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Dark magic: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

One of the best Marvel origin stories gets a disappointing sequel that takes the franchise’s magical themes to some disturbingly dark places.

(Image: Twitter)

Six years after its release, Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange remains one of the best Marvel movies, and certainly one of the only cinematically interesting installments. In a franchise replete with visually dull, generic action sequences, Derrickson and company crafted a unique, kaleidoscopic visual vocabulary to express the reality-bending power of sorcery. They also gave the Marvel Cinematic Universe its best redemption-arc origin story since the original Iron Man—and, in a plot fraught with genuinely ambiguous moral and spiritual themes, set the stage for possibly the most thoughtful and interesting villain in MCU history.

There’s a scene in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in which Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) hastily explains about Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his former ally turned mortal enemy, to a young newcomer named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). The catch is, they’re in another dimension of the multiverse, and the Mordo before them is not our Mordo. Our Mordo—the Mordo who said “I will follow this path no longer” and, in an ominous post-credits sequence, ambushed a paraplegic and stole the magic he used to walk, declaring that there were “too many sorcerers” in the world—isn’t in this film. So far as I know, he hasn’t been seen since that post-credits sequence.

So far as I know! I’m pretty sure I’ve kept up with all the MCU movies, but I guess it’s possible that I missed Mordo’s return in some small-screen Disney+ series. I know I didn’t see the WandaVision series, which is definitely prerequisite viewing for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Seriously: The entire plot of Multiverse of Madness flows directly from WandaVision, which, for me, made watching Multiverse of Madness feel not entirely unlike watching Avengers: Endgame without seeing Infinity War, know what I mean? If you’ve seen these movies, I’m pretty sure you get my drift; if you haven’t seen them, I’m positive you get my drift.

This storyline seems to have no relationship to the groundwork laid by Derrickson and his writing partners, which may explain the “creative differences” behind Derrickson’s departure from the sequel (he takes an executive producer credit). Multiverse of Madness is written by Michael Waldron (who wrote another Disney+ series, Loki) and directed by Sam Raimi, an apt choice to replace Derrickson. Not only does Raimi have solid superhero cred via the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, his horror background (the Evil Dead trilogy; Drag Me to Hell), like Derrickson’s (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us From Evil), is in principle well-suited to the potentially bizarre, grotesque trappings of Doctor Strange’s sorcerous milieu.

An early set piece involving a Lovecraftian monstrosity I’m tempted to dub an “oculopod” (think Mike Wazowski crossed with Cthulu) nails the vibe of the comics and also plays to Raimi’s established strengths (I was reminded of sequences from all three Spider-Man films in connection with the physics of vertical urban action sequences involving ledges and building facades). Then there’s a goofily macabre conceit at the climax that must have been a special delight to the director of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness.

In between those two energetic sequences are some disappointingly banal visualizations of magic, including a frontal assault on the mystic stronghold of Kamar-Taj with very little of the imaginative style pioneered by Derrickson. There’s also a lot of plot-turning on the trauma of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Scarlet Witch, whose grief over the Vision’s death led (per plot summaries of WandaVision) to a mental breakdown and a horrific magical coping mechanism. It seems Wanda magically sucked an entire town into a nostalgic, utopian fantasy of her own creation, with real people forcibly assigned make-believe roles like puppets. The fantasy also included a pair of adorable sons named Billy and Tommy (Julian Hilliard and Jett Klyne) who never existed…at least, not in our universe.

A question left open at the end of WandaVision: Did the Scarlet Witch’s appalling crime against thousands of people make her a villainess? And so we come, you see, to Multiverse of Madness: What is fantasy in one universe might be real in another. In fact, we’re told that dreams are actually empirical experiences of alternate lives in other realms of the multiverse. The Scarlet Witch is obsessed with doing whatever it takes to find a universe in which her dreams of being Billy and Tommy’s mother are true—and by “whatever it takes,” I mean “murder as many people, in as many universes, as necessary,” which seems like a considerable escalation on the villainy-meter. Wanda is particularly after America Chavez, a young woman who seems to be unique in the multiverse, and has a power she can’t control of traveling between universes—the very power the Scarlet Witch wants.

