Doc­tor Strange in the Mul­ti­verse of Madness

When­ev­er a new Mar­vel movie rolls off the pro­duc­tion line, crammed full of in-jokes and ref­er­ences to char­ac­ters from pre­vi­ous tele­vi­sion shows and adja­cent stu­dio prop­er­ties, I’m moved to recall the words of inter­net prophet Dril: ​“think­ing about shit that i Rec­og­nize and smiling”.

It felt most notice­able in last year’s Spi­der-Man: No Way Home, which saw Mar­vel and Sony’s prof­itable joint ven­ture bring a host of fan favourite faces back to the big screen. The mon­u­men­tal suc­cess of this film report­ed­ly moved the stu­dio to retool some of Doc­tor Strange and the Mul­ti­verse of Mad­ness, Sam Raimi’s long-await­ed return to the director’s chair, which sees Bene­dict Cumberbatch’s gruff sor­cer­er face off against a famil­iar threat. The result is frac­tured film, where brand recog­ni­tion, fan ser­vice and a valiant attempt at cin­e­mat­ic per­son­al­i­ty all strug­gle for dominance.

Since the likes of Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans and Scar­lett Johans­son left the Mar­vel behe­moth in Avengers: Endgame, the stu­dio has strug­gled to find faces with the charis­ma and on-screen pres­ence to real­ly dri­ve its flag­ship fran­chise. Cum­ber­batch is arguably the biggest star left in their ros­ter. His character’s ori­gin film was gen­er­al­ly well-received and his role in Endgame finale was cru­cial, but he feels like a vari­a­tion on a type Cum­ber­batch has been play­ing since Sher­lock (the anti-social genius with a god com­plex). If any­one could inject a lit­tle colour into his fair­ly unin­spired uni­verse, it’s Rai­mi, whose Spi­der-Man tril­o­gy is still (right­ful­ly!) held up as a high water mark for the genre.

This is Raimi’s first direc­to­r­i­al effort in nine years (the less said about Oz the Great and Pow­er­ful the bet­ter) and it’s pleas­ing to see him return to his hor­ror roots, con­jur­ing some fair­ly gnarly – by Mar­vel stan­dards, any­way – crea­ture design and death scenes. Even work­ing with the con­straints of the Mar­vel machine, Rai­mi man­ages to imbue the film with plen­ty of per­son­al­i­ty, far sur­pass­ing any­thing Scott Der­rick­son was able to do with Doc­tor Strange’s first solo out­ing. This is like­ly also a result of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with writer Michael Wal­dron, who knows a thing or two about mak­ing this high-con­cept com­ic book mul­ti­verse feel engag­ing, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly worked on Loki.

Join­ing Cum­ber­batch is new­com­er Xochitl Gomez, play­ing Amer­i­ca Chavez (Ms Mar­vel) whose pow­er kick­starts the nar­ra­tive. Able to ​‘hop’ between alter­nate real­i­ties, she is being pur­sued by the men­ac­ing Scar­lett Witch (Eliz­a­beth Olsen) whose grief fol­low­ing the events of Endgame and Wan­daVi­sion has turned dead­ly. Wong (Bene­dict Wong) is also on-hand, as are Strange’s for­mer love inter­est Chris­tine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) and var­i­ous oth­er side play­ers from par­al­lel universes.

Yet while Rai­mi injects as much soul into this sequel as the Mar­vel blue­print will allow, it’s dif­fi­cult to see the film as any­thing oth­er than a cog in a big­ger machine. Rather than cre­at­ing self-con­tained nar­ra­tives, every new Mar­vel release now serves as a build­ing block for some­thing greater, and as such any­one who isn’t inti­mate­ly famil­iar with the source mate­r­i­al is like­ly to feel increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed. Geek cul­ture often func­tions in this way – as a com­plex series of ref­er­ences to oth­er prop­er­ties – but while a ref­er­ence to anoth­er super­hero or a mid-cred­its cameo might have been nov­el six or sev­en films ago, it is so now for­mu­la­ic that the ele­ment of sur­prise has all but evaporated.

This schemat­ic approach might sat­is­fy view­ers who sim­ply enjoy being in on the joke or see­ing a char­ac­ter they like appear on screen for a few min­utes, but the upshot is that orig­i­nal­i­ty and inno­va­tion have become an after­thought to Mar­vel, and the heavy reliance on CGI gives their films an aes­thet­ic bland­ness. One scene in par­tic­u­lar here, in which the same extra with a suit­case runs past four times, speaks to the wider cre­ative atro­phy that has set in at the studio.

The film also suf­fers from being the sec­ond mul­ti­verse adven­ture to hit screens in 2022 – Daniels’ Every­thing Every­where All at Once (which releas­es in the UK on 13 May) does far more with the con­cept of infi­nite real­i­ties and achieves greater emo­tion­al res­o­nance along the way. Per­haps Mar­vel should take that film’s crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess as a chal­lenge and shoot for the moon with their next raft of fea­tures, rather than rely on brand recog­ni­tion and a famil­iar sta­ble of fan favourite char­ac­ters to get bums on seats.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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