Well, my first NaNoWriMo experience is over, and I have staggered out of the field of battle, waving my flag, and a 51,000 word story, aloft. I did so at about 7 o'clock yesterday evening, so my time for writing anything else had been slightly limited. Therefore, please enjoy some potentially rather frazzled and incoherent thoughts on the recent Marvel move, Dr Strange, which I finally got around to watching. Normal service will resume shortly.
Dr Strange, dir. Scott Derrickson – 2016
All rights to Marvel Studios
Brash, narcissistic Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is one of the finest neurosurgeons in the world, though he works entirely for glory and prestige, and not at all out of altruism or the desire to heal the injured. However, as a result of a horrific car crash, he suffers severe nerve damage in his hands which leaves him unable to wield a scalpel and while others, particularly his ex-girlfriend (Rachel McAdams), advise him to accept the fact and suggest he focus on more theoretic areas of medicine, his ego will not allow him to do so. Discovering a patient who suffered far more crippling injuries than he and yet is seen playing basketball with his friends, Strange questions the man, and begins his journey to Kamar-Taj. There he encounters the mighty Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), her loyal right hand man, Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the formidable librarian Wong (Benedict Wong), and the magic they use to keep the forces of darkness at bay. After some trouble accepting the reality of magic, Strange turns his impressive intellect to learning all that he can of the mystic arts. Even as he does so, however, Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), a former student of the Ancient One, now cast out, is seeking revenge, and has turned to a far darker being; the dread Dormammu. Worse still, are the questions he raises about the source of the Ancient One's power…
So first off, the casting… Scott Derrickson, the director, has said a lot about it himself (yes I did just link to the Express… I feel dirty…) and I understand his point. Essentially, the real problem lies with the source material, in adapting a fifty year old story in which a white man learns magic from a wise old Asian man, until he becomes the 'Sorcerer Supreme'. Basically there were always going to be issues. On the plus side, a previously male character was made female, a character who has always been white in the comics is played by a black actor, and while this obviously does little for Asian visibility in Hollywood, it's nice to see SOME effort being made…
Beyond this, perhaps the most important thing to say about the film is that it is gorgeous. The designs and the execution of some of the CGI, particularly Strange's introduction to magic and Dormammu's Dark Dimension, are absolutely beautiful and the scope and scale of them mind blowing. It is so refreshing for the Marvel films to contain genuinely magical elements, especially bearing in mind the disappointingly technological Asgard in the Thor movies, as it gives the director and effects teams the chance to abandon any semblance of reality and really cut loose. This also leads to some breathtaking action scenes, in which streets are folded up, sections of buildings set spinning and half a city transformed into a gigantic clock, all as background to a fight. Dr Strange makes the most imaginative use of CGI of any movie since perhaps Avatar (and even then, that was really only some floating islands and a forest… not a single ethereal dimension to be seen!).
To compete with this, it takes some fairly strong acting to not get swept aside by the stunning CGI, and Dr Strange boasts the most prestigious cast of any Marvel movie yet, with some of the most charismatic, talented actors working today amongst the cast. Rachel McAdams is massively underutilised in the generic girlfriend role, slipping nicely into the 'she's the best at what she does, just not quite as good as him' trope and while McAdams, Academy Award nominated actress, plays it well, it's difficult not to feel that she, the character and the audience are all being a little short-changed. Likewise, Mads Mikkelsen, the only one of the main five who is not an Oscar nominee despite being a titan of the acting world, portrays a villain who brings some very interesting moral conflict to the film, but whose only real strengths as a character are those that Mikkelsen himself imbues him with.
And, in their far more well developed roles, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Cumberbatch are all excellent. Given the direction in whichthey chose to take the Ancient One, Swinton is perfect; warm yet distant, obviously secretive yet inspiring trust, and ethereal, while remaining wry. Ejiofor is, quite simply, one of the finest actors alive and he brings the same quiet, easy fanaticism to Mordo that made him so chilling all the way back in Serenity (2005), choosing to play Mordo's perceived betrayal by the Ancient One with wide-eyed pain, and only allowing a bitter, resentful zealotry to emerge late. For Cumberbatch's part, there are obvious comparisons that could be made to Sherlock, but a more worthwhile link could be made to Robert Downy Junior's Tony Stark, as a bearded know-it-all whose primary weapon is a mixture of intellect and arrogance. However, in Strange, Cumberbatch is given the chance to depict a man prising his ego away from his genius, and emerging as a stronger, better man, therefore throwing off the character burden of being unbearably, smugly annoying; development Stark has not been allowed.
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