Another open question, this one from the original Doctor Strange: Is Stephen himself a superhero or a supervillain?

Kwame Opam, in what now looks like a prescient 2016 piece for The Verge, argued that it was easy to see Stephen as the villain and Mordo as the hero. I didn’t go that far, but I did argue (in a piece published the same day as Opam’s) that Mordo had a point about the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) crossing a clear moral line by stealing immortality from the realm of Dormammu, an essentially satanic being of limitless power and malevolence. While the Ancient One believed she was able to do good with her stolen power (Satan casting out Satan, as it were), Mordo plausibly argued that her transgression had led to the very threat Earth faced from Dormammu. The very lessons the Ancient One tried to teach Stephen suggest the hypocrisy of her actions: “It’s our fear of death that gives Dormammu life”; “death is what gives life meaning”; and especially “It’s not all about you.”

For what it’s worth, Derrickson expressed appreciation for my interpretation, but suggested I was being a bit narrow or rigid—like Mordo. For my part, I thought the jury was still out:

Whether this interpretation holds in the long run may depend in part on subsequent developments. For instance, if in later films Dr. Strange follows the Ancient One in drawing power from the Dark Dimension or anything similar…then Doctor Strange’s story will be compromised by something too close for my comfort to embracing black magic.

Despite our difference of opinion, I recognize that Derrickson’s Christian faith shaped the first film in various ways. I can’t help wondering what he thinks about escalations on the villainy-meter in relation to this film’s various incarnations of Stephen.

The sequel introduces two magical books: a book of seemingly limitless good magic, the Book of the Vishanti, and its antithesis, the Darkhold or Book of the Damned, which is connected to Dormammu’s Dark Dimension. Actually, the Darkhold was introduced in WandaVision, and its corrupting influence is connected to Wanda’s descent into supervillainy. We also meet versions of Doctor Strange in other realities who have been corrupted by the Darkhold.

In one universe we meet a powerful panel of superheroes called the Illuminati, who consider Stephen Strange the greatest threat to the multiverse—although clearly they ludicrously underestimate the Scarlet Witch. Is it fan service to cast a popular actor as a beloved character who is meant to be among the most brilliant minds in any universe, only to have him die a massively stupid death? Sure, you can always bring him back in some other universe, but still: stupid. This isn’t the only bad call by someone who should know better—Wong (Benedict Wong) also makes a terrible call at a critical moment—but it’s the most pointless.

This is becoming a running theme in the MCU: The powers that be are at best incompetent, if not frauds or something worse. In a similar vein, although the Book of the Vishanti and the Darkhold are meant to be equally powerful, well, there’s a trope I’ve been writing about for at least 20 years but have never named. We could call it “The Dark Side Sure Seems Stronger.” (Sub-tropes could be called “Evil is Powerful, Goodness is Pretty” and “Demons Are a Lot Busier than Angels.”)

America Chavez comes to trust our Stephen, and she assures someone in another universe who, poignantly, doesn’t trust him that this Stephen is different. But is he? With respect to spoiler-averse readers, there is no way for me to do my job here without saying this much: When all is said and done in Multiverse of Madness, there is no reason to believe that any iteration of Doctor Strange, in any universe, would refrain from turning, if necessary, to the damned power of the Darkhold; from engaging in an admittedly hilarious but still disturbing form of what could be called necromancy; or even from utilizing the power of damned souls—malevolent spirits who, again, effectively read and function as demons.

I’m thinking of a moment in the original movie in which Stephen looks skeptically at a deeply corrupted individual nattering about the greater good and retorts, “No. I mean, come on—look at your face.” Nobody says that in the sequel—but they should.

A closing title tells us “Doctor Strange Will Return.” Having gotten to know him better than I wanted, I can’t help feeling that’s less a promise than a threat.


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About Steven D. Greydanus 50 Articles
Steven D. Greydanus is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, a permanent deacon in the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, and the founder of DecentFilms.com. He has degrees in media arts and religious studies. He and his wife Suzanne have seven children.

17 Comments

    • More and more, Dave, it looks to me like the only thing the MCU can do any more is origin stories. After that, they can’t stick the landing.

