Doctor Strange

Dr. Strange was created in 1963 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, the same creative team that came up with Spiderman. It was a move away from traditional tights-and-flights superheroes and was an embrace of America’s burgeoning interest in magic, expanded consciousness, and psychedelia in the 1960s. Instead of a plucky teenager dressed as a spider fighting crime or a playboy millionaire in a suit of iron righting wrongs, Dr. Stephen Strange was a sorcerer, a magician who traversed mysterious dimensions and dealt with cosmic forces. He brought mysticism to Marvel comics’ universe of irradiated, angsty teens, mutants, and scientist industrialists. 

While he’s been woven throughout the Marvel universe for over fifty years, Dr. Strange is a more obscure character compared to Captain America or X-Men, and perhaps that has something to do with the success of the new film version of his story. Much like Guardians of the Galaxy from a couple of years ago, with lower stakes, the filmmakers are more free to be as faithful or as loose with the original stories as they want. In the case of Dr. Strange, it’s pretty faithful. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Stephen Strange, a brilliant but utterly self-centered surgeon who is in a catastrophic car accident that gives his hands a career-ending tremors. He exhausts all of his resources looking for a cure, and eventually finds himself in Nepal, hoping for a more mystical solution.

Strange studies with a sorcerer called The Ancient One, played by Tilda Swinton. With her, he learns the mystic arts, makes some allies, makes some enemies, and finds enlightenment. Initially, Strange is a reluctant hero who actually only wants to learn enough magic to stop his hand tremors and get his old life back, but eventually, as it often does in movies like this, fate takes him in another direction and he ends up becoming the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth. He battles Kaecilius, a rival former student of the Ancient One. He, like any good comic book movie villain, wants to bring an end to the world by handing it over to a massive, cosmic, evil entity from another dimension called Dormamu.   

If this sounds like even more comic book ridiculousness than usual, maybe it is. But Dr. Strange the movie manages to pull it all off with a good deal of gravity and a straight face while staying lighthearted in the right moments. 

The lynchpins are Cumberbatch’s deft performance; a smart, funny script; and confident, economical direction from Scott Derrickson. Cumberbatch’s success comes from the fact that he’s simply a really good actor. He seems to take the role seriously without taking himself seriously. He effectively conveys Strange as a real character who evolves over the course of the film, but he also doesn’t try to make a movie about sorcerers and other dimensions into Shakespeare. The script is light on its feet and gives nice moments of humanity mixed in with the universe-spanning, special effects packed action sequences. Director Scott Derrickson has apparently been sharpening his skills on the five or six horror films he’s helmed over the last fifteen years or so, and he does a good job of keeping the action moving in its kaleidoscopic fashion without overwhelming the audience. He’s been more or less a B-list guy up to this point, but I anticipate that the success of Dr. Strange will change that. 

 

As a comic nerd from way back, I will say the thing I enjoyed the most about Dr. Strange is how the movie created beautiful, striking, 21^st century representations of Steve Ditko’s original art from the 1960s. You wouldn’t think it translate well to the big screen but clearly Marvel Studios has a ninja strikeforce team of digital technicians and artists who found a way to be faithful to the trippy, sometimes silly looking original art but still make it fit into Marvel’s sleek, glossy, modern universe.