Issue #14: Sandy's Reflections on Doctor Strange (2016)

I have to say…I liked this film much more this time around. It helps to have built up my knowledge of Doctor Strange’s character, and I did really like his arc for Infinity War/Endgame. If I had to say what I thought was missing in the film, it was that I wanted more Rachel McAdams, and I admit this, too: I like a love story and a couple to root for.
 
In many of the reviews, most critics felt like I did: we like Rachel McAdams, but there wasn’t much for her to do in Doctor Strange.  Take this very pointed analysis from Vulture:
 
It’s hard to figure out what Rachel McAdams’s standout scene in Doctor Strange is. Maybe it’s the one where she offers Benedict Cumberbatch emotional support while he performs a surgery. Possibly it’s the one where she performs surgery on Benedict Cumberbatch and offers him emotional support. My personal favorite, though, is the one where she brings Benedict Cumberbatch some fancy wine and cheese while she offers him emotional support, all of which he refuses to accept. McAdams, a recent Oscar nominee, is technically playing Doctor Christine Palmer in the film, but her actual role is to be the latest in a long line of Underutilized Marvel Love Interests, or UMLIs (https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/rachel-mcadams-doctor-strange-marvel-love-interest.html).
 
So, while I enjoyed seeing her in the film, my hopes for a juicy leading-lady or kick-ass role was dashed at my first viewing. Who doesn’t love Rachel McAdams.
 
However, this time around, I noticed something else: this film is a very good love story. Let me explain, as I’m not going where you think I am. Ha.
 
When we meet Stephen Strange, he is at the top of his game as a surgeon. He’s charming, a little bit sexy, and a lot overbearing. He’s obsessed with his own abilities and puts down others who don’t match his prowess in the operating room. We get a glimpse from Christine’s gift to him, the watch that is engraved with “Time will tell how much I love you—Christine.” Yet we are a little bit perplexed by the fact that she loved (or loves) him. We can tell they are an on-again/off-again couple who are currently in an “off” stage, but he can’t be grateful to her for her care during his recovery from the car accident—and his cutting words to her are downright cruel. Later, he asks why she never returned his emails…and we in the audience were left saying to ourselves, “Why, honestly, would she?”
 
But all of this back-and-forth is a bait and switch, really. Because she isn’t really the person that he needs to learn how to love—though his apology to her is lovely.
 
His journey forces him to confront the ugly parts of himself, to learn how to be humble, to truly see himself as he is: a vain, heartless, and ego-centric man. And he is all but broken by the middle of the film. Yet, it is only now that he can truly grow.
 
The film is sneaky in that it starts off with the formulaic plot that sets up a gorgeous former lover and the hope that by the end, they reunite and fall back in love. But that wasn’t the point of the film. The real love story is the one where Stephen Strange has to learn how to love himself.
 
Only then is he worthy of his new-found abilities. Only then can he grow and become a better man.
 
I read that Rachel McAdams’s Christine might not be in Doctor Strange 2, but I can wait. Let’s let him grow a bit more, and maybe we’ll see her again. When he’s ready.
 
And now that I’ve written this entry, I can honestly say that I like the film even more—and I look forward to more Doctor Strange in the future.

Issue #14: Alex's Reflections on Doctor Strange (2016)

This was the Marvel Cinematic Universe film I was the most excited about seeing once again. When I first saw it in the theaters in 2016, it was an underwhelming experience, but I truly wanted to like it. The MC Escher style cinematography coupled with Benedict Cumberbatch being the Sorcerer Supreme was genuinely appealing. In short, I wanted to love this film, and I went into with a preconceived level of admiration that could never conceivably be met.

My second viewing helped me come to a realization that I had not considered beforehand: Doctor Strange, throughout the course of the film, becomes the most self-actualized superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The tragedy of his origin story is a deconstruction of hubris that may be one of the most compelling in literary history. One of the running jokes among us is that I do not like origin movies, and I stand by that. I hold this opinion because I have read a lot of the comics these stories are based on and am familiar with a lot of the origin stories. Movie studios seem to have caught on to the fact that the general public is familiar with origin stories as evidenced by recent movies such as Spider-Man: Homecoming and Batman V Superman skipping the origins of Spider-Man and Batman respectively. However, it is important to note that characters such as Spider-Man and Batman, who are cultural touchstones at this point, need no introduction. Doctor Strange, an obscure 1960s Stan Lee and Steve Ditko creation, does.

 
The peace that Stephen Strange finds upon learning the mystic arts is satisfying. As a world renowned surgeon who is supremely arrogant, Dr. Strange loses a great deal of motor-function in his hands due to a car accident. Not only does Strange lose the delicate use of his hands, he loses his identity and sacrifices all of his wealth to find a cure for his hands. However, in his quest to physically fix his hands, he finds his inner peace through learning about the Mystic Arts.
 
