I just saw Doctor Strange for the first time, and I’m afraid I didn’t find it very good. I had high hopes, given how many positive reviews it garnered, but even for Marvel, I found it disappointing.
Let’s start with the cast, which oh so very white. Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelson and Rachel McAdams. Is this a Marvel movie, set in Nepal, or a drama about a romantic ski trip to Norway that goes terribly wrong? Chiwetel Ejiofor is along for the trip, but he’s not any more Nepalese than Mikkelson is. Benedict Wong plays Wong, the librarian, and the only Asian character with any sort of meaningful role. Wong functions primarily as a guardian of the books and provides a foil for Strange’s comic relief. His character isn’t offensive, but he just doesn’t provide much to the story. Nevertheless, he represents the sum total of the film’s Asian representation (not including those setting the scene as background). In 2016, that can only be considered “willfully negligent.” It’s not every film that can make The Golden Child look like a sensitive, accurate filmic representation of Himalayan culture.
Not that the cast isn’t excellent. Cumberbatch makes a great Dr. Steven Strange. He’s been believable as an arrogant prick for nearly a decade now, and his emotional transformation is believable, if somewhat protracted. Ejiofor is similarly able, and plays the stolid, dependable Mordo as well as could be expected with his rather stunted character arc. Tilda Swinton is The Ancient One. She is compelling in her role too, though it is concerning that this mystical master in Nepal is so breathtakingly white, and seems to surround herself with primarily white students (at least the ones who get screen time). Surely an actor of Asian descent would be capable of performing the role of “Nepalese Magic Abbot.” Mikkelson does his tried and true understated, yet unsettling villain routine. It’s a solid performance, but his motivations aren’t as clear as they might be, beyond “eternal life in the Upside Down.” The cast all performed handsomely, but you could hope that a film that’s primarily set in Nepal would feature more Asian speaking roles than Die Hard.
The plot, like the plot of so many Marvel films, just felt lazy. You get glimpses of things, just enough to whet your appetite for a meaningful scene, but then you’re whisked away on another mind-bending CGI adventure, watching buildings contort around Benedict and Tilda, and forced to wonder how silly everyone looked before the CGI was added. Strange’s perfunctory denial of entry to the temple takes about six hours of movie time, and maybe 15 seconds for the audience. Man, what determination that guy must have! He spent an entire afternoon sitting on your doorstep, so we might as well teach him how to bend space to his will?
Strange’s training, too, happens too quickly for him to earn his powers. Take a little more time, Marvel. Add a couple scenes to the training montage or something. Don’t give me the impression that he masters teleportation in the same amount of time as a coding bootcamp. But that’s the thing, with so many scenes that Marvel ‘needs’ in this movie, there’s never enough time for anything beyond the superficial. Magic cloak? Must have chosen you. Fiddling with time? Picked that up in an afternoon’s reading. Oh wait, it was in Sanskrit? Glad I have that photographic memory to explain all this away. For a movie that deals in Time, it sure doesn’t seem keen on keeping time for us. We know Strange has been away “for a long time,” but what does that mean? Months? Years? A decade or two? As far as the film is concerned, it really doesn’t matter, but that’s frustrating if you want to buy into the story they’re telling.
And that’s perhaps what is so frustrating about the movie. Nothing seems to matter except as a tool to get you to the next crucial scene. It’s less the Hero’s Journey and more the Hero’s Choose Your Own Adventure. Everything is superficial, and the further you get into the movie, the superficialer it gets. The CGI is impressive, and helps obscure action scenes that are not. I will say that I found the final confrontation wryly amusing, and that overall, the movie is not so much unwatchable as it is underwhelming. The actors, though pale as the driven snow, are excellent. The dialogue is clever in that fun Marvel way that usually cracks a smile, occasionally elicits a chuckle, and basically never gets a real laugh.
Look, Doctor Strange has been out for a couple years, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you aren’t missing anything. If you’ve watched all the other Marvel movies and love what they do, this will probably scratch that itch. Otherwise, I think you’d be better off with the Golden Child.