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tori_reviewsHere's what I meant to post the last couple of Mondays, as a capper on doing MCU reviews for a while. Now...if you'll excuse me...the bad vampire show wants my attention.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
I wasn’t going to do this review, I haven’t done a movie review in a while, especially one that wasn’t closely tied to a show I was reviewing. I’ve been meaning to do things like review the SW movies and the MCU ones, but I tend to only have room for one big project at a time and these day’s that’s Buffy. The other two fandoms are things I dip into.
But then I slept on this movie and…I have things to say.
How can it be that the TV shows feel more like they should have been two hour movies, while the movies feel like they should be six hour shows? On its own this is probably only a mild problem, but a lot of my other issues are compounded by it. Sometimes a lot.
I feel like there is a seed of a really good idea, if the conflict was kept between Strange and Wanda. That the conflict is built around ‘was there another way?’ and Wanda believing there must have been and Strange clinging to a belief that there wasn’t. Is he clinging to that belief because it means everything that’s been lost can still be considered worth it? That there are some things you sacrifice for the greater good, but the cost was high in this case. While Wanda thinks the costs were too high, and maybe she’s not willing to sacrifice anything more for the greater good.
For one thing, there are two people missing from this story who cast long shadows that the story doesn’t seem to deal with. One is Vision, who apparently just isn’t in Wanda’s better life; which puts us in a weird place where she’s willing to shred the multiverse not for perfection but for marginally better.
The other is Tony. While the struggle between Wanda and Strange would have been best waged over Vision somehow (although that had already been explored in WandaVision), as symbol of what I think Strange’s arc would have worked best as, Tony needs to be taken into consideration. It doesn’t hurt that Tony and Strange are so alike that there would be something to examine there. Strange ends up in an alternate universe where apparently he’s the guy who gave his life to defeat Thanos; is he perhaps wondering if he could have taken the fall in Tony’s place, whether he is more valuable than Tony Stark. Or maybe he’s cold about it, believes himself to be the chess master so it must be better to sacrifice someone else instead of himself.
This story is all over the place in what the point of Strange’s arc is. If it’s that he needs to learn to share power, then it should be more tied to him deciding that America can do more for Wanda than he can. If it’s that he needs to accept that he can’t have everything (especially when it comes to Claire), then there should be an actual cost to him, a hard selfish vs. selfless choice he has to make at the end. If it’s about what all is he prepared to sacrifice for the greater good, then the story should put him in a tight moral spot; even if it has him think of a third option, that’s saying something as compared to his binary thinking that’s gotten people killed before. If it’s about accepting that he’s not necessarily the best for every situation, that maybe Wong is the right choice to be Sorcerer Supreme then…honestly it kind of needs a bigger overhaul because while the payoff is there, there is no buildup to that payoff. If it’s that his choice to allow the Blip to happen had consequences that he now has to live with (even if he knows it was for the greater good and is better than the other million alternatives), then that probably should be addressed after the first ten minutes of the movie.
Just pick a character arc, and actually write it instead of throwing paint at the wall and letting the audience pick out some accidental shape that makes sense to them.
I also have…an odd issue that distracts me but probably doesn’t anyone else. How old is Wanda? In AoU and Civil War, the Avengers talk about her like she’s a kid. And even if we expand that to say she’s ~21, she’s still only about 24 by the time we get to Infinity War; which means that even somewhat generously, she’s ~27 at this point, since she didn’t age between IW-Endgame.
Where am I going with this? Well, her ‘kids’ are about 10. In WandaVision we know they’re made up, so a 25-26 Wanda *having* her kids and then those kids getting accelerated growth is fine; but if the kids aren’t made up, then she would have had to have them at ~17. That, in addition to making her a teenage mom, is before she met Vision. So there would be a different origin of the kids, or they are also made up but she got to keep them. I guess that if alternate Wanda also didn’t get Blipped then the timeline almost works in that universe, but that raises quite a few questions.
I don’t know that I’m currently expecting there to be any more material with America, given how the MCU works these days we probably will, but I have no interest in seeing anything more from her. She’s a plot device and maybe mcguffin is this, she’s not a character.
