Keep reading to the end to find out what I thought of the Avatar 2 trailer!
Genre: Superhero
Premise: Dr. Strange must utilize the help of a young universe-trotting superhero to defeat a fellow member of the Avengers, who’s turned into a super-psycopath.
About: How is this possible? Dr. Strange 2 pulls in a 185 million dollars! Can Marvel do no wrong? The script was written by Michael Waldron, who became a big deal a few years back when Kevin Feige fell in love with his script, “The Worst Guy Of All Time, And The Girl Who Came To Kill Him,” which I reviewed here. That script got Waldron the “Loki” series. It got him Kevin Feige’s Star Wars project. And it got him this. Of course, as we all know, writers have zero control over these Marvel films. It’s the director calling the shots. And Dr. Strange 2 sees the return of comic book movie directing icon, Sam Raimi.
Writer: Michael Waldron
Details: 2 hours and 6 minutes
We’ve got ourselves a new Marvel movie!
The summer has officially begun.
But has it begun with a whimper or a bang? And do those whispers and/or bangs exist in this universe or another one?
So many questions. I don’t know if I have the answers. But I’m going to give it my best shot!
Okay, I’ll keep this summary short and sweet. And it *will* include spoilers. You’ve been warned.
Dr. Strange is bummed out because the love of his life, Christine, just got married. But no sooner do the wedding bells ring than a giant octopus is attacking the city. So Dr. Strange goes and kills it.
He quickly finds out the octopus is from another universe, a universe that a new superhero, 16 year old Latina, America, opened. America has a special power that allows her to jump between universes.
Flash forward to Wanda, aka Scarlet Witch, who is really bummed out because she’s learned that she has kids in every single universe but this one! Since she wants kids, she wants America, since America can get her to these other universes where she can be with her kids who aren’t technically hers but rather another version of hers.
Dr. Strange needs to stop this because… well, it’s been 24 hours since I’ve seen the movie and I don’t entirely remember why he has to stop her. Probably because stealing somebody else’s kids are bad, I’d imagine.
Boy is she pissed at him about that. So mad that she attacks Dr. Strange’s Shaolin monk temple and says if they don’t give her America, or the secret book of spells that allows her to get to her not-hers-kids, then she’s going to start killing everyone. Which is exactly what she does, killing several superhero favorites. But did she kill them… or the the thems from the multiverse? Either way, she’s out for blood. And it’s going to take the most unique Dr. Strange ever to stop her.
The first thing I noticed about this movie was the opening. The opening has Dr. Strange and America running through a bizarro world set of objects floating in the sky trying to get to some treasure at the end of the path.
I thought… is this really where we are?
In 1981, we had a sequence just like this. Two people heading down a trail trying to get to a treasure. That movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I was thinking, in the 40 years since this scene… have we improved on it? Or have we actually gone backwards? I would argue that we’ve gone backwards. Because the brilliance of Raiders was that everything was clear. We understood the rules (a cave with a bunch of booby traps). We were spatially aware of how the geography worked (it was one straight line). The simplicity of it is what allowed it to thrive.
This was just gobbledy-gook nonsense. I didn’t understand what Dr. Strange and America were running from, what the rules of the world were, the geography. Everything looked fake. And that’s not to say the big papier-mâché boulder in Raiders didn’t look fake. But this looked a special kind of a fake. A non-tangible fake. And that monster looked like digital scrambled eggs.
I don’t mean to be so “old man yells at cloud” here but I would bet you a million dollars that if you sat a dozen ten year-olds down in front of two TVs, one playing the opening sequence from Raiders and the other playing the opening sequence from this movie, that they’d all eventually focus on the Raiders TV.
Going into this movie, I had a simple expectation. If that expectation was met, I’d be happy. If it wasn’t, I’d be bummed. That expectation was that the film exploit the multiverse concept as much as possible. The movie is literally called, “Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.” But guess what? There is surprising little multiversing.
I thought they were gonna get stuck in a bunch of strange universes and have to find their way back. But outside of seeing a couple of quick lame universes, we end up in a world pretty much the same as our own, and that’s it. No more multiversing! And the final act takes place on some random mountain somewhere. So it didn’t matter WHAT universe we were in. Not gonna lie. Lame choice.
Luckily, the film had two good things going for it and two fun talking points. Benedict Cumberbatch and Scarlet Witch were the good things. Benedict Cumberbatch is endlessly likable. So he was fun. And Scarlet Witch turned out to be a surprisingly formidable villain. I always thought her character was kinda lame. But her psychopathic tendencies gave the villain storyline a bigger punch than it typically has in a Marvel movie.
Talking point #1 is the Illuminati sequence. In retrospect, this sequence was kind of genius. Because it introduces two characters that are really exciting to see in the Marvel Universe – Professor X and Reed Richards (leader of the Fantastic Four). You see these characters and you think, “Whoa! This is what the 20th Century Fox buy got them! We get to see these characters in Marvel movies now!” But then they completely flip those expectations on their head when they kill these titanic characters off. And, of course, it doesn’t matter that they killed them off because we’re in another universe. Those characters are still alive when we go back to earth (and therefore available for future movies). It was the perfect way for Marvel to be able to have its cake and eat it too.
