Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Xochitl Gomez, Michael Stuhlbarg, Rachel McAdams

Directed by Sam Raimi

Marvel/Disney, out now

 

Major spoilers

 

Doctor Strange travels the multiverse…

I like Dr Strange. There’s something calmly reassuring about the smart person who is confident in their abilities and has worked hard to get to where they are. I enjoyed the first film and have liked his dry wit in each of the other MCU entries in which he has appeared.

I felt Dr Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home was a little messy, a little scattered and ultimately a little wasted but it was in service to Spider-Man and I could live with that.

This isn’t the case with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The needed emotional punch of the film is, for me, entirely absent.

I’ve thought long and hard about why that’s the case and I’ll come back to it below but there’s some groundwork which needs laying out first.

The film looks fantastic – there are many scenes which would sit nicely inside a frame on a wall. Seeing it in IMAX only brought home how beautiful it was. I think we’ve been spoiled on this front with superhero movies which have developed the freedom to have their own aesthetics – Eternals, whatever its other flaws, was sumptuous and thematically coherent in its presentation. However, stunning effects and composition only get us so far.

My concern here is that it’s easy to enjoy the spectacle (and, by and large I did, this is not a terrible film – for that go see Morbius) and lose sight of what’s actually being said and done by these characters.

My concerns about Doctor Strange are not with the imagination and verve on display but about the story it tells.

In particular about how it sets its female protagonist against its male protagonist and subs them both in to tell a morality tale about good parenthood. If this was done in an even-handed manner then fine but, conclusion first – Wanda is stiffed by this film.

Now, I was angry with the resolution of WandaVision. I feel it set up a tremendously interesting central question about grief and abuse in the name of love and then completely ducked facing up to the answers to those questions. At the time it felt like a betrayal of the very point of the show.

Doctor Strange takes that question up again and pits Stephen against Wanda. A man who didn’t even manage to stay with the love of his life against a woman who lost her love under deeply traumatic circumstances.

Furthermore, Wanda wants to be a mother and Stephen very definitely doesn’t have a way with kids. Stephen is, in no particular order, self-absorbed, arrogant and self-righteous. Like Tony Stark, he generally gets away with it because he’s also good looking, handsome, smart and powerful. These latter elements more than covering over the problems in his character, just as all too often happens in real life.

Wanda, on the other hand, has had none of the privileges that Stephen’s rich, male life has afforded him and yet, somehow, she is presented as the one who is morally irredeemable.

In a fascinating attempt to paint Stephen’s self-regard as the real problem it is, we learn that just about every Stephen Strange is the same and none of them are to be trusted. In the end, Stephen Strange is a danger to everyone else because he assumes he’s right by default.

Even other superheroes regard him as a catastrophe in expensive shoes.

Yet somehow he comes out of this as the hero – mainly because he doesn’t ‘eat’ someone. This is, it shouldn’t need to be pointed out, a low bar.

Wanda on the other hand is deeply problematic. I thought there was no real exploration of the wrong she did in the television series. Instead the writers double down. It turns out that Wanda did wrong because she’s a wrong’un. She might be corrupted by some mystical bad thing but, sadly, when Stephen encounters the same McGuffin he comes out of it OK. You can argue that there’s a qualitative difference in their experience of corruption but, ultimately, that’s splitting hairs and letting the writers off the hook for making a wannabe mother evil and an arrogant, selfish man her moral better.

This is a story as old as humanity – that women can’t be trusted with power because it corrupts them in a way it doesn’t men. There are subtle references to the fact that just maybe ALL the other Wandas are balanced while ALL the other Stephens are maniacs. That might help subvert the painfully anti-woman trope except that in all the other worlds Wanda is a ‘good American mother’. So we’re told that Wanda could have been good if only she was a homemaker. This is catastrophically retrograde.

It’s not the movie’s fault to emerge the same week as the leak about Roe vs. Wade in the US (and the world is not the US by any stretch), but it is part of the same problem: that women are, in fiction and in reality, not trusted to be their own masters. From Eve to Medea to Pandora to Cersei to Lady Macbeth and to Hela in Thor: Ragnarök – too often the only thing powerful women are for is to be put in their place because their power is inherently evil and corrupting.

I am sure female-presenting writers will handle this better than me, but for my part? I am left deeply disappointed that Wanda’s struggles aren’t explored at all – that the same failure to address the issues WandaVision raised so well are repeated all over again but writ large and offering only self-destruction as redemption.

All this while Stephen gets to prove he’s capable of being better… you see my problem?

What maddens me here is not just that Wanda’s character is sacrificed to make a problematic man look redeemable but that there’s so much effort put into it. Don’t get me wrong – the things she’d done by the end of the movie were hard to come back from but then they had to be because otherwise she looked relatively reasonable against Stephen Strange.

There’s also the subtext of parenting for them both. Will Stephen exploit America or will he protect her from a ravaging mother who’s willing to sacrifice her for her own children? It’s baffling to frame it in this way and it doesn’t add good energy to make the childless woman the antagonist because she’s childless.

The film is an enjoyable romp. It is colourful and action packed. It is occasionally funny. It is also a structural mess with too many plots and not enough time to breathe life into its characters so we might feel an emotional connection with any of them. Even America Chavez’ back story is presented fleetingly, feels weightless and has no resolution. My impression is of a script that wasn’t trusted by the talent and, as a result, was interfered with by said talent – much to its detriment.

Verdict: It really is a mixed bag – quite enjoyable, lovely to look at, but also a deeply problematic structural mess.

Rating? 5 universes out of 10.

Stewart Hotston

Don’t underestimate the power of a mother.

Here be spoilers – continue reading at your own peril if you’ve not seen the film.

I’ll come straight out with it: I enjoyed Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Also known as Dr Strange and the MOM for short, in one of the most obvious spoilers I’ve ever failed to notice – I blame the American spelling! That opinion might surprise you if you learn that I am a woman with no desire to become a mother myself.

My expectations were nebulous to say the least. Other than the creative direction of this MCU instalment moving into a more of a ‘horror’ style, I knew very little in advance – and even then, not having seen that genre particularly represented in a super-hero film before, this didn’t really prepare me. So, you could say I took to my front-row seat with an open mind, ready to soak up the story.

Said story could arguably be boiled down to Doctor Strange trying to get The Scarlet Witch to realise she isn’t a mum for just over 2 hours, with fatal consequences. For me with my zero maternal instinct, her struggle wasn’t relatable, and initially I found myself thinking: really? Is that enough of a motivation for the arch villain in a film like this? My conclusion after sleeping on it is that it’s enough for her – and that’s made clear in her every scene, so even if I can’t relate specifically, her backstory (provided in detail in the WandaVision Disney + series and recapped very briefly in the film) and Elizabeth Olsen’s performance are enough for me to accept it.

Reflecting further on that, as villainous motivations go, it’s a deeply feminine one. I’m not intending to minimise fatherhood at all, far from it, but the way The Scarlet Witch expresses her passion for motherhood, her grief and loss and her love (and need) for her children seems particularly unique to her as a woman. For the driving force of a major film in a huge franchise to be so rooted in the desires, feelings and needs of a woman – however twisted and flawed they may be – was refreshing, and it is enough, it works. It’s not your tired ‘the hero is female so for the villain to appear her equal they have to be female too’ thing, either. We seem to be over that now thank goodness.

Throw in a few jump scares and some genuinely scary and unexpected moments and I’m left with the feeling that I just went on a real trip – in more ways than one – on Dr Strange’s cloak-tails. Just don’t call it a cape.

Verdict: What motivates a woman – yes, even a mother – is as valid a narrative drive as anything else. 9/10

Claire Smith