DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS, sponsored by the Kandarian Demon Film Society

A new Sam Raimi movie is out this weekend? Groovy.

Figured it was time to make a thread to dismember our thoughts into.

Two and change with credits? Sign me up! Raimi can pack more into a minute of film than most directors can during nine ty, not expecting a game-changer but certainly a well paced time at the theater.

Oh yeah, this breezed right by without feeling rushed. Definitely a Raimi film while still being a Marvel film.

There a Bruce cameo?

Oh yes indeed.

How does Wanda's story fit in? Is it a good fit for the ending of Wandavision? Given that this was supposed to be released beforehand, am curious if it feels disjointed.

Mostly, I want more talking here on CD!

Doc Happenin wrote:

Given that this was supposed to be released beforehand, am curious if it feels disjointed.

Pretty sure it got totally re-written since then. The film really does feel like a sequel to both the first Strange and WandaVision. Really, if you've only seen those two properties, you will absolutely not be lost here. And I feel like it addresses some of the complaints about how WandaVision ended.

I'm seeing this tonight.

Just got back from a matinee. This flick was bonkers fun. I kinda wish I revisited the first film to refresh on a few bits. At one point Michael Stuhlbarg shows up and I was stressing to remember if he played a different character in the MCU, then see in the credits that he was in the first. And then he disappears. I feel like that’s too much of a common recurrence in MCU; grabbing notable character actors and not doing much with them. Alfre Woodward was at least given a more memorable bit in CIVIL WAR.

I'm seeing this on Saturday night. Pumped as hell.

My first Counting Down review. I’ll be brief. Was mostly bored by the first two-thirds, including the big Illuminati (Marvel) nonsense…but then it hit Raimi-gear and I ended up liking it a lot. Man, I missed Raimi and his filmmaking style and sensibility. Great fit, and it got quite nasty. I’ll wait for more spoilery thoughts until next week, when more folks have seen it.

What a delight!

It’s a wonderful surprise to see how much of Sam Raimi’s visual and tonal signature can be felt running underneath all this, and as a longtime fan of his work, that’s so refreshing. Marvel really did let him take the horror stuff much further than anybody should have expected, and it’s a fantastic thing to see him playing with that kind of iconography again. Ditto for how he visualizes sorcery and magic.

On a storytelling level, the movie is trying to do several significant things:

1. Be a sequel to DOCTOR STRANGE, servicing him and his supporting characters.
2. Be a sequel to WANDAVISION, servicing Wanda’s continued character metamorphosis.
3. Be an expansion of the MCU template to include more overt horror elements.
4. Indulge wacky, fan-service-y, Easter-Egg-y Multiverse hijinks.

Potentially four hard things to balance and weave together in the right way. Remarkably, somehow, restraint was shown and they got the brew just right. This is not an overstuffed movie. The Multiverse shenanigans do not take over the film; instead, we are actually treated to an agreeably self-contained (and fairly small-scale) story that doesn’t strain to tie-into larger MCU story arcs, and instead does feel fully centered around Strange and Wanda, with a splash (more than a splash, really) of some trademark Raimi ghoulishness.

There are nitpicks, of course (characterizations of various players don’t fully line up with where we last saw them, and a couple spoilery bits didn’t land for me), but there’s so much more that is terrifically enjoyable: almost every individual sequence here has at least something visually interesting going on, the performances are all very good (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Strange should be the foundation on which the next ten years of the MCU are built, if producer Kevin Feige knows what he’s doing), it’s got a rollicking pace with a two-hour runtime, and there are enough wild and crazy shenanigans (including a full embrace of the weirdness of the Doctor Strange comics) to keep the picture constantly engaging.

Please let Raimi do more of this.

You know, I kinda want them to let Raimi do a Man-Thing movie now.

I dunno, maybe it's because the MCU is finally starting to collapse under its weight for me or maybe it's because I've never been able to get into Raimi, but this felt a bit airless and joyless. There was no general sense of a grand adventure spreading out in front of my eyes, there was just a bunch of characters running in a narrow tube of plot and getting to their destination not a moment too soon.

I enjoyed the hell out of this. Loved how gruesome it got, especially with Zombie Strange at the end. Good fun.

I thought it was pretty good, but what surprised me the most was just how Raimi/Evil Dead it went. I expected it to have a few Easter Eggs, but it went way further down the rabbit hole than that. It felt like the most Raimi movie since Army Of Darkness to me, and that includes Drag Me To Hell, which I thought was pretty damn Raimi-ish obviously as well.

ArcadeJimmy wrote:

I thought it was pretty good, but what surprised me the most was just how Raimi/Evil Dead it went.  I expected it to have a few Easter Eggs, but it went way further down the rabbit hole than that.  It felt like the most Raimi movie since Army Of Darkness to me, and that includes Drag Me To Hell, which I thought was pretty damn Raimi-ish obviously as well.

Raimi and Feige have worked together on the Spider-Man films, so I think Feige just allowed him to go wild with his own style of filmmaking and I’m so glad. It’s such a fun ride of a movie.

I never knew Feige was involved that far back. Makes sense though, and thanks: that’s a good piece of info to know.

Feige has been producing movies for Marvel since the first X-Men film. It's just that he never had a sizable amount of control on any of them until Iron Man.

I had an absolutely blast with this film, by the way. Just a great rollercoaster ride of fantasy horror from start to finish.

Sam Raimi Superhero Flicks Ranked:
1. Darkman
2. Spider-Man 2
3. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
4. Spider-Man
5. Spider-Man 3

Still in the theater and holy shit, this was just a joy. Love seeing an MCU film with some teeth and a flair of its own. Raimi bgone done brought it.

Also, props to the writers for making Captain Marvel interesting! Not being the strongest hero in the room is actually great.

Feel kinda bad for Lynch, she's now "the other one" in two series!

I don't know that she was in the movie enough to call her "interesting," but the fight was fun!

I guess it's interesting because she didn't just Konami code her way to victory.

I know Rami was recently quoted as saying he had full creative control, but certain beats had to be hit; I'm paraphrasing of course. He wasn't talking out of both sides of his mouth. Visually this is a Rami movie. There were visuals that reminded me of Evil Dead 2. The third act gets bat shit crazy! The beats that had to be hit were that the characters stayed consistent to how they behaved in previous movies. The Snap, defeating Thanos and the events of Wandavision are addressed as well.