Doctor Strange - seen it (open spoilers)

My wife performs surgery on animals and she wears nail polish. I don’t know if human docs have different standards, but it doesn’t seem to be inherently a problem.

Alright, this one really was worth the 3D!

I like this way of looking at it!

I’d add that for once, we actually see the genius hero so something clever—and that in a genre where ‘clever’ usually means talking very fast and magicing up some gizmo that does the thing, preferably after explaining during the talky phase how doing the thing is absolutely positively scientifically impossible.

But no, during the final fight when Dormammu just pummels Strange into oblivion we’re all set to experience the pseudo-shock that oh no, maybe our hero won’t pull through after all, when he on the brink of defeat grits his teeth, learns a lesson (flashback optional), recites a pithy quote whose true meaning he only just understood, realizes his true potential and blasts the bad guy into oblivion with the combined power of heroic clichés, preferably while screaming loudly through the strain.

But no, Strange actually is complete out matched by his adversary, and only prevails because he’s got a plan that actually makes sense within the confines of the story.

Also, regarding the pace of Strange’s ascension to top-dog mystic, he’s shown studying while on the astral plane, and we actually are shown that time may move differently there: the entire conversation between him and the Ancient One takes at the end takes place during the time it takes a bolt of lightning to strike. Given that and the references made to his genius, photographic memory etc., I’d say they’ve at least made an effort to make this plausible.

Some quibbles:

I wasn’t really happy with the uberbad, Dormammu, both as regards his characterization and his depiction. He didn’t really seem threatening, and that once more the fate of the whole world (whole Earth dimension?) hangs in the balance is wearing a bit thin for me. Maybe it would’ve helped if we’d had some personal stakes for Strange.

Also, for a ‘dark’ dimension, it looked pretty colorful, with blinky lights and whatnot all over the place.

Fair enough.

First, let me affirm that I am not on Team He Must Have Had Powers During the Winter Soldier Dialog.

That said, the time frame of this movie spans, I’d say, at least a year.
You’re right that he’s called out for being gone for six months. Prior to being gone, he was in a major car accident, underwent multiple surgeries, spent time in conventional physical therapy, sought out alternative physical therapy.

So, I’d say a year at least for the total span of the movie. Really I’d say more likely a year a least from the start of the movie until the point when he departs in search of Kamar-Taj.

I agree, but, then, I tend to like 3D anyway, so I suppose I’m in the minority on this message board.

Thank you.

More than that: It’s both foreshadowed and thematically appropriate. It’s foreshadowed in that we see Strange studying the time-warping stuff and being warned it’s dangerous, even being explicitly told that it could result in him re-living the same moment over and over and over. That’s pretty standard for movies which are trying at all, however, and it’s especially standard for action-adventure movies which tend to be plot-heavy anyway. If you wanna use the big gun, you gotta pay for it up front. That’s foreshadowing.

However, this movie goes one better, in that the ending is thematically appropriate. What’s Strange most afraid of? Failure. How does he defeat the monster? By failing, over and over again, until the monster is tired of winning in a way which denies it any progress. Is this the deepest stuff in the world? No, but it does show they thought about it for more than five minutes, and are willing to put non-obvious stuff in the film to reward the more attentive viewers.

This is interesting. The usual rule is to scale the villain to the hero, and then push the limits a bit: Batman can take on bank robbers and other “normal” humans, so we focus on having him take those kinds of villains down, and then throw a city-destroying threat at him, to see him at the limits of his ability. Obviously, Strange would be completely wasted on the average non-magical human being, so strong sorcerers are his usual enemy, and the only way to go up from there is into the planet-eating-deity weight class.

I agree that seeing Strange tackle a more personal problem would be an interesting change of pace, but it would risk slowing the movie down to, first, explain the problem and, second, give due time to the resolution. And if you go too far in that direction, you get Watchmen. I love Watchmen, but I don’t want all of my superhero media to be Watchmen.

That’s pretty much the comics, as I understand it. They just kept to the canon for that one.

Good observation!

True, but the problem’s always, where do they go from there? You know that any further threat will always have to dwarf the prior one, so if you start out with the whole Earth in the balance, there’s not much room above, without going into ridiculous over-the-top destroying the whole hyper-multi-megaverse kind of stuff—which doesn’t really register on an emotionally different level anyway. Also, the whole ‘the whole Earth is in peril’ has become so much of a mainstay of the MCU that it seems just like another monster of the week.

