Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

[Dylan Thomas]

Okay, I said that if I liked this movie, I'd write a review.

However, I must confess, I didn't just like it, it totally blew me away.  I got back from the movie, and Liz said that she hadn't seen me that excited in a long time.

It's not like it's the greatest movie ever, it's just that it's everything that I wanted to see in a Doctor Strange movie.  I liked it much, much better than the first Doctor Strange movie, which I enjoyed. Multiverse of Madness is very comic-esque, including some scenes with campy visual effects that look like they're straight out of a comic.

And the whole premise and plot, it's just totally bonkers and off-the-wall.  That's what I want from a Doctor Strange movie: the really bizarre, extradimensional tripped out weirdness, and Sam Raimi certainly delivers the goods in that respect.  There are even some homages to classic scenes from the Evil Dead trilogy, complete with a Bruce Campbell cameo.

In my opinion, Sam Raimi is really the reason that this movie works so well.  I was excited as all hell to find out that he directed, and this far exceeded my expectations.  He's not afraid to get weird, he's not afraid to get campy, and he's certainly not afraid to get DARK.  That's another factor that makes this reall work; it's super, super dark.  The death count is certainly high, and it's not just how many die, it's *who* dies and under what strange circumstances, not to give away any major plot points.

The plot is fairly incoherent, and I'm okay with that in this instance.  It's not like Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, which were incoherent, mindless and incredibly boring.  This is the good kind of incoherent which relies more on the "what the fuck?" factor.  Incoherence has to be pretty smart to actually blow your mind, and Raimi gets that.  This movie definitely blew my mind.

I think that the reason it was able to blow my mind was that it started off totally bonkers, and it was consistently able to up that ante.  That's the problem with many modern eye-candy blockbuster movies, the pacing.  If a movie starts off super intense, it's tough to just keep upping the ante.  Raimi is able to do that here, and by the end it's pretty close to jumping the shark without turning into unwatchable nonsense.  As Spinal Tap once so sagely stated, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."  Sam Raimi understands that point intimately.

The only downside, in my humble opinion, were the parts that referenced the terrible Avenger's storyline, Thanos and such.  I get that they did the whole big crossover thing with the Infinity War/Endgame debacle, and Doctor Strange played his part in making those movies the colossal mess that they were.  Whatever - I don't understand why that automatically has to be referenced in any new Doctor Strange movie.  It wasn't that omnipresent or odious, as RalphSnart pointed out (we went together and he hadn't seen those Avengers movies).  He was happy that he didn't really need to know what happened with those movies.  They were referenced briefly here and there, then things moved on.  Smart move, though I'd have preferred if those flicks just weren't referenced at all and I could go back to pretending that they never existed.  When I think about the kind of social programming we could have afforded with the money that went into making those Avenger's shitshows.....well, I digress as usual.

All in all, a fairly minor complaint by my standards.  This was my second favorite Marvel movie, with Welcome To The Spiderverse, which was also referenced here, being my favorite.  To me that's by far the best thing Marvel has ever done, hands down, and this is a close second.  Definitely more enjoyable than any other live action superhero movie I've seen them churn out, though I am biased.  Doctor Strange is my favorite superhero, if you want to call him that.....

If any of this sounds appealing, go out and check it out.  If nothing else, it's campy fun, if you're into camp and fun.  It's not very serious, and it doesn't take itself too seriously.  That's something that Sam Raimi has always understood the value of.

[renfield]

Nice. This is the first Sam Raimi movie in like 10 years and will therefore be the first MCU film I see in the theater since AVENGERS.

[mortlock]

this movie was fucking mind blowing. DT's assessment is spot on. i cant say anything he didnt, other than i wasnt as bothered by the reference to the avengers than he seemed to be.

just seeing reed richards made the whole movie for me. that scene was my favorite.