Doctor Strange

After watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2, I thought I’d better catch up with some other comics movies that I’ve missed, and since he’ll be in a few upcoming movies I decided I should get to Doctor Strange.

The movie isn’t the very best Marvel has to offer and I doubt it will get the comic many new fans, but it was a very solid entry for the MCU, boasted superb visual effects and had a little more emotional depth than most of the other origin stories.

The first act, as many have remarked, is basically Cumberbatch doing Doctor House. A brilliant but prickly doctor saves lives and infuriates colleagues with his arrogance. A life-changing accident leaves him searching for healing, and he eventually finds The Ancient One. There’s been criticism of the whitewashing of this role by casting Tilda Swinton as what was originally an old Tibetan man, but I can also see the director’s point that there was no way of escaping the far-left’s criticism here – cast an old Tibetan man and you get criticised for propagating a wise-old-venerable-master stereotype. Cast a young Tibetan and you get accused of simply using another culture like a tool. A woman? Fetishing. I guess he could have gone with a black star and probably gotten less flack, but that, too, is patronising and using a culture as a tool.

In the end, Tilda Swinton brought her usual ethereal spacyness to the character and I thought it worked rather well. Certainly she put in an engaging performance and showed all the different, conflicted sides of her rather simple character. Plus she facilitated the development of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s rather more interesting Baron Mordo character, who I look forward to seeing return in future.

Perhaps the main problem here is that Cumberbatch lacks a certain something. He’s not very likeable, by intention at first but really throughout the whole movie. Somehow he lacks the gravitas he’s had in other movies or his breakout TV show, and too often his character seems to be just Tony Stark lite – which is all wrong for Doctor Strange.

Still, him aside, there’s an excellent supporting cast, a bad guy made far more interesting than his comic counterpart (who I’d never heard of), a fairly clever conceit to defeat an extremely powerful being, incredible special effects that look like something Cyriak might make with a ridiculous budget – something people apparently keep asking him about.

I am interested to see how he and his infinity stone will tie into the larger universe, and I get the feeling I’ll enjoy the character more as a minor voice in an ensemble film than I did with him at the very centre, but this was by no means a bad movie. But certainly it wasn’t as fun as Guardians 2.