Aaron Swan

The MCU for me drew to a close with Infinity Wars and the time invested in the many films and characters I felt was a worthwhile and enjoyable experience. The dividend I now take from the MCU is really only to check in from time to time with the characters from IW and earlier and so many of the current films have passed me by. Dr Strange was one I was willing to check in with. The film opens with a very 'family funny' foe, a sort of octopus creature from the saturation lagoon blending the kind of ridiculous creature form we expect from maybe, One Punch Man or Monsters Inc. It reaps city wide destruction in a very PG12 appropriate manner but the gruesome end it suffers is a mere amuse-bouche of what is to come. The audience is set up on a trajectory of bright RGB and silly adventure which is a false promise, and the film takes a much darker turn toward what I would describe as 80s Japanese horror. By the time we come to the possession, the growing darkness and the persuing evil, we realise that the film has taken a direction like no other MCU yet, and I was really thrilled by the hybridity of superhero and It Follows or The Ring. But I nearly didn't make it to the film's better scenes, and frankly I was so done with the production that I didn't hang around for the mid credits sequences. The problem for me was the way certain important character moments were given barely seconds to be realised - why does America trusts Strange? The Deus ex machina that she arrives in exactly the right place to meet him... That her burden is seemingly cured by the close of the film. Whilst MoM hits the feels in the fleeing from unstoppable terror, it makes no solid growth in the characters, which arguably has been the MCU's biggest strength - these were characters that felt fleshed out, dynamic, flawed and relatable. Now these motifs are employed without development, lazily. This is a film which makes the classic adventure romp mistake of never fully doing justice to the notion of the equilibrium of the world, the disruption and the emotional recognition to it, so that more air time can be spent on the repair - the battles and the struggle. It even steals narrative from the final end equilibrium whereby we accept that everything has been right again - the world doesn't seem to have been affected by this story other than for us to have been given a new character to give her own Disney+ series to. This feels more like an opportunity to advertise future MCU installments rather than to have been an MCU cross road. Sure, there will be call backs to this film, but I suspect that like Dark World, it will have very little impact on the the wider scale. And yet, I'm glad I did stay. I feel like the film would have been better for eschewing more of the Glee hues and focusing on the horror hybrid, and this might have opened up more narrative time to give better breathing space to other important characteristion moments. It's a film that is worth seeing, but not because it is feels important to the MCU, but because it makes a very good blend of motifs rarely brought on screen together and for this, it creates wonderful media discussions.