Doctor Strange tells the story of Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), a brilliant neurosurgeon whose hands are ruined in a car accident. With recovery seemingly impossible through regular medical means, he travels to Nepal in search for some sort of miracle treatment. There he finds The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), Sorcerer Supreme of the Earth, who opens his eyes to the world of the mystical. Through intense study, Strange learns the ways of the sorcerer, and is unwittingly recruited into a magical war against the zealots of the other-dimensional being hell bent on consuming the universe.
Step far away enough from this plot, and one can see all the holes in it. One also gets a sense of the very conventional structure within all the ostensible weirdness. This may be a story of sorcerers, but it clings very tightly to the formula of the superhero origin movie. But working within that structure, the movie delivers unique thrills, and a deeply human story that really does the character justice. More than anything else, this is just a story of a man learning to look beyond his own ego, finally realizing that his talents may be put to a greater purpose.
The film quickly establishes a very different look and feel from every other superhero movie. Its conception of magic involves fluid geography, entire cities bending to the will of the sorcerers. It looks fantastic, and offers an interesting twist in the wide scale destruction that tends to come with the genre. There are sequences that are basically fights in an MC Escher version of the world, the film using a vision of the impossible as the basis for what sorcerous combat looks like. And it only gets more imaginative from there. The climactic sequence, for once, conceives of something even more twisted and weird. We've been spoiled on superhero spectacle, and this film manages to freshen things up a bit.
The story itself is pretty standard. In fact, this script almost seems to have been pared down to the most basic components. The villain, for example, is basically a cipher that gets one big speech to explain all of his motivations. His grand scheme is only vaguely hinted at, and it isn't always clear what the heroes are supposed to be doing to stop any of this from happening. And yet, this doesn't feel like a weakness, exactly. The movie finds a solid core in the narrative of the main character, whose journey into magic doubles as a journey into himself, and the failings that keep him from being all that he can be.
One must acknowledge, though, that a big part of why any of this works is because the cast is so phenomenal. One speech is all you really need when the villain is played by Mads Mikkelsen. Tilda Swinton resists the easy markers of mystical characters and delivers a grounded performance in a role that seems completely nonsensical on paper. Chiwetel Ejiofor is remarkable in a secondary role, the actor making his character feel fully formed. And then there's Benedict Cumberbatch, who is clearly having a blast playing Stephen Strange. His naturally patrician demeanor works really well with the character. Rachel McAdams is ill served by a role that just doesn't have all that much to do, but she's great anyway.
Doctor Strange is appropriately weird. It still isn't as weird as it could be. It's still working within familiar structures, unwilling to really stretch the narrative beyond the safety of established constructs. It certainly does it well, but there is still room here for more strangeness. Along the way, however, it does get to show off a unique visual style, putting together trippy sequences that are just pure explosions of imagination. It isn't quite magic, but it is a reasonable facsimile of it.
My Rating:
