Over a year ago, I started watching the Defenders shows on Netflix in prep for the upcoming Spider-Man film and at time of writing I’ve about three-and-a-half seasons left. In light of the imminent release of the new Doctor Strange film, I skipped ahead to the “Phase 4” shows on Disney+ from WandaVision to What If? The latter is a nine-part animated series of roughly half-an-hour each and seemingly follows on from the ending of Loki Season One with the Marvel Cinematic Universe branching out into various alternate timelines (in light of Spider-Man: No Way Home, seemingly a way of explaining the various screen incarnations of Marvel heroes over the decades). Each episode starts off with a premise asking “what if” – for example – Agent Carter became the hero that Captain America originally was. As it turns out, the episodes aren’t entirely self-contained and they all eventually pay off in a two-part finale in which our various heroes across the dimensions are rounded up for a showdown with the Big Bag – and a very, VERY, cosmically Big Bad it is too (the moment the arch-villain breaks the literal fourth wall is one of the scariest I can recall in the MCU’s history). In some way, the series is better served by animation rather than the usual CGI spectacles. The universe has never been more imperilled and the onscreen destruction has never been more epic. I’m not a fan of the melding of traditional hand-drawn 2D animation with 3D movement, which has an uncanny valley-like effect like CGI humans. It generally makes for an enjoyably disposable Saturday morning cartoon.
Saturday morning is probably the
best time to see the new Doctor Strange film.
Original director Scott Derrickson (whose first film I enjoyed) now sits
as an exec producer and Sam Raimi returns to the director’s chair, fifteen
years after Spider-Man 3. After a teasing opening sequence, the film becomes
rather like one of his Spider-Man trilogy with our hero (Benedict Cumberbatch) seeing
his would-be love interest being married off to someone else (there’s no turnaround
fleeing the altar this time) before an action sequence with a bug-eyed monster
storming the city that recalls last year’s The
Suicide Squad from DC. Here, the
good doctor and his sidekick Wong (Benedict Wong) run into the mysterious America
Chavaz (Xochitl Gomez), a girl whose superpower is that she can jump across the
various dimensions of the multiverse.
She comes to the attention of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), whom we
last saw becoming the Scarlet Witch in TV’s WandaVision. She wants to use Chavez’s power to find the
universe where her imagined sons from the TV series are living real lives and
assume her role as their mother. It’s up
to Strange and Wong to protect Chavez and this leads to a trip across various
timelines, dark magic, and trans-dimensional bodily possession. One particular sequence sees a trailer-teased
crossover with another Marvel property and some all-to-brief cameos from
characters old and new.
My initial problem with the MCU
had been how every film seemed like a homework assignment in that you had to
see everything in order to understand how it all paid off down the line. With this – having seen most of the films
only once at time of writing – it gets harder to keep track of all the
characters and events so I’d start struggling to place returning faces. I also retain a nostalgic preference for two
thirds of Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy in which the characters felt like real
people facing real-life problems rather than cartoon characters on a production
line. It’s generally good fun though and
its transition into PG-13-friendly horror (more Drag Me to Hell than Evil
Dead) just about nudges it into four-star territory. And it has the best post-credits bit since Spider-Man: Homecoming.
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