There is a whole plot that revolves around a shadow dimension and Dormamu trying to invade Earth, yada, yada, yada. But the soul of this film, is the transition that Benedict Cumberbatch has from arrogant surgeon to humble sorcerer. Christine Palmer (played by Rachel McAdams) was the only person in the world who saw the good in Stephen Strange from the beginning, and the one belonging Strange has left when he meets The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) is the watch Christine gave him which has an inscription: “Time will tell how much I love you.”
 
In the end, the story of Doctor Strange is more than cool MC Escher action sequences and trippy kaleidoscope effects. It is the story of finding peace when everything is lost. Of all the superheroes in the MCU thus far, he seemed the happiest and most content at the end.

Issue #14: Gian's Reflections on Doctor Strange (2016)

When I was a kid, I never really liked Dr. Strange. His costume seemed to goofy to me, which is funny considering that I loved superhero costumes which, in the early days with their underwear on the outside, could have all been considered pretty goofy. But to Dr. Strange just didn’t look right. He first appeared in Strange Tales #110, and Stan Lee noted, he was meant to be “a different kind of super-hero”:
 
 

I definitely thought he was different and too “weird” for me to like as a kid. I think, too, that I didn’t care for the gray streaks in Dr. Strang’s hair. (Let’s just say I’m a lot more accepting of gray hair now than I was at age 6!) At any rate, all of this reticence toward Dr. Strange made me a bit skeptical when Marvel decided to introduce the master of the mystic arts to the MCU. But as usual, Marvel knew exactly what it was doing when it released Doctor Strange in 2016 from director Scott Derrickson and staring the fantastic Benedict Cumberbatch.
 
The film goes for lots of laugh as well as some cool special effects. The lightness of Doctor Strange felt needed after the anguish left in viewers watching Captain America and Iron Man battle almost to the death in the previous MCU installment, Captain America: Civil War.
 
What interests me, though, is Marvel’s attempt to weave some religious themes into this film. Prior to Doctor Strange, there has not been any exploration of religion or philosophy in the MCU except, perhaps, for Loki in Avengers telling people to bow down to him like a god, which, of course, one brave man refuses to do.
 
At the beginning of the film, Stephen Strange has it all. As a top-notch surgeon, he has wealth, a beautiful girl friend, and so much ego that his head he can barely enter a room. But after recklessly speeding and crashing his sports car, his nerves are injured too badly to ever perform surgery again. Strange spends his fortune chasing one experimental cure after another, but all of those prove to be dead ends. In the end, broke and having cruelly driven his lover away, he stumbles upon a man whose paralysis was cured by some sort of mysticism. Strange goes to Tibet in search of this dream of a cure.
 
But instead of a cure, Dr. Strange finds religion and magic or, put another way, he finds faith. At first, Strange can’t accept things beyond his understanding of the physical realm. Strange is a doctor, after all, a man of science. He even shouts at the Ancient One (played with cool reserve by Tilda Swinton), “There is no such thing as spirit! We are matter and nothing more!” The Ancient One responds by pushing Strange’s spirit right out of his body, offering him startling proof of the existence of magic.

In “Doctor Strange Is The Most Religious Superhero Movie Ever,” a post for the website Watching God, Paul Asay discusses how Doctor Strange breaks new ground for the MCU:
 

There’s an undeniable aspect of faith to it all, even beyond the obvious occult trappings in which these spells are used. Strange is forced to embrace spiritual paradoxes, to relinquish his idea of control, to set aside the very things that made him so great at his job. “Your intellect has taken you far in life,” the Ancient One says, “but it can take you no farther.” At another juncture, she tells Strange one of the secrets of faith, particularly Christian faith. “It’s not about you.

Stephen Strange thought he had everything: Money, prestige, a beautiful lover, intellect. He was on top of the world, and that made him arrogant, self-righteous, and sometimes cruel. But everything we have can be taken from us in an instant. Strange learns this all too hard lesson, and then he has to learn that when the trappings of the world desert us, we must rely on faith and love to get us through.

 

Strange does not know everything, as the Ancient One shows him. And, eventually, this leads Strange toward humility, understanding, and finally courage. While he gains great mystical power, he also has to come to trust that there are things greater than himself. He must trust in others, for it is not only about him.

 

The other day, in yet another argument with my 17-year-old son, I found myself saying, “I remember when I was seventeen and knew everything, too. How I miss those days.” When I was 17, I didn’t care for that gray hair at Dr. Strange’s temples, but little did I know that I would find myself in the Ancient One’s shoes soon enough.