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The next movie to discuss on the Road to Infinity War is Doctor Strange which came out in 2016 and was directed by Scott Derrickson. Being that it was unique in the way it portrayed fight scenes and introduced really interesting magical aspects to the Marvel Universe, it was a successful film.
There are some really cool moments such as when the Ancient One shows Doctor Strange different dimensions and he is projected into a montage of beautiful yet mind bending visuals such as when his fingertips turned into tiny hands as hands crawled up his body forming his face. The fight scenes also separate it from other movies because instead of fighting with traditional style weapons they fight using the mystic arts by summoning weapons made of magic, or have objects gravitate towards them such as with Doctor Strange’s Cloak of Levitation. Another engaging aspect was when characters manipulated the mirror dimension in a way that was similar to Inception. It’s the great use of CGI in moments like these that make the movie novel and memorable.
Apart from the effects and fight scenes, the characters were decent. While Stephen Strange has great character development throughout the movie when he goes from an arrogant selfish surgeon to a more open minded person willing to stay in the same time loop forever to save the world, the other characters were not as compelling.
Christine has little purpose in the movie as Doctor Strange would have done everything he did to save his hands, thus would have ended up at Karmar-Taj, without her. The characters at Karmar-Taj however were interesting and provided comedy when playing around with Strange who came in with a completely different outlook of the world. The ancient one is an interesting character because while she is very stoic she is also sassy at times, and shows the fine line between right and wrong since she drew power from the dark dimension even though she forbid it so that she could live longer to help the world. Mordo is very set in following the laws of nature which provides a different perspective since the other heroes believe in doing what they think is right even if it breaks the rules. Wong provides comedy in the scenes where Strange borrows library books from him which helps to lighten up the tone of the movie since at times it seems dark, especially with lighting which is dim for the majority of the movie.
Kaecilius, the villain in the movie, and his zealots were interesting because of the way they fought in the mirror dimension, but character wise were very one dimensional (pun intended). Like most villains they stopped at nothing for eternal life which in this case was drawn from the dark dimension. Dormammu’s scene was absolutely beautiful the way he was surrounded by all of those colors, but while a great way to show the power that Doctor Strange had with the Eye of Agamotto, was anticlimactic since we did not see the great powerful Dormammu physically do anything. Although, we did see the city in shambles because of him prior.
Overall, Doctor Strange was filled with unique and mind blowing scenes that showed us the power of the mystic arts in the Marvel universe and while the story wasn’t the best, these moments made up for it.