      Their latest TV series, Moon Knight, got positive reactions when it debuted, but by the end it seemed like a big letdown. (Again: going on what I hear; the only small-screen MCU thing I ever watched was Loki, and it persuaded me to skip small-screen MCU stuff from now on.)

      The only recent exception I can think of is Spider-Man: Far From Home. But that’s because they borrowed gravitas and emotional weight from other movies, including, ironically, three movies by Sam Raimi, whom I gather wasn’t allowed to invest Multiverse of Madness with its own gravitas and emotional weight. He had to try to borrow it all from WandaVision. Oh well.

      • My guess is that Benedict Cumberbatch wasn’t very happy with the fact that his contract forced him to play in this movie. And Disney is almost too transparent about its intentions to indoctrinate a fresh young generation with… yes : illuminati ideas about how the world should/will be shaped. The dark forces reign and the (magically) gifted (parentless) youngsters will be put in training camps to learn how to use their gifts. Their teachers are of course the dark forces who control the Earth. Nice detail: a Latina girl. Come on Disney!

    • I know, right?
      Might be coming down with the ‘vid’ so I’ll be brief. I saw all the prerequisite films, Disney+ shows and read the comics. I agree morally this film is occultish and actually was so politically tangled that I fell asleep so many times out of sheer boredom of the Disney machinations. Probably why directors and writers couldn’t agree. It shows.

  1. A+ movie, D+ review
    Terrible takes from a guy who didn’t even bother watching all the required material beforehand. This is not a sequel, it is the next movie in phase five of the MCU which was started with Loki(doubt you watched it). If you understood that very common knowledge, maybe you would’ve understood why the actions in this movie happened. For example, the movie directly tells us that the Scarlett Witch is destined to destroy or save the multiverse and we need to be shown how strong she is. Good movies show, they don’t tell but the best movies do both, which is exactly why Wanda destroyed the Illuminati like she did. Reed is a genius but not as strong as the person destined to destroy or save the multiverse. You couldn’t figure that out and they told the audience in the movie! You can’t pick and choose which movies and shows you watch then give a movie a D+ because you didn’t understand it. Don’t give movies poor reviews because you did your job poorly.

    • I love comic books and have enjoyed the Marvel franchise more often than not but if you need to have watched multiple tv series in order to make sense of a movie, then there’s a big problem. A story told through a different medium might deepen my enjoyment of a particular film, but it shouldn’t be required in order to do so.

      • Yes, as so many people are saying. I haven’t seen half of the pre-requisites, so although I have enjoyed the odd Marvel movie, and the first Doctor Strange, I cannot imagine seeing this one.

    • Kevin Feige disagrees with you, C melly (and agrees with Adolfo and me).

      We try to make the stories unfold in a way that if you are following along and have seen what has preceded it, you’ll be right up to speed. And more importantly, if you haven’t [seen what preceded it], you’ll be up to speed…There were lots of conversations with Sam Raimi and and Michael Waldron, and the entire Doctor Strange team, that this movie needs to work for people who watched WandaVision, but more importantly, needs to work for people who didn’t, who maybe Endgame was the last time they saw Wanda, or one of the earlier movies. Or maybe she’s a character they’re meeting for the first time.

      And I understood the movie just fine! If Reed had been smart, he would have backed away, recognizing that Wanda was way out of his power league. She literally told him that she was going to widow his wife. He died literally for nothing; he didn’t even slow Wanda down. He died because he was stupid, or, more precisely, because the writers didn’t care about making him smart and treating his character with respect.

