So I have had this blog post on my to do list for like five or six days now and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, which is very unlike me. I think the reason probably has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t know how I feel about the movie as a whole. I definitely can’t say I left the theater like oh my god that was so enjoyable and I loved it, but I also don’t think it was bad necessarily? I don’t know. As you can see, I still haven’t managed to fully figure out how I feel about the whole thing, but I’m going to attempt to put some thoughts into words! (Spoilers ahead!)
I will say right off the bat that Dr. Strange is not my favorite. He has a cockiness and entitlement that, while present in many of our other heroes, isn’t softened in anyway. Maybe because his relationship with Christine was always kind of meh. Maybe because that’s an attitude carried by Benedict Cumberbatch. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like he lacks the compassion and empathy that our other heroes display at least occasionally. So I figured I probably wouldn’t love this one, but I was looking forward to it because I do love Wanda and I really loved WandaVision. Maybe part of my issue is that Wanda in this movie feels like a completely different character than the one we saw at the end of WV. At the end of WV, she had realized how much harm she was causing and made the ultimate personal sacrifice in order to attempt to start to right her wrongs. So how did we go from that to this total monster we see in MoM? I assume it’s because of the Dark Hold, but I don’t feel like we saw enough (or any) of that journey for it to make sense.
I guess the hard part as a viewer is I didn’t know who I was rooting for here. I’m ambivalent about Dr. Strange, but I love Wanda, but she really crossed over to the dark side. It left me with a lot of questions and not a lot of satisfactory answers. And I think you can do that two sides to the story (see Civil War), but I don’t know that it was successful here, at least not for me. Normally when I leave the theater after watching an MCU movie, I can’t wait to go back and see it again. (I saw Spider-Man No Way Home again a couple weeks ago and I still cried through the whole last half.) I don’t really have a desire to see this one again though. It was kind of like okay, I saw it, I have the knowledge I need for whatever comes next, but I don’t need to watch that one again, which is a shame.
So yeah, not a whole lot of coherent thoughts on this one, but I would be interested to hear perspectives from people who thought it was really well done, so if that’s you, hit me up! What did you think of Dr. Strange?