Are they ever going to deal with Mordo in the main world? Because a conflict between Strange and a multiversal counterpart really doesn’t resolve anything in that plot thread. Are we just supposed to assume that it was resolved in between movies sometime? Yet again we have something that could be considered fallout of Strange’s actions, but…Strange gets to act morally superior, and not to the version who he knows, but taking his frustration out on someone in the multiverse. It’s a mess and it doesn’t work.
I suspect this movie was forced to go big instead of being a Doctor Strange focused story, and it’s worse for it. Strange wasn’t that great a character to start with, but they could have given him more character if they’d made that a priority as opposed to focusing on bringing in the multiverse.
I already said WandaVision was the destruction of Wanda’s character, she was the villain of the piece and I wasn’t sure if the show knew that. If we take this as where that was leading, then clearly she was a villain. Here she’s not even a particularly sympathetic one (although I think the writing continues to think she should be). Really, the way this story (and WV too) treat Wanda is just weird to me, to the point where one almost has to retreat to the insanity defense instead of trying to actually make sense of her actions, not to mention how she is framed by the narrative.
When I saw the trailer line about how Strange bent spacetime and gets called a hero but Wanda does it and she’s a villain, I guess I naively assumed that was a theme that this movie intended to tackle. Admittedly, since Wanda’s actions are so obviously villainous, it really just serves to question Strange’s. And as I’ve laid out, there was room to make that a theme of this movie; question whether Strange really is a hero, whether he even deserves to consider himself one much less whether he should be seen as one by the laypeople out there. But the movie is absolutely not about that.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been the only way to salvage this story, but I can see the tattered remnants of actual story here, they’re just pulled very thin over a bunch of shit that just happens.
I do suspect that had I seen this in the theater, I would have come out with a somewhat better feeling; at home on the small screen, and all, it’s harder to get caught up in the elements that are there for spectacle. Spectacle can at least mask the flaws a bit more; when the spectacle is taken out, the flaws are there to be seen.
Not to say major flaws can’t break it even in the moment. One day I will put together a whole rant about fuck you Steve Rogers in Endgame and how I even though I enjoyed more of the movie watching it I still walked out angry at the end because of how awful the end was for me. fuck you Steve Rogers needs to leave Peggy to her own life.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
I wasn’t going to do this review, I haven’t done a movie review in a while, especially one that wasn’t closely tied to a show I was reviewing. I’ve been meaning to do things like review the SW movies and the MCU ones, but I tend to only have room for one big project at a time and these day’s that’s Buffy. The other two fandoms are things I dip into.
But then I slept on this movie and…I have things to say.
How can it be that the TV shows feel more like they should have been two hour movies, while the movies feel like they should be six hour shows? On its own this is probably only a mild problem, but a lot of my other issues are compounded by it. Sometimes a lot.
I feel like there is a seed of a really good idea, if the conflict was kept between Strange and Wanda. That the conflict is built around ‘was there another way?’ and Wanda believing there must have been and Strange clinging to a belief that there wasn’t. Is he clinging to that belief because it means everything that’s been lost can still be considered worth it? That there are some things you sacrifice for the greater good, but the cost was high in this case. While Wanda thinks the costs were too high, and maybe she’s not willing to sacrifice anything more for the greater good.
For one thing, there are two people missing from this story who cast long shadows that the story doesn’t seem to deal with. One is Vision, who apparently just isn’t in Wanda’s better life; which puts us in a weird place where she’s willing to shred the multiverse not for perfection but for marginally better.
The other is Tony. While the struggle between Wanda and Strange would have been best waged over Vision somehow (although that had already been explored in WandaVision), as symbol of what I think Strange’s arc would have worked best as, Tony needs to be taken into consideration. It doesn’t hurt that Tony and Strange are so alike that there would be something to examine there. Strange ends up in an alternate universe where apparently he’s the guy who gave his life to defeat Thanos; is he perhaps wondering if he could have taken the fall in Tony’s place, whether he is more valuable than Tony Stark. Or maybe he’s cold about it, believes himself to be the chess master so it must be better to sacrifice someone else instead of himself.
