Well, this sucked... or "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"
We watched the latest installment in the Marvel Universe, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and it was awful. (FYI, there will be spoilers, but read on anyway, you really don’t care about this movie; trust me, the spoilers are a PSA).
Disclaimer: I’m not blaming the characters or the universe. The characters have deep stories, and the universe is rich and interesting. The blame for this awful waste of bits of a movie is all on the writers, producers, and editors.
Not going into (shoddy) plot details, the movie is a bloody mess. Doctor Strange and his mystical magicians are weak. Like, we know they have portals and magical powers, but the best they seem to do is sparkly magic swords, shields, arrows, and whips. That’s cool, I guess, but seems like magic ought to do better than produce slightly enhanced versions of weaponry from the 1600s. They can barely handle a giant one-eyed land octopus, and even that with significant help of Strange’s magical cloak.
The Scarlet Witch is two-dimensional (no pun intended), a huge roll back of any character growth that happened with Wanda during the last installments of her story. The fantastically well done WandaVision story line is thrown out completely except for the one bit that supports the (shoddy) movie plot. Wanda Maximoff has been turned into a gore splattering supervillain as she goes through the universe’s toughest superheroes like a hot knife through warm butter. The writers turned her into Evil Superman from Justice League - overpowered to the point of ridiculousness, except that Evil Superman made more sense.
In one scene, when the supreme magician or whatever falls off a cliff - his *magical* whip is just a foot short - not enough to save him from his fall, as if it was limited by some physical length. He’s a magician. He can make it a foot longer to reach the edge. Bad writing, people!
Wanda can control reality and erase people’s mouths at will, not to mention rewrite their memories and make the world go black and white with a laugh track. What an awesome power! I wonder how else she can imaginatively win her battles? Oh, never mind. It’s all flinging physical objects around and shooting scarlet fire balls. Bad writing, people!
Visual effects and scene transitions are just as bad; my son exclaimed more than once “Was this done in iMovie?!”, and that’s giving the effects and cuts too much credit.
The movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a superhero flick? An Avengers side quest? An origin story? A gorefest? A horror crossover? Sam Raimi’s credentials get unleashed about halfway through, and that’s when the campy horror fun begins. I wish they made the whole movie that way, just as an interesting departure from other MU styles. Start with some blood splatter on opening credits and go from there. The best part of the movie was Zombie Doctor Strange, and there wasn’t enough of him.
The movie treats all characters unkindly and inconsistently. There are unnecessary, lazily written, horrible deaths for a multiverse’s mightiest heroes, including that of Professor Xavier, the most powerful mutant of all - who gets his neck snapped in about 30 seconds after a scene that looks like it had its budget cut 10% into development.
Wanda’s story arc makes no bloody sense. Supporting characters are forced into lazily sketched out roles. Everything feels rushed and underdeveloped, like the movie was in someone’s contract and they had to make it because, uh, someone had to and it was now due.
Just bloody awful.