Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Fan-Service
"It’s a Frankenmovie, a blockbuster sewn together from pieces of other films, comic books, and TV shows and given life with the electricity of a Marvel budget." -rogerebert.com
Sigh.
I don't usually "rate" movies but I got to thinking a lot about how I even possibly
could rate this deeply challenged "film". Challenged, unfortunately, from the core of its being and fought for at the fringes by its director and stars and a few really fun bits.
Or is it the opposite, were those latter three challenging the Death Of The MCU... and losing, but spectacularly.
Yeah, I think it might be that.
Make no mistake, from an actual, ya know,
movie point of view, this is a pretty bad film. Most of the emotional conflict of the film is extremely simple and one-note and is actually mostly played out in previous films, with this movie being more like the third act of several other movies, which are constantly being referenced.
The dialogue is just abysmal, continuing a recent Marvel trend bucked only by
No Way Home. Marvel decided about 5 or 6 movies ago that the only dialogue there needs to be in films is one of the following four items:
1. Explaining what is happening.
2. Explaining why it's happening.
3. Somebody say something quippy.
4. Somebody say something that sounds cool.
And they're usually failing these days at the fourth one.
Marvel has completely abandoned the kind of
heart that made the whole machine run. They still give the characters motivations but they are always really simple, really quickly described by someone, and then really quickly resolved. Nobody ever says anything that's truly moving anymore and none of the relationship-building that existed in most of Phases 1-3 remains.
It's sad because they get such good actors. But let's be honest, they get them so they can put them on the posters. Why did Angelina Jolie, a truly great actor, need to be in Eternals? That role could have been played by a no-name or B-lister and no-one would have been the wiser. I mean, Olsen, who is an enormously talented actor, has to work so damn hard here to keep this movie watchable. Wait, maybe that's why they cast these great actors, because you have to be a f*cking master of your craft to make these recent Marvel movies feel like there's any soul to them at all.
Let me touch on just a couple of other negatives and then I will be positive for a minute.
Marvel's
second greatest failure in some of Phase 3 and all of Phase 4 (except Spidey) is the way they pace and edit their films. The movies rush along so quickly that you have no time to care about anything before another CGI battle is dumped over your head. Camera movements are too fast (almost certainly sped up in post because I don't think helicopters even fly that fast), rushing you into scenes with establishing shots you barely get to look at before they're gone, then
crucial dialogue scenes are abridged to only the words the audience
must hear in order to follow into the next set-piece. Emotional moments are cut jarringly short so that nothing ever lands and the audience has to work really, really hard to care about characters they are supposed to love (Wanda, in this case).
This actually began in
The Winter Soldier but didn't really take off until
Captain Marvel. At this rate, I think Marvel will actually cut out dialogue altogether sometime during Phase 5.
Another really distracting bummer is the increasingly poor CGI in Marvel films. Again, starting right about Captain Marvel, you started seeing CGI that looks ten or some people have even said 15-20 years old. This was never more evident than in
Shang-Chi, the third act of which honestly looks like a movie from the late 90s or early 00s or something that should have been DTV, and it's nearly as bad in
Eternals as well. As someone who used to defend the MCU, I'm almost embarrassed for them how bad large sections of their film look. The CGI in the opening 15 minutes of Multiverse Of Madness aren't quite as bad as Shang-Chi but every bit as bad as Eternals. Which is to say, terrible.
Finally, the fan-service in this is just brutal. So many constant references to other MCU films, famous comics, popular characters, and in this one even constant winks by the director to... himself?
A good example is
WARNING: "kinda spoilery, though mostly in the trailer" spoilers below
The Illuminati section of the film, which I was very excited about and then realized after I saw it was completely unnecessary to the film. Those of you who have seen it, just run the movie quickly back through your head but cut out the entire Illuminati sequence. Is the movie changed in any way? The film had already shown that Wanda was more powerful than Doctor Strange, Wong, and an entire army of sorcerers combined. So that wasn't the reason. They'd already shown that she would torture and kill so that wasn't the point.
The Illuminati section of the film, which I was very excited about and then realized after I saw it was completely unnecessary to the film. Those of you who have seen it, just run the movie quickly back through your head but cut out the entire Illuminati sequence. Is the movie changed in any way? The film had already shown that Wanda was more powerful than Doctor Strange, Wong, and an entire army of sorcerers combined. So that wasn't the reason. They'd already shown that she would torture and kill so that wasn't the point.
What was the point? The point was to sell tickets. They actually wasted one of the most interesting ideas in the history of Marvel comics to do ten minutes of fan-service that amounted to nothing.
And that, folks is where the ten minutes of dialogue and character-building that this movie needed to even be worthy of the top half of MCU films or to even really be called a "film" rather than a content-exercise (or profit-machine) went. It went to crap like that.
Ok, given all that, it shouldn't be hard for me to rate it, right? I should just say this was terrible and move on.
But the movie actually offers a lot of excitement and fun when you're not either cringing, rolling your eyes, or feeling exasperated. It's fairly exciting for a flimsy-as-hell plot. Raimi is given more latitude than I think anyone even expected and he really makes some of these scenes cook. It is true that there is a real Horror element to this film and it plays really nicely. Some of the things that happen are genuinely, truly imaginative and I found myself grinning in spite of myself (actually in spite of the rest of the movie).
And let's just say it, Olsen, not Cumberbatch, carries this film. While he does his job well, he is simply not the new Tony Stark no matter how much Marvel tries to make him that. And Xochitl Gomez is actually very good as what might have been an interesting new hero, but she's given
so little emotional time on-screen, just saying things that get us from sequence to the next.
No, it is Olsen who is the star of this movie and when she's on-screen, even when the dialogue she has to deliver is excruciatingly wooden and expository and tone-deaf, she manages to make things exciting.
In all, I initially feel like the film ends up being like a 5 or a 5.5, held up entirely by some really awesome fantasy-action scenes and Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch.
If I were judging the movie as an actual, ya know,
movie though, man, I'm not sure what number I think would be too low.