Read: There’s little magic to be found in Doctor Strangeĭuring the first half hour of Multiverse of Madness, I squirmed in my seat, urging the film to yada-yada the static, requisite scenes in which a bunch of characters sit down to explain exactly what is happening, and who is where, and which magic doohickey will undo various evil spells, and so forth. They all show up to collect their paychecks and try to fit into the chaos. A casual fan of Marvel movies might have even forgotten that great actors such as Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Michael Stuhlbarg are all part of the Doctor Strange–verse. If you have not brushed up on those eldritch texts, it may be harder to understand what the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) is doing here, or just how to explain some of the shocking cameos that arise later in the action. If you’re acquainted with the MCU’s deep lore, the many plot contortions required to stretch this movie around No Way Home, the TV show WandaVision, and the rest of the universe will make enough sense. She’s unable to control her powers, and she becomes the plucky plot mechanism through which the following wild two hours unfold Strange and company zap between various universes in search of a way to help America and dodge the uncanny forces chasing her across reality. Somewhat unsettled at the thought of a parallel Earth where, say, people might prefer Velcro on their sneakers over shoelaces, or where doughnuts could exist as a form of fiat currency, Strange bumps into a dimension-hopping teen named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). No Way Home dug into the notion of the “multiverse”-alternate universes where things can feel a little different from our own, where Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield could still be the handsome fellow behind the Spider-Man mask instead of Tom Holland. How to even begin describing the plot of this film? It picks up after the last Marvel entry, Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which the prickly super-magician Doctor Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) appears, waving his arms around with staccato fury to open portals and alter people’s memories en masse. Multiverse of Madness is overstuffed with the usual fan bait, but it’s also undeniably a Sam Raimi movie, and a remarkably good one at that. How could Raimi, long one of genre cinema’s most individualistic voices, have any hope of cutting loose from the corporate strictures entangling such a project? I shouldn’t have worried. Nominally a sequel to 2016’s Doctor Strange, its story has to address plot threads from various other Marvel films and TV shows. Raimi has made only two films in the intervening 15 years, so I was both surprised and worried to see him hired to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the 28th entry in the ever-expanding MCU. A year later, Iron Man and The Dark Knight came along, and the superhero flick truly began its journey to monocultural supremacy. It was a box-office success but underwhelmed critics. It seemed like a story at war with itself the director’s earnest zaniness was bumping up against studio demands for more villains, more plot twists, and more money on the screen. That film was Spider-Man 3, in 2007, the final entry in his trilogy of adventures starring Tobey Maguire as the hero. The last time Sam Raimi made a comic-book movie, nobody had ever heard of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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