![]() Without Vision, or any inkling of Wanda’s desires beyond her children, this dream comes across as even more claustrophobic. In this universe, dreams are windows into the lives of our multiversal selves, and for Wanda, her dream involves being a suburban housewife. Since the events of WandaVision (which you would need to watch to get what the hell is going on here), the Scarlet Witch has leaned full tilt into her now-villainous persona, eyeing America’s powers as a way to reach a universe where her fake children are actually alive. This is perhaps how we arrive at screenwriter Michael Waldron’s utterly sexist conception of Wanda. These are corporate installments for shareholders rather than, you know, actual films. How can I not raise my eyebrow at the casting of America Chavez, who has predominantly read as Afro-Latina in comics? How can I not notice that the Zombie Doctor Strange has less frisson than Billy Butcherson’s mangled corpse in Hocus Pocus? Doctor Strange 2 is too keenly aware fans don’t need much to cheer at these wretched undertakings. Instead, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness left me more disenchanted than ever. I come to Marvel films hoping for something to hold onto, for a wisp of the electric thrill audiences around me feel. The ideas that hold a gleam of potential are shot down by the film’s rank ugliness, its incessant pace of exposition, the utter slog of the first hour, and the insistence on special effects that render the horrifying as textureless. In another, they’re garish, living paint. Another transforms them into cartoon characters. ![]() There’s a sequence in which America and Doctor Strange find themselves traveling through universes at a breakneck speed, each more debilitating than the last. But Doctor Strange’s multiverse is neither emotionally resonant nor artistically agile enough to leave an impression. Multiverses have an intrinsically somber quality as they are evidence of the road not taken and the people who we could have been if things were different. ![]() Bodies here and there are left mangled and bloody, and alternate versions of characters we’ve come to know appear throughout. There are moments with intriguing Raimi ideas behind them - when a tentacled beast’s eye is plucked out when Doctor Strange possesses a corpse in another universe when a mystical battle involves notes of music alight in the air when a whole universe turns into a graying graveyard with only a single spark of life. Doctor Stephen Strange (played with a foot out the door by Benedict Cumberbatch) performs daring feats of sorcery and jumps through a variety of poorly crafted universes with America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), an interdimensional being who can punch holes through universes (if only she could learn how to wield such abilities), in hopes of outmaneuvering the incredibly powerful, and now completely batshit evil, Wanda Maximoff–slash–Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olson). The plot, as it stands, is held together with bubblegum and a prayer. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. And it’s easy to see why Marvel would absorb Raimi, with all his weight and prestige, into its machinery. Your career either dies with some integrity or you live long enough for your artistry to be absorbed and nullified by the Marvel machine. These are expectations that aren’t quite met in the latest MCU installment, a truth not so much surprising as it is grimly disappointing. It has also piqued audience expectations for a familiar blend of pop art and macabre intrigue. In hiring a beloved “auteur” like Raimi to take over the Doctor Strange sequel, Marvel has given the Multiverse of Madness some heft. But in films as mammoth as these, the latter can only go so far. The body can be a site of horror and power in the superhero genre, an idea that is made lightning bright by a combination of good scripting and the approach actors take to it. The swooning camerawork elevates sequences like the failed surgery of Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) in Spider-Man 2 - darkness swallows the characters whole, while the cutting sound design of nails scraping against tile leaves you with goosebumps. Its arch dialogue and visual ecstasy serve to streamline our understanding of the characters, allowing them, as well as the world they inhabit, to feel uniquely real even with its heightened tone. The pleasure of director Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Spider-Man films beginning in 2002 can be found in the bombast. Faced with infinite plot possibilities, Marvel couldn’t come up with a less sexist Wanda story line?
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