'Try Me, Beyonce' | Doctor Strange - Film Review

This review contains SPOILERS. Seriously, I pretty much spoil the whole plot.

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a New York-based neurosurgeon - not the singer from 80’s New Romantic band Visage - with ego issues who gets his hands severely broken in a car accident. After several operations fail to fully repair his mitts, Strange seeks other options and learns of Kamar-Taj, a place of spiritual healing. Travelling to Kathmandu to find it,  he is introduced to a mystical reality he never believed existed by the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her assistant, Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Soon, he meets Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen, playing another villain with eye trauma, after Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), an ex Kamar-Taj student with an even bigger ego than Strange’s and a deadly plan to match. It’s up to Strange and his friends to stop Kaecilius before he alters reality forever.

An article about this film on Christian media watch website, Movieguide, called it a ‘dangerous introduction to the occult’ in its depiction of ’false spiritual notions’, citing the biblical values Movieguide seeks to promote as ‘truth, love, compassion, sacrifice, justice, and forgiveness’, most, if not all, of which are present in Doctor Strange. The film’s director and co-writer, Scott Derrickson, is himself a Christian, so it’s unlikely that he would present a worldview that contradicts his own. In order to progress in his sorcerer training, Strange must learn humility. How more Christian a central message can you get than, ‘it’s not about you’? 

 The only danger for me in watching films like Doctor Strange is that I have had issues with certain reality-bending films before. I was really shaken by a scene in The Matrix when Neo (Keanu Reeves) wakes up from the illusion of virtual reality in his real-world battery pod. Not everyone has this sort of sensitivity and some may view at it as being overly so, or maybe a little crazy and perhaps I am - I like to see it as a vivid imagination but I have to be careful what I let into my head. 

Thankfully, in Doctor Strange, there was nothing in all in its architecture-rebuilding, wall-walking, spell-casting, astral projecting, time warping, dimension-traversing antics that either threatened my own sanity or faith. The most disturbing images in the film were realistic portrayals of serious hand and back injuries that (mostly) have nothing to do with magic. The fact that I’d seen versions of a lot of the film’s concepts before probably helped. There are whole cities bending in on themselves in Inception (although there’s more intricate window, brick and tile movement in Doctor Strange), wild space travel in 2001 and Interstellar (Christopher Nolan’s work is very influential, here), David Bowie walking around gravity-defying Escher-like structures in Labyrinth; whereas The Mighty Boosh, Cyriak’s surreal videos and U2’s video for Even Better Than The Real Thing depict fractal infinities of the kind we see during a sequence where Strange tumbles through the astral plane. Events also get rather timey-wimey, as per Doctor Who and the ending of 1978’s Superman: The Movie, albeit by a different method. 

Doctor Strange is visually audacious for a superhero film and it’s all done beautifully. I was ‘struck’ by a scene where reality slows around two characters talking in their astral forms. There’s a storm and lightening strikes crawl gracefully across the sky beyond the pair as they talk. It’s a simpler effect than entire cities being reordered but that’s part of its beauty.

The effects blend well with the story, rather than the latter being a showcase for the former. However, whilst engrossing, the narrative is pretty much the same as that of The Shadow (1994), where Alec Baldwin plays the arrogant American humbled and taught superpowers by an Eastern mystic, who is killed by a former pupil gone bad. Baldwin must then use his powers to stop his evil fellow pupil’s world-threatening plan. Batman Begins (Nolan again) had a similar story, too but Doctor Strange far outranks the former and is arguably better than the latter. The climax of Doctor Strange, whilst exciting, is still the same as most other Marvel entries. Our heroes must prevent an otherworldly force attacking a major city. Even with added wibbly-wobbly, it’s still essentially the same thing. 

As usual with Marvel, we get the obligatory end credits scenes. One features Strange talking to an Avenger that is sadly not Tony Stark, who is, of course, played by Benedict Cumberbatch’s fellow Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. Perhaps having Rachel McAdams, who played Irene Adler in Downey’s first Sherlock Holmes film, also play Strange’s ex-lover Christine Palmer in this film, was enough. Nor does Strange meet Everett K. Ross , played by Martin Freeman, Sherlock’s John Watson, in Captain America: Civil War. Maybe breaking the fourth wall like this is traversing one dimension too far? This happened to a lesser extent, at one point, when Strange says ‘yep’ in that elongated way in which Cumberbatch also utters it as Sherlock.

Thanks to writers Jon Spaihts (great to see you back after Damon Lindelof ruined your Prometheus script, Jon) Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, Doctor Strange is also very witty, which helps make one of Marvel’s more outlandish characters (which is saying something) more grounded. ‘Try me, Beyonce!’ is possibly the best line in the film. Strange says it to Kamar-Taj librarian Wong (played by Cumberbatch’s fellow Benedict, Benedict Wong, who was surely cast on more of a basis than his last name being the same as his character’s?) whose single moniker causes the good Doctor some amusement. Wong clearly spends too much time amongst his books and this magical library does not have a popular music section, not even when there’s magical music videos like Even Better Than The Real Thing; so he’s never heard of Adele, Beyonce, or even Bono (it’s odd hearing those names in a superhero film. I suppose its grounding it in ‘reality’). Strange soon educates Wong, though, allowing himself to sneak books out whilst Wong is distracted. Of all the characters, Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One was the most intriguing. Where did she get her head scars? Was she, like Strange, also inducted into the mystic arts through searching for physical healing?