Talking point #2 is Zombie Dr. Strange. I thought Zombie Dr. Strange was cleverly constructed. Somehow it made sense. And I have to give to director Sam Raimi for figuring out a way to get his favorite things – zombies – into a Marvel film in a way that actually worked.
So if I were only grading the movie on everything I’ve talked about above, I’d give it a “worth the price of admission.” Cause it was fairly entertaining. Unfortunately, there was one more element in the film that weighted it down so severely, it plummeted into “awful” territory. I’m of course talking about the character of America.
Make it stop! Agh! I even hate that stupid jacket!
I have no clue what this girl was doing in the movie. I kept thinking, “Is this one of those weird woke choices that studios are being forced to make these days?” I couldn’t figure out what was steering anyone with half a brain into including this annoying pointless reject of a character.
I thought, “Well maybe she’s there to give the younger audience someone to relate to?”
The problem with that logic is it doesn’t matter what your intentions are as a writer. If you try to force a character into a movie in an inorganic way, nobody’s going to like them. And this character never once felt like she was needed in this movie. And even if you excused that, she was just BORING. She had nothing interesting going on. No powers. No flashy backstory. No compelling inner conflict. Why was she in this movie????
Cause she’s the Jar-Jar Binks of Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. She’s the reason, when people ask me if they should see this movie, I’m going to say no. She’s straight up a dumb character and shame on Marvel if they put her in here for reasons other than trying to make the best movie possible.
I’m happy that movies like this are getting people back into the theater. But this is a bottom fourth-tier Marvel movie. It’s in the same category as the early Thor films and the Ant-Man sequel. If you have 2 and a half hours to waste, go ahead and see it. Otherwise, wait for the next Marvel offering.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t pair your hero up with someone just to pair them up with someone. Sure, adding a co-star so that your movie is a two-hander has benefits. Giving your hero someone to bounce dialogue off of eases up the exposition load and allows for a lot more banter. But if the secondary character doesn’t have any interesting juxtaposition to the hero at all (good juxtaposition would be Thor and Starlord)… it’s better to just delete them. A two-hander is not unlike how sexual chemistry works in real life. When you and another person have sexual chemistry, there’s a spark that provides an exciting energy to your interactions. When you don’t, there’s a deadness to your conversation. It lacks impact. Same thing when writing two-handers. If the chemistry isn’t there, drop the second character. Cause Doctor Strange 2 is evidence of what happens when you try to force a two-hander. It’s paaaaaainful.
BONUS: THOUGHTS ON AVATAR 2 TRAILER!
I thought this trailer was amazing considering that Cameron is clearly only including footage from the first ten minutes of the movie. This isn’t even a traditional teaser. This is whatever precedes a teaser. It’s basically footage set to music. The difference being that the footage is accumulated from ten years of research and development along with a new industry-changing digital technology.
Surprisingly, there isn’t a whole lot of underwater footage. We get some shots of the human base on Pandora, which has gotten a lot bigger. We get some shots of the jungle. We get people swimming just under the surface. Nothing crazy. But the thing that stuck with me the most was the music. It had this traditional etherial sound but Cameron has tweaked it so that the ends of each note slither, like tendrils, into your body, latching onto your soul and shaking it. I know that’s a big statement but it’s true. Cameron is a master and understands that nothing can be left to chance. He makes sure that even the music – something no fan’s been thinking about during Avatar’s decades-long production – is great. That sound alone makes me believe this is going to be an epic story.
If I were to guess what the plot was, I’d say that the humans are trying to exterminate the remaining pockets of Na’Vi resistance, which is why the Na’Vi have moved underwater, since it’s harder for the humans to fight them there. A part of me wishes a third foe would arrive so the humans and Na’Vi had to work together to stop them. But I’m not seeing anything in this trailer that would lead me to believe that’s part of the plot.
I think Avatar 2 is going to be one of those movies that shakes the industry up. Because for the last ten years, Marvels’ been cranking movies out on an assembly line. And they look crappy. Marvel movies work because of the characters, not because you’re like, “Wow, those were amazing special effects.” Then you had Netflix, which was pumping out films too fast for any serious quality control. So the industry has gotten used to these sloppy-looking movies and just shrugged their shoulders and said, “That’s just the way it’s done now.”
Avatar 2 is a movie where every single frame will have been relentlessly poured over by Cameron himself so that it looks beautiful. Audiences are going to be wowed by that and Marvel’s going to have a come-to-Jesus moment where they can’t give us special effects that are indistinguishable from hiring some nameless programmer on Fiver.
And that’s a good thing. Cause if there’s anything Doctor Strange 2 taught me? It’s that Marvel is getting too sloppy. Nothing like a new movie from the master to remind everyone where the bar should be placed. :)
