Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the newest Marvel Studios film and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr Stephen Strange and this time he must contend with Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) a former Avenger turned Scarlet Witch as she prowls the multiverse for her children who we saw in the Disney Plus series WandaVision but Strange will need the help of a young girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) to travel across the Multiverse to stop her.
Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was sadly a bit of a disappointment to me for these reasons:
- The first reason is that the Strange and Wanda storylines felt too much at times like 2 separate storylines that on their own could’ve been tweaked enough to justify their own movie but instead they are brought together into this movie and they didn’t really gel together into a cohesive film I felt, in one moment one storyline would build to a big moment and then the next scene would deflate that sense of urgency and it put me off after a while.
- Secondly the character motivations especially around Wanda, America and Christine played by Rachel McAdams again really didn’t make a lot of sense to me, Wanda’s arc in this movie just had me thinking “This is either contradicting or ignoring the events of WandaVision entirely” and that really began to bother me as Wanda to me was a sympathetic villain but here not so much and as good as Elisabeth Olsen is in this role I was really bothered by this disconnect.
Also Xochitl Gomez’s America felt too much like an anchor on the overall storytelling, from what I’ve read she is a fan favourite character in the comics but here she just got in the way somewhat when the clear focus should have been Strange and Wanda and their conflict especially when their both masters of the mystical arts and with some script tweaking could’ve found their way around the multiverse just fine on their own.
And lastly I have to talk about the Charles Xavier cameo (don’t worry this cameo was revealed in the previews for the film so no spoilers here) and this was the most disappointing part of this movie to me, not only was it very short but the way the character is handled just made me think “The Charles Xavier of the X-Men movies would not have let it happen like this” and also as much as I love Sir Patrick Stewart I think it would’ve been better if James McAvoy had done this cameo instead as Stewart looked too old and frail for this small role I’m sorry to say.
And so that was Dr Strange and the Mutliverse of Madness and since Avengers Endgame in 2019 I have felt more and more that the MCU has been a real mixed bag quality wise and I fear that between the 3-4 movies a year and the 3-4 Disney Plus shows a year that Kevin Feige is stretching his production resources too thin, asking too much of them and not being able to properly oversee everything in the way he once did when it was just 3 films a year and I think he either needs to let the series take a break or share the workload otherwise this franchise will fall over a cliff and badly, 1.5 out of 5.
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