Doctor Strange is bold for a Marvel movie, visually, if not narratively. Consistently good performances, writing, effects and music helps create a fun film that makes a potentially daft character believable. 

Images courtesy of IMDb and C. Scott Cargill's Twitter. Thanks, C.

His Mind is the Scene of the Crime | Sherlock: The Abominable Bride - Review (SPOILERS!)

This was the finest hour and a half of nothing much happening that I have ever seen. Cheekily marketed as a one-off, period special from Sherlock co-creators, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, The Abominable Bride was apparently (going by trailers and stills, at least) a departure from the usual contemporary setting of previous series and instead taking place in Victorian times - the original milieu of Holmes and Watson, as written by Arthur Conan Doyle in his original stories, himself writing in the 1800-1900's.

During the first half of Bride, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, usually 'Sherlock' and 'John', now refer to each other as 'Holmes' and 'Watson', rocking a respective pipe and 'tache with as much natural élan as their many forbears in the role (e.g. Jeremy Brett and David Burke). The deductive duo are on the case of a spurned bride, Mrs. Emilia Ricoletti (Natasha O'Keefe), apparently returned from the dead after being seen putting a bullet through her own addled brain. This, in much the same fashion as modern Moriarty (Andrew Scott) at the end of series 2's The Reichenbach Fall, only to appear in a video message at the end of last series' closing episode, His Last Vow, chanting 'Did you miss me?'

About an hour in, all of this turns out to be a heroine-induced fantasy inside modern Sherlock's vast Mind Palace of  as he lies on the plane we saw him on during Vow's final moments. It's all rather reminiscent of Inception.  Later on, Victorian Holmes even echoes that film's main theme. 'Once an idea exists,' he says of the reportedly resurrected bride, 'it cannot be killed.' Christopher Nolan's epic featured the same concept, as well as a main character who spent most of the film asleep on a plane.

There are hints to the twist beforehand - some very dreamlike scenes of Victorian Sherlock approaching his brother's room and their 'where do we pick up these extraordinary expressions?' conversation. 'Virus in the data.' Says Mycroft I liked the fact that, in modern Sherlock's Mind Palace, his envied elder brother is a fat slob, slowly killing himself through his food addiction. At one point, Victorian Sherlock meditates on clues in his flat. So, he's inside his Mind Palace, as his imagined Victorian self, inside his Mind Palace. A dream within a dream.

Moffat and Gatiss no doubt intended to convince viewers that the whole episode would be period-set and decided to throw us a curveball. It does still work, up to a point. Although, they possibly thought fans would want something to connect it to the series proper, beyond just using the same cast (Una Stubbs' Mrs. Hudson, Rupert Graves' Inspector Lestrade and Louise Brealey's Molly Hooper all turn up, too). I liked the connection but by having the best of both worlds it lessened both of them to some extent.

The Victorian element is diminished a little by never actually happening (although it was, according to the 2016 Sherlock, an actual cold case that he imagined himself solving in order to figure out modern Moriarty's alleged resurrection) and all that happened in the modern one was that the Great Detective slept, dreamt a lot, woke up, had a chat, got in a car and was driven off. Still, I did like the feminist element of the period story (it was like suffragette city at one point, with all the scorned 'brides' in one rom) and a revised, more Doylian Reichenbach fall scene, at the actual Reichenbach Falls, with a period Holmes and Moriarty. It was marred slightly in its deviation from canon by having Watson flippantly kill a cowed Moriarty by booting him off a ledge to a watery grave.

The twist that the Victorian shenanigans were really all a drug trip was Bride's greatest strength but also its worst weakness. It blew my mind with its audacity at first but, upon reflection, I think it cheapens the period element by shoehorning it in with the main series' continuity. This is most likely the first and only time Sherlock will do a Victorian-set story and they may as well have gone all out.

Whilst the show's style of showing graphics of text or thoughts moving around the characters in a comic book fashion might have seemed somewhat out of place in a period piece, I'm glad it was included, but not overdone, as it was - almost to the level of spoof - in the last series. A couple of the fancy scene transitions were jarring and unnecessary, though. Flipping a long shot of our heroes in a train carriage to match the exterior of a manor house (1st picture above) was a bit of a show-off and having a bird's eye view of a maze match-dissolve into Sherlock's spindly fingers (2nd picture above) in the next scene was painfully arty. Still, smart-arsery and showing off is what Sherlock is all about, as a character and a show.

The Abominable Bride was still an improvement over the whole of the last series and has me looking forward to series four, due later this year.

All images courtesy of BBC