of Madness suffered immeasurably from my having seen it so soon after the transcendent Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie that also revolves around the idea of characters jumping from one alternate reality to another. The inventive zaniness and refreshing unpredictability of that picture – if you read my review, I only have to type “butt plugs” and “hot dog fingers” for you to know what I mean – is the antithesis of what the MCU has come to mean to me.
I treat every successive entry in the MCU as a possibility to be surprised and delighted, but I’ll take the bonkers chaos of something like Everything Everywhere All at Once over the flavorless entertainment units of recent installments in the MCU franchise, where every new story feels like setup for the next one.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- I think I’ll simply quote myself here, which, in turn, is me paraphrasing Shakespeare: “It’s a lot of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.”
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I never even got to the performances for Multiverse of Madness. They’re all as solid as you would expect in an MCU movie. Xochitl Gomez is very good as America Chavez. I was simply so beaten down by the whole affair that few of the performances struck much of a chord, which is really a shame, because Elizabeth Olsen is perfection in the same mode in WandaVision.
- All of the previous statement notwithstanding, please, please, please more Benedict Wong. I love that dude’s screen presence.
- Also, without spoiling it (not exactly, anyway), if you are a fan of Sam Raimi, your favorite cameo appearance in his movies is here, and it’s as delightful as you would expect.
- But seriously, where’s Ted?!?
- The obligatory mention of the blip that happens in each MCU movie now is starting to get a soap opera feel to it.
- In one scene, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is playing on a TV in the background. Do you think that was a directive from the Disney overlords, or is Sam Raimi simply a fan? The world may never know.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- As mentioned in the review, I saw this at a press screening with a couple dozen other people. They all seemed as underwhelmed as I was. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is currently playing in every movie theater in the country.