  2. It is interesting how Hollywood especially in its superheroes has turned to the reality of the existence of other universes, thus multiverse. As quantum physics has long ago calculated the existence of other dimensions of reality, this is best to be thought of as our faith’s declaration that our material world is not the only reality, there is the spiritual realm. This surge in the appreciation and recognition of the multiverse calls for the reunderstanding of Catholicism not as universal but multiversal. Relatedly, this brings me to the thought of the universe we live in in which the truth exists objectively and as St. Thomas Aquinas following Aristotle declared that the truth cannot be untrue at the same time. Today’s information overload is demonically mixed with a lot of disinformation. Oftentimes this twisting of the truth refers to a spin of a different universe as in the multiverses of reality. I’m reminded of Trump’s serial pattern of immoral dishonesties and falsehoods by singing the refrain of an “alternative reality” when confronted with the inconvenient truth or cry that they are “fake news.” Detrimental to faith, a lot though not all of American Catholics have embraced these falsehoods, for example that Trump won the 2020 election. These sort of Catholics then should just turn to the idea of multiverses, to another universe, that Trump won the 2020 election and is now reigning from the White House and in this time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he is serving as “Vladimir Putin’s altar boy” – not the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow! And of course, he the superhero, Super Donald!

  3. In the main, I had fun during most of the movie–hey! It’s that guy! Ooo, cool visual!–but as soon as I thought about any of it, the whole thing fell apart. One of the things that separated the Marvel and DC franchise films for me was that Marvel understood heroism whereas DC, in general, did not. This movie definitely blurs that distinction. How can anyone root for Dr. Strange after this? If anything, we need to be afraid of him. He’s one bad day from killing us all.

    • I agree, Adolfo. Like I said, Kwame Opam’s argument in The Verge now looks prescient, and the more I get to know him, the more “Doctor Strange will be back” sounds like a threat, not a promise.

  4. Perhaps Mr. Greydanus has read my old grade school classmate, Chris Vogler’s screenwriter’s guide, THE WRITER’S JOURNEY: MYTHIC STRUCTURE FOR WRITERS.

    Well, here is a summary of the situation, from one of the greatest science fiction writers who ever took up the pen:

    “In the centuries before our coming, your scientists uncovered the secrets of the physical world and led you from the energy of steam to the energy of the atom. You had put superstition behind you. Science was the only real religion of mankind. It was the gift of the western minority to the remainder of mankind, and it destroyed all other faiths….

    “All down the ages there have been countless reports of strange phenomena — poltergeists, telepathy, precognition — which you had named but never explained…. But they exist, and, if it is to be complete, any theory of the universe must account for them….

    “During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars….

    “That could not be allowed. I cannot explain the full nature of the threat you represented….”

    CHILDHOOD’S END, (181, 182), by Arthur C. Clarke

  5. You mentioned you didn’t watch WandaVision, and I think that was for the best because this movie feels like a betrayal of Wanda’s journey in WandaVision and would have made you like the movie even less. She refused to kill anyone in that series. Not the military that shot at her or the main villain that ruined her fake world and tried to kill her.

    I know the movie tries to explain that the Darkhold corrupted her but it was handled clumsily and didn’t seem authentic to the journey from the tv show. I thought the show handled grief, sorrow, anger, temptation and regret in a much more interesting and adult manner than this movie.
    It also seemed they were a little too blasé in the way they handled the dark magic that clearly is meant to read as demonic.

    I think if they had given Derrickson or Raimi more control they would have gotten a scarier movie that had a clearer moral compass instead of what felt like a long exercise in the ends justify the means.

    Spoiler Alert:

    Reed was completely bungled. You are right he wouldn’t have underestimated Wanda and wouldn’t have simply tried to punch her. He would have retreated to a lab and grabbed a device he would have pre-made to capture her while directing the rest of the team to distract her. The whole thing just felt like a cheap way to kill a bunch of super-heroes. If this is how they are going to treat Reed, then I don’t expect the Fantastic Four to be very good.

    I was uncomfortable with the confusing way the movie ended. The evil Strange had a third eye and then at the end the good Strange has a third eye unexpectedly pop up. Does that mean he was corrupted or that he had achieved greater power though evil but wasn’t evil? It just felt wrong and a weird way to end the movie.

    Also the Chinese and Indian belief systems don’t associate a third eye with evil, it seems odd that Marvel would possibly misrepresent billions of people’s belief considering how much flak they got with casting Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One.

    Thanks for the great review.

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. Benedict Cumberbatch on Doctor Strange sequel: ‘It’s not all about him’ – The Washington Post – CoverStory
  2. Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (2022) - Critic Reviews

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