Soul-challenged and wit-deprived, the new Marvel entry Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness nevertheless taps into some contemporary obsessions.
Soul-challenged and wit-deprived, the new Marvel entry Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness nevertheless taps into some contemporary obsessions.
D octor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness may turn out to be one of the defining movies of the Twenties. The red pill–blue pill reality dichotomy of The Matrix is no longer sufficient in explaining the crazed and hectic shattering of perceived truth into an infinite number of shards. When male swimmers stuff their junk into a ladies’ one-piece and declare themselves women, who’s to say they aren’t exercising their sci-fi right to slip away into an alternate universe? When Marvel presents alternate slates of superheroes, it feels like a nod to all those who thought there were alternate slates of 2020 presidential electors out there.
If we can’t even agree on which reality we’re in, civil society could become as frenzied and fractured as this fascinatingly overblown movie. “Is America okay?” someone asks near the end of the chaos carnival. America, in the movie, is a teen girl, not a country, but the question is still pertinent. Is America okay? The legitimacy of three of the last four presidents is hotly disputed, and halfway through the screening, someone leaked a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The leaker evidently hoped that the premature appearance of the document would jolt us all out of one reality and into another.
That the instigator of the crisis in the movie is a Latina — her name is America Chavez (played by a somewhat dull Xochitl Gomez) — who suddenly migrates to a place where she is not particularly welcome may carry some symbolic freight as well. When Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange dreams about a fight involving her and a monster that results in his own death, America the girl appears (after a second massive battle, this time with a giant octopus) to tell him that it was no dream but simply a reality that took place in a different universe. The girl is a sort of trans-universal shuttle who inadvertently creates openings between the various universes. Because of this, she gets targeted by the rageful Wanda Maximoff, who after the events in the Disney+ series WandaVision executes a full heel turn and becomes the Scarlet Witch, hoping to use demonic possession to inject herself into an alternate reality where she can be a happy mom with her twin boys, from whom she was parted in the television show. Another emblem of the times: A woman with awesome superpowers really just wants to be a stay-at-home Fifties mom. Kinda reminds you how many women with MBAs and law degrees morphed into chief domestic officers.
Doctor Strange’s ideal universe, meanwhile, is one in which he gets another shot at his ex-girlfriend (Rachel McAdams), who in our universe is married to another guy. In case distinguishing universes gets tricky, they have area codes. Ours is 616. (The one with lots of fun surprise characters designed to set up another half-dozen Marvel movies is 838. Yet another new character turns up in a mid-credits sequence, and there’s also a joke at the tail end of the credits.)
Along with the movie’s suggestions that you can live in your own custom-made existence (“You get a universe! And you get a universe! And you get a universe!”) is another very contemporary factor: gigantic amounts of spending for no good reason. Director Sam Raimi seems to be operating under the assumption that he’s not living up to the spirit of the spectacle if he’s not spending $2 million a minute on every scene. Any one of a dozen fantastical interludes is sufficiently splashy to have constituted the climax of a blockbuster 20 years ago, but very often the Inception-on-acid look of a given scene is merely the background for a chunk of story exposition that could have been delivered seated at a desk. Dr. Strange and America are constantly being catapulted from one spectacular digital set to another, gigantic monsters appear out of nowhere for no reason, and armies of magical combatants fire orange laser arrows and cannonballs at one another. At one point the leads slip through a half-dozen universes in a few seconds, including one in which the characters are animated and another in which they are streaks of paint.
It’s eye candy all the way, but who wants a 19-course all-candy dinner? The movie is more numbing than stimulating. I haven’t seen money thrown in every direction like this since the last federal stimulus package. And in Michael Waldron’s screenplay the narrative is very much an afterthought; as often happens in these kinds of digital blowouts, the most critical development essentially amounts to somebody deciding, “Nah, instead of being evil I think I’ll stop being evil.” Dialogue is strictly of the faux-snappy variety: “You’re welcome,” and so on. If the special effects are from Tiffany, the writing is from Dollar Tree.
So, whose fault is that? The audience’s, probably. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness strikes me as exactly what moviegoers are looking for these days — soulless, senseless, flashy fantasy. We live in a decade in which people mislabel their tantrums as activism, and discourse drowns under waves of hyperbole. Benedict Cumberbatch personifies what is happening on our huge, messy, American canvas: Come on, I found myself saying to him, you’re a great Shakespearean. What are you doing wrestling a giant octopus?