And besides, we have a Dr. Strange who’s any way you look at it just come into his powers, so I think one might have spent a bit of time developing the character before showing him taking on cosmic-level threats. But really, this is high-level griping—I thought the movie was pretty much fine as it was, even though it probably won’t make it into my list of all-time greats. Finding something personal for Strange to connect to the somewhat faceless (even though it pretty much only was a giant face) bad guy apart from just ‘he’s gonna kill everyone’ to craft some form of emotional connection would’ve just been the icing on the cake.

(One more point in the movie’s favour is that they didn’t—or at least not fully—go the ‘the villain is just a dark reflection of the hero’ route; I think having Kaecilius alone be the main villain would have made for a lesser film because of that.)

(EDIT: By the way, is Cagliostro—who apparently wrote the book containing the ritual Kaecilius stole—a known quantity in the Marvel mythology, or was he added for the movie?)

Lordy; shoulda known there was a Wiki entry on it, including an update based on the movie. Okay, semi-sentient, protective of and reactive to the will of the wearer. That explains the lovey bit - Strange was admiring himself and the Cloak acted that out (vs. expressing its own desire to caress his face…)

Thanks!

Back when Doctor Strange became Sorceror Supreme in the 1970s, his first order of business involved going back in time to the 1700s to check in on Cagliostro – even impersonating him, because Mordo was pulling some Swipe-The-Book-Of-Cagliostro hijinks involving a future Sorceror Supreme – who was also back in time, and also impersonating Cagliostro: describing the basics of his secrets-to-ultimate-power techniques in that book while the real Cagliostro was off battling Dracula.

I thought it was that Strange had been crying (well, he’d shed a manly tear or two), and the coat was wiping the tears away?

Oh well so that’s reasonably straightforward, then.

I’d have to see it again, but as I recall, he kinda looks in the mirror, steels himself, then pops the collar of the Cloak and gives himself a “yeah, I’m a badass” look. The Cloak seems to respond to that and caresses his cheeks, which ends up being a small tease to Strange, who basically reacts with “yeah, yeah, I get it - knock it off.”

Folks laughed in the theater I saw it in, as did I, so I assumed that was it.

That story actually gets even weirder: Strange goes further back in time, performing magical feats that get chalked up to Merlin – sure as the future Sorceror Supreme heads yet further back in time, getting mistaken for the God of the Old Testament while smiting Sodom and Gomorrah; or maybe he is the God of the Old Testament, since by the end of the story Strange honestly can’t figure out whether the guy has just now created a new universe complete with an Edenic garden or whether that was just how things had been all along, because, hey, time travel is like that.

Well… other than having the villain and the hero both played by the same actor.

Kaecillius is the villain. Dormammu is the Big Bad.

They wear gloves. Makeup is much more of a nono.

Definitely wiped away tears. That’s why it’s funny the sudden shift from serious to silly.

here;'s the thing - Strange did not ‘beat’ Dormammu in the traditional sense, he made a deal with him - Domammu wasn’t even directly attacking the earth, but being beckoned by Kaecilius.

Strange made the deal because he could not beat Kaecilius directly, so he went around him and got Domammu to take Kaecilius out for him AND agree not to target earth again.

The whole Dormammu showdown was very much like something out of Doctor Who - and I mean that as a compliment.

I don’t know if you watched Jessica Jones, but David Tennent played Kilgrave as essentially the 10th Doctor if he went bad. Here Cumberbatch played Strange as a more assholish version of Sherlock.

For a Dr. Strange wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey plot point, it actually is.

I just saw this on Netflix and was surprised by how much I liked it, given that Doctor Strange was never one of my favorite comics, and I always questioned how much it even really belonged in the same universe as other Marvel characters.

But now I wish I had gone to see it in IMAX 3D! Oh well, even on my 55-inch non-3D TV, it looked pretty awesome, and the script was definitely, as others have noted, a cut above what we have come to expect.

I have now seen 15 MCU movies, and this one ranks fourth for me—behind only Avengers, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Iron Man.