I finally just watched this. What did Sup Forums think of it?

I finally just watched this. What did Sup Forums think of it?

yes

Rachel McAdams didn't get naked

I saw it for the first time yesterday because I'm a Doctor Strange casual and wasn't super excited for it.

Visually it looked amazing and Bandersnoot Crumblepump looked on point. Fight scenes got messy and hard to track when doing the reality twisting thorough.

The villains outright sucked. Although I did think that how Strange got Dormammu to piss off was clever, even if it was anticlimactic.

Overall an enjoyable movie, nothing to rave about. Wouldn't watch it again anyrime soon though. 6.5/10 I guess?

Yeah she really needs to hurry the fuck up and do it. Then I will have completed the Mean Girls trifecta.

>The villains outright sucked
I thought the main bad guy played by Mads Mikkelsen was better than most other Marvel villains. At least he had a good reason for trying to do what he was trying to do and it was sympathetic at that.

s'good. Not great, but good.

With all the ways the could have fucked up, they played it safe and didn't really drop the ball anywhere... probably the best route when using someone like Strange who audiences don't know but nerds consider an A-lister.

And I liked Dormammu's big wavy head, though I understand why some people didn't.

Iron Man 1 but with a babby's first trippy movie coat of paint.


Also his accent was awful.

Lackluster story, fantastic visuals that pretty much carried the whole film

It was cheap

the sling rings were shitty

the inception magic was hack

I didn't sympathize with him
Crumblepump looks ugly


next...

loved it
story is simple, but its not a problem since the focus is firmly on the characters
special effects is the main attraction and it is awesome, worth watching in 3D, goes full 70s ditko psychedelia
lots of memorable lines (Dormammu ive come to bargain, teach me) hilarious delivery of the lines
characters are still a bit generic, except for the cape, the cape is awesome

>Dormammu i've come to bargain.

Flick/Kino

Felt like a very paint by the numbers, overly safe, Iron Man 1 remake. (Which I understand, since it's supposed to be the new launching point for the MCU's next wave).

Which means it was still fun to watch....like, once. But also somewhat forgettable outside of the visuals.

I feel like this was straight up copied from an Episode of Doctor Who.

Haven't watched it. Same with Green Lanterns. I have zero interest in watching these two movies.

Green Lantern was ok, it isn't as shitty as people say. But the villain sucked ass, they should have used Sinestro instead of just teasing him for a sequel.

And they are both coincidentally have same plot.

What, you didn't think The Floating Testicle was a genuine threat to our hero?

The Bad
>should been someone less famous/suited for the role
>DRASTIC lack of actual spells, more cosmic "science" magic
>dormamu's design was alright, needed more work to be great. pupils was a mistake
>ancient one was too jokey, all the funnies in general stuck out way too much. only good funny moment was strange stealing books from wongs library and "mister doctor. its strange. i suppose, im not one to judge"
>mordo's change of heart came almost out of nowhere, slight hint but needed more buildup to be satisfying
>they killed the fucking villain again
>mirror dimension
>this is the staff of the living tribunal
>eye of agamotto is a goddamn infinity gem

The Good
>everything right up until "teach me" was really good movie content, nothing stuck out as odd/out of place or unlikable.
>the magic that was used looked pretty cool
>"dormamu, i've come to bargain"
>all the wonderful translations of ditko's art was really quite breathtaking, albeit shortlived
>the sanctom at least looked pretty good
>costumes seemed pretty good overall, ancient one did look like they were wearing a raincoat but strange and mordo looked good

my thoughts

le Beyonce xD

It would have been much better if they cut out 80% of the jokes.

I liked the Kaecilius and his interaction with The Ancient One and Strange. His origin and story felt a lot better than most other villains in MCU.

It was a shitty Boring and an unappealing kungfu moive that stole inceptions effects

I've seen better graphics in a Japanese video game

The lead star looks too old and ugly to carry a franchise

I'm glad I didn't pay to watch it

Great! Best MCU movie yet

The sling rings were awful and cheap
Lol inception + kungfu
What the fuck were they thinking?

+5 dollars were added into your account

oh yeah, sling rings can suck my dick. that is the fucking worst

I don't read Doctor Strange, why were the sling rings shitty?

Also I personally don't see what people are saying about it just being cosmic science and not magic. Pretty much every system of magic these days tends to be repeatable and measurable to some degree, making them all sciences more than arts. Magic that has a codified system with reliable results when you follow the correct process is always science.

Decent

Pop culture jokes were forced, but the cape was alright

Rachel MacAdams is the most beautiful MCU woman

No one was ever going to want Kaecilius to return as a villain, Dormammu survived of course, and Mordo did a reasonably well motivated villain turn, so actually it did fine setting up future Strange movies.

I agree that it had JUST a bit too much humor, and Swinton really didn't sell herself to me as an Ancient One, though I did like the reveal about her powers.

Nothing wrong with a staff having a spark of the power of the Tribunal, lots of Doc Strange items/spells work like that.

The MCU Eye is nothing at all like the 616 Eye, had no problem with it being the Time Stone, it was one of the best utilized stones yet, storywise.

