Doc­tor Strange

“I could have done bet­ter!” exclaims Stephen Strange (Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch), for­mer Doc­tor, to the sur­geons who tried their best to fix his hands after a ter­ri­ble car acci­dent. Despite his brush with death, Strange hasn’t lost any of his arro­gance or his faith in sci­ence. He recalls anoth­er famous pre­ten­tious doc­tor played by a British actor, found this time in TV land: Hugh Laurie’s Dr House also thought him­self far more tal­ent­ed than his peers. How­ev­er, House was more hum­ble and accept­ed that his leg would nev­er ful­ly heal.

By con­trast, Strange will try any­thing to save his hands and his career, and thus brings to mind anoth­er Mar­vel hero: Tony Stark, who in order to sur­vive and to remain on top of the tech­no­log­i­cal war­fare game, became Iron Man. Yet Strange’s trans­for­ma­tion is ren­dered even more com­pelling thanks to direc­tor Scott Derrickson’s uncom­pro­mis­ing, unsen­ti­men­tal and, yes, real­is­tic approach.

Death can­not bring Strange to mod­esty, there­fore only some­thing beyond death could. For Stark, it was love, but Strange isn’t the sen­ti­men­tal type (or his sen­ti­ments are buried way too deep). This is where the film gets very strange indeed – know­ing­ly so, of course – by tak­ing a big step into the mys­ti­cal realm. Fol­low­ing a rather ten­u­ous lead, Strange trav­els to Nepal to find some­one who can sup­pos­ed­ly teach the mind to heal the body, even though he doesn’t believe in such ​“gift shop” things.

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Adopt­ing his character’s sci­en­tif­ic out­look, Der­rick­son intro­duces the spir­i­tu­al phe­nom­e­na that Strange is exposed to in a rad­i­cal mat­ter-of-fact way: one sec­ond, Strange is sit­ting on a chair in a monastery, the next he is pro­ject­ed across dimen­sions where build­ings bend and mul­ti­ply expo­nen­tial­ly and every rule of physics is for­got­ten. Then, as soon as the Ancient One – the mas­ter of this place, played by a Til­da Swin­ton at her oth­er­world­ly best – tele­path­i­cal­ly lets go of him, Strange returns to our dimen­sion just as abrupt­ly as he left it. There is no way around the strange­ness of the spir­i­tu­al world: as the mas­ter soon tells Strange, ​“Not every­thing can be explained,” and Der­rick­son fol­lows her advice to embrace the unknown.

Nev­er­the­less, this oth­er dimen­sion has to be faced, and the mys­ti­cal, just like med­i­cine, can only be mas­tered through prac­tice. Derrickson’s real­ism applies to both the world as we know it, and the mag­i­cal one: it takes Strange count­less tri­als and errors to get to grips with the basics of his new pow­ers, and even then he remains extreme­ly vul­ner­a­ble. Even more so than Iron Man in his near-inde­struc­tible met­al suit, Strange seems to be sur­viv­ing fights in extrem­is, which makes him a refresh­ing addi­tion to a Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse stuffed with semi-invin­ci­ble demigods.

Fac­ing the stu­dent-gone-rogue Kae­cil­ius (Mads Mikkelsen, who seems to be devel­op­ing his style again by cry­ing unso­licit­ed tears like he cried blood in Casi­no Royale), Strange appears ready to break at any moment – just like Tom Cruise’s Cage in Edge of Tomor­row he is an unlike­ly hero who must learn on the job how to defend him­self. As the film pro­gress­es, it echoes Doug Liman’s time-bend­ing epic in oth­er ways, although the result is per­haps less exhilarating.

Stick­ing to real­ism when trav­el­ling across dimen­sions in which real­i­ty is of a dif­fer­ent kind means that sit­u­a­tions change from being fas­ci­nat­ing­ly unique to ludi­crous­ly absurd. Der­rick­son man­ages to avoid the pit­falls of oth­er Mar­vel movies by (most­ly) not forc­ing the humour, instead allow­ing it to slip through the life-or-death cir­cum­stances of the sto­ry, and through the very British sar­casm of the film’s hero.

The real and the mys­ti­cal meet in ever more strik­ing ways, as when Strange’s inher­ent ratio­nal­i­ty is chal­lenged by the rules of the mys­ti­cal world. Even though it was dif­fi­cult for him to admit that sci­ence isn’t always enough, he must then accept that the mys­ti­cal world too has its lim­its. An aston­ish­ing scene shows Strange hav­ing to tele­port him­self to his very real hos­pi­tal to heal his body, while his spir­it fights a vil­lain in the ​‘astral’ dimen­sion in the same room: the two worlds don’t quite col­lide, but they are con­nect­ed, which Der­rick­son express­es through the use of hand­held cam­era and some mas­ter­ful cross-edit­ing between both simul­ta­ne­ous scenes.

The film’s visu­al style is by far the most inter­est­ing of any Mar­vel film. Rarely has a mod­ern block­buster so ful­ly embraced the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal cin­e­ma for its fan­tas­ti­cal sequences, incor­po­rat­ing its action into infi­nite views formed through the code-like rep­e­ti­tion of visu­al motifs. Unapolo­get­i­cal­ly, Der­rick­son invites us to bask in the utter phys­i­cal irra­tional­i­ty and play­ful­ness of the algo­rith­mic designs, just as he devotes him­self to an almost docu-style approach when return­ing us to the real world. while such a heady mix of dig­i­tal­ism and real­ism could have been jar­ring, Doc­tor Strange makes for a cap­ti­vat­ing cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence, one that sig­nals a bright future for Hollywood.