Top Tier Multitasking

A big grin appeared on my face about a third of the way through 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It stayed there for most of the movie. The film has its problems, I guess, but it brings such a hearty bounty of fucked up shit that I barely noticed.

Spoilers ahead

Really, the only problem I had, and it really didn't bother me that much, is that the film was very clearly recut from another, probably superior cut. It's obvious in some awkward dialogue scenes with two in particular standing out--when Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) flies up to talk to Wanda (Elizabeth Olson) above Kamar-Taj, the sorcerer stronghold, and when Strange speaks to the Illuminati. In both cases, the scene cuts between close-ups of actors which don't have quite an organic flow. In the first scene, Strange has an inexplicably emotional reaction to something Wanda says and his expression changes too fast and drastically between cuts. In the later scene, a moment that starts and ends with Strange delivering dialogue with his back turned seems like it was originally meant to have his back turned the whole time but there are odd inserts of him facing forward.

Among other things, the scene was clearly edited to add in Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart). And that's one bit of reshoots I'm definitely not complaining about.

It was during the Illuminati sequence that I went from having a good time at the movies to having a great time at the movies. Leading up to film's release, it seems like it was the cameos everyone was talking about. Who were these big MCU hitters? People from other franchises, from future franchises, from alternate universes? Yes, yes, and yes. And Wanda fucking slaughters them all.

Not only that, she hoists them by their own petards. The moment where she cuts Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell) in half with her own shield filled me with delight, particularly as it came after Carter'd delivered one of those overused, smart ass superhero lines, "I can do this all day!" Ha ha, no you can't.

I loved Wanda in this. After she's done making mincemeat of the Illuminati, she becomes the inexorable approaching darkness as Strange, America (Xochitl Gomez), and Christine (Rachel McAdams) desperately flee down corridor after corridor. And after what she'd just done, you know she's a real threat.

I'm so glad she's a villain in this, that the filmmakers didn't bow to the delusional view that she was a heroine in WandaVision. And what a villain she is. With credible motivation, too. Wong (Benedict Wong) tells her she can't control everything, which is a bit on the nose (Michael Waldron's dialogue isn't great) but, yeah, I can buy that motivation. After all the trauma she's been through, all the people she's lost, I can believe how she's rationalised reordering multiple realities to her own ends.

I love how the idea of dreams being glimpses of the multiverse is played with. I loved the scene where Wanda starts to infiltrate the reality of her alternate self and the innocent, alternate Wanda starts hallucinating. That was a scene right out of Evil Dead 2 and Sam Raimi in horror mode was definitely present.

Usually in the MCU, magic is portrayed as just another kind of technology. Raimi makes magic feel like magic, an artform to manipulate reality along the lines of human thought and feeling. There's a battle involving musical notes that felt more like two wizards fighting than anything I'd seen in the MCU before.

Wanda is glorious for how fucked up she is in this movie and Raimi's smart enough to know that Strange doesn't just need to beat her to make the movie satisfying, he has to do it by being more fucked up. So I loved Strange inhabiting his own decaying corpse, and I was beyond thrilled when he was pestered by the souls of the damned.

I liked America Chavez, although her name got kind of awkward at times. Every line about her sounded like the screenplay was trying to make some kind of point about the U.S. "We need to save America!" "America is out of control!" It got silly. But she's cute and her power to punch star shapes in things was even cuter.

Her relationship with Strange is nice and it further develops a tension between Strange and younger people that we saw in No Way Home. Though I imagine any No Way Home fans expecting a movie with a similar tone were pretty disappointed, possibly even horrified. Oh, well. I loved it.