The one that that struck me about the movie is how it seemed rather small and intimate after all the recent Marvel ensemble movies.
The entire meaningful cast of the movie is 6 people, Strange, Wong, Mordo, Kaec, A1, and Christine.

Even Ant-Man had a significantly larger cast of important characters. No pun intended.

>mordo's change of heart came almost out of nowhere
No, that was Sinestro. Mordo actually made reasonable sense.
They are very close to the same character, really.

>but the cape was alright
>The one time a movie isn't cape shit is when the cape is technically a character.
hmmmm.

Right?
Mordo didn't end the movie with a passionate speech about how the hero was right all along and willpower triumphed in the end... to just go LOL NOPE! and snatch the evil mcguffin.

They really, really thought GL was going to be their Iron Man. The sequel was greenlit before the movie had opened in theaters.

by 2019 it's all going to be the Harley Quip universe.

the beginning ate up too much runtime that would have been better spent focusing on the final fight with Kaecilius. bargaining with Dormammu should have felt like way more of a desperate last resort after trying everything else. but they didn't let the tension mount enough.

a lot of the jokes were really awkward, like an entirely new writer was handed the script and just looked for places to stick in some funnies without reading the whole thing properly

I loved the visuals. dope as fuck.

the score sucked, plain and simple. with a better score I'd be more willing to overlook the other flaws. what moron failed to realize 'hey, this movie has all this psychedelic imagery, we should include some psychedelic music to accompany it' ?

I consider it a good movie but it could have been a great movie

It didn't need to be an origin movie. The least interesting part of Doctor Strange is how he learned magic. This isn't fucking Harry Potter.

Strange's origin is less about "how I got my powers" and more about establishing his personality as a heroic but arrogant bastard who loves them ladies.

You can't just have him walk onscreen in the cloak and throw zaps at people, if you want him to be a fleshed out character. Most of his villains are so diabolically evil and threatening that OF COURSE any hero would oppose them out of pure common sense.

DCEU skipped on the Batman intro and the result was a chaingun wielding sociopathic murderer trying to kill Superman for absolutely no raisin at all.

Another boring quipfest. I've forgotten 90% of what happened

>DCEU skipped on the Batman intro and the result was a chaingun wielding sociopathic murderer trying to kill Superman for absolutely no raisin at all.
You're not wrong, but Superman wasn't in that movie.

too many jokes

KeatonBats was just a murderous vigilante.
Batfleck was straight up assaulting security details guarding private property and trying to murder the one guy who was trying to help the world.

Objectively because he didn't stop an alien rampage without casualties.
The same alien rampage Batman apparently ignored, even though they warned they were going to do it at least a full day in advance.

It really wasn't.
The problem with most origin movies is that they go for a shitty first flight, where they might even spend the final fight finishing character development.

Meanwhile Strange is basically done developing about 40% into the movie, and the rest is him showing that off.

the movie is less about Strange learning magic and more about how shortly after he starts getting over himself, nearly the entire secret society is wiped out and he gets field promoted to a Master. by the end of the movie he's still immensely green and knows it, but the only person left even in a position to teach him anything is Wong

The surgery stuff did a great job of illustrating how Strange wanted to do great things, but with zero risk to himself or his sterling reputation.

And how he evolves through the movie to end up as the guy willing to let himself be torn to shreds eternally, forgotten by the world, to save everyone. (but deep down he's a smug bastard who's enjoying outsmarting someone YET AGAIN.)

Wong just hands him books, nowhere is it implied that he's mastered all that stuff. He's the replacement Librarian.

It's adequately illustrated that Strange was quickly mastering texts he had no right to be working with yet.

I liked Mads and Dormamajama. Don't know why people think every cape movie has to practically star the villains aka TDK. Even Batman Begins wasn't really about the villains, Crane was doin his thing and Ras was presumed dead til the last half hour. And I like Begins more than TDK desu senpai.

The villains of Doctor Strange just didn't seem to do anything really. Show up and cause some trouble but with no real personality. They're just there are a vehicle to move the story forward, at least I felt that way about them.

You have good taste though, bro. Begins was much more enjoyable than TDK to me as well, and I liked Scarecrow and Ras a lot.

Mads gives a pretty convincing monologue about why he's doing all the crazy shit he's doing, and what they are doing is powering up with Dark Dimension juice so they can blow up the Sanctums and join Earth to the happy paradise that is the Dark Dimension.

That "just didn't seem to do anything" to you?

Same with ant man it was borinf safe and shitty
You take away nothing from these movies

It's like watching kids play with action figures

What's an example of a superhero movie you "took something away from", and what was it?

Because otherwise this just sounds like babby's first troll attempt.

The effects for the sling rings look cheap and shitty

I think the entire reason for the Sling Rings is that they story (and a lot of Strange stories really) require fantastical travel across space and dimensions, but you have to be able to have Strange in situations where he can't just fuck off home whenever it's convenient.

It's a big problem for storytelling when people can just unstoppably teleport.

It means you care about the character even more less after you watch it

Too much martial arts, not enough spell casting.