This story is all over the place in what the point of Strange’s arc is. If it’s that he needs to learn to share power, then it should be more tied to him deciding that America can do more for Wanda than he can. If it’s that he needs to accept that he can’t have everything (especially when it comes to Claire), then there should be an actual cost to him, a hard selfish vs. selfless choice he has to make at the end. If it’s about what all is he prepared to sacrifice for the greater good, then the story should put him in a tight moral spot; even if it has him think of a third option, that’s saying something as compared to his binary thinking that’s gotten people killed before. If it’s about accepting that he’s not necessarily the best for every situation, that maybe Wong is the right choice to be Sorcerer Supreme then…honestly it kind of needs a bigger overhaul because while the payoff is there, there is no buildup to that payoff. If it’s that his choice to allow the Blip to happen had consequences that he now has to live with (even if he knows it was for the greater good and is better than the other million alternatives), then that probably should be addressed after the first ten minutes of the movie.
Just pick a character arc, and actually write it instead of throwing paint at the wall and letting the audience pick out some accidental shape that makes sense to them.
I also have…an odd issue that distracts me but probably doesn’t anyone else. How old is Wanda? In AoU and Civil War, the Avengers talk about her like she’s a kid. And even if we expand that to say she’s ~21, she’s still only about 24 by the time we get to Infinity War; which means that even somewhat generously, she’s ~27 at this point, since she didn’t age between IW-Endgame.
Where am I going with this? Well, her ‘kids’ are about 10. In WandaVision we know they’re made up, so a 25-26 Wanda *having* her kids and then those kids getting accelerated growth is fine; but if the kids aren’t made up, then she would have had to have them at ~17. That, in addition to making her a teenage mom, is before she met Vision. So there would be a different origin of the kids, or they are also made up but she got to keep them. I guess that if alternate Wanda also didn’t get Blipped then the timeline almost works in that universe, but that raises quite a few questions.
I don’t know that I’m currently expecting there to be any more material with America, given how the MCU works these days we probably will, but I have no interest in seeing anything more from her. She’s a plot device and maybe mcguffin is this, she’s not a character.
Are they ever going to deal with Mordo in the main world? Because a conflict between Strange and a multiversal counterpart really doesn’t resolve anything in that plot thread. Are we just supposed to assume that it was resolved in between movies sometime? Yet again we have something that could be considered fallout of Strange’s actions, but…Strange gets to act morally superior, and not to the version who he knows, but taking his frustration out on someone in the multiverse. It’s a mess and it doesn’t work.
I suspect this movie was forced to go big instead of being a Doctor Strange focused story, and it’s worse for it. Strange wasn’t that great a character to start with, but they could have given him more character if they’d made that a priority as opposed to focusing on bringing in the multiverse.
I already said WandaVision was the destruction of Wanda’s character, she was the villain of the piece and I wasn’t sure if the show knew that. If we take this as where that was leading, then clearly she was a villain. Here she’s not even a particularly sympathetic one (although I think the writing continues to think she should be). Really, the way this story (and WV too) treat Wanda is just weird to me, to the point where one almost has to retreat to the insanity defense instead of trying to actually make sense of her actions, not to mention how she is framed by the narrative.
When I saw the trailer line about how Strange bent spacetime and gets called a hero but Wanda does it and she’s a villain, I guess I naively assumed that was a theme that this movie intended to tackle. Admittedly, since Wanda’s actions are so obviously villainous, it really just serves to question Strange’s. And as I’ve laid out, there was room to make that a theme of this movie; question whether Strange really is a hero, whether he even deserves to consider himself one much less whether he should be seen as one by the laypeople out there. But the movie is absolutely not about that.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been the only way to salvage this story, but I can see the tattered remnants of actual story here, they’re just pulled very thin over a bunch of shit that just happens.
I do suspect that had I seen this in the theater, I would have come out with a somewhat better feeling; at home on the small screen, and all, it’s harder to get caught up in the elements that are there for spectacle. Spectacle can at least mask the flaws a bit more; when the spectacle is taken out, the flaws are there to be seen.
Not to say major flaws can’t break it even in the moment. One day I will put together a whole rant about fuck you Steve Rogers in Endgame and how I even though I enjoyed more of the movie watching it I still walked out angry at the end because of how awful the end was for me. fuck you Steve Rogers needs to leave Peggy to her own life.