Was strange training at Karma Taj or Kun Lun?

Yeah, because it's not convincing at all. From the moment you hear about or see a glimpse of the Dark Dimension you know for a fact that Mads is mad, or otherwise has no clue what he's actually getting himself into with Dormammu.

When you're going with a villain who an audience knows is outright wrong, that villain really needs either some real impressive memorable showing on screen, or else a force of personality, whether that be gravitas or the opposite end of the spectrum with a memorable aspect to him. Mads played the character he was given, but it wasn't a well-written villain. He was easily as throwaway as almost every other Marvel villain to date.

>care about the character even more less after you watch it
What's your first language?

Don't care about the bullshit behind it
the effects look cheap and awful

A mediocre flick, but at least it looked both good and original. The magic was boring, i hated the martial arts spin. Still along with ant man is among the beat Mcu movies

Does that matter? Doesn't invalidate his point.

>Wong just hands him books, nowhere is it implied that he's mastered all that stuff. He's the replacement Librarian.
my point exactly.

>It's adequately illustrated that Strange was quickly mastering texts he had no right to be working with yet.
the movie also made a point that just being able to do a spell isn't good enough. Strange nearly broke time when he first messed with the eye. and when he's fighting the Dormammu cultists in New York one of his construct spells just fizzles out after a few seconds, because Strange has spent his time learning advanced stuff despite still being an amateur at the fundamentals

Is his point that "I watched this and I love Batman so much more now"
? Because that's not "taking away" anything, that's just really fucking loving Batman.

in Doctor Who going back to the same point in time again and again causes a localized apocalypse

Sure Strange is recklessly messing with powers he doesn't grasp the nuances of.
But it's never implied that Wong can even use that shit. All he ever does is pick up a weapon at one point.
All Wong teaches him is that it's wrong to do A., when doing A is exactly what saves the Earth.

in doctor who no time travel rules are consistent.

t. time travel autist

>>mordo's change of heart came almost out of nowhere
I disagree, I think the issue with him is more the execution of his post credit scene than rushing his change of heart. That scene should have shown Mordo has a more reluctant "this has to be done" type of guy.

This.
Doctor Who time rules are whatever that episode requires for today's plot.

I didn't actually like the Mister Doctor exchange. the scene was too tense for that kind of levity

what I did like was the one where Strange gets shown his room
>Eat, rest, meditate if you can
>*reads card* Shambala? Is...is that my mantra?
>It's the wifi password. we're not savages.

Mordo didn't seem to have a reluctant bone in his body.
The Ancient One more or less says "Mordo is this guy who's going to follow whatever course hardheadedly".

The basis of his entire character is that he lacks nuance, that he has no use for half-measures or compromise. They really hammer at this the whole movie.

Pretty much this. Mordo does what Mordo thinks Mordo must do, and damn everyone else.

He right up says to Strange "The Ancient One says these guys are "bad", so we kill them, plain and simple".
It's Strange who's willing to see other views and grey areas.

It really saddens me that people fault characterization they clearly didn't understand after they sat through the story.
It's as if they can't grasp anything more complex than "Y so Srs".

Wong probably can't perform those spells, but he knows enough about the theory behind magic in general to point out all the 'beginner's mistakes' Strange doesn't know about when it comes to 'use magic to accomplish X'

>All Wong teaches him is that it's wrong to do A., when doing A is exactly what saves the Earth.
there's a big difference between risking a time break just to sate your curiosity and risking a time break to save all humanity from an infinity of suffering. Wong even says at the end that once Strange is a more accomplished sorceror it'll be completely fine for him to carry around the eye and use it as he sees fit

Absolutely. The post credut scene may seem jarring to some but it's absolute how the person we had seen up to that point would act once he realised what he must do.

I can imagine that after abandoning the others at the end Mordo may have been untethered or rudderless for a short period of time while he considered what he would do now, but the moment he came up with an answer in his mind he would have stuck firm to that answer for sure. No doubts and no hesitations.

Forgettable.
The Beyonce thing really caught me offguard tho what a fucking cringe.

I hate what they've done to Strange..
I know they want to replace RDJ since he's gonna die soon from aids but they failed.
Cumberbatch doesnt sell maybe its his brit genes.

Looking back, it really felt like watching Green Lantern again (but with good vfx)

6.1/10

>DRASTIC lack of actual spells, more cosmic "science" magic

they pretty much said straight up that it's not science

they killed the fucking villain again

the villain didn't even die. Dormammu is still in his dimension and Mads character only got absorbed into the dark dimension. if he doesn't show up again i'll eat my hat

I guess you're right, reluctant isn't the word. Maybe a more "I'm taking the harsh decision, this has to be done"?

Though, I just watched the scene again and I realised my memories were playing me. I somehow remembered an almost slasher scene with a Mordo creepy evil smile.
I would have add some sort "sorry you have to suffer this, but..." line, but I'm no writer.

Magic and science are practically synonymous in most modern media, because the factors that allow one to replicate spells are generally known (to a degree), even if not understood entirely. Do this, offer that as a sacrifice, say this other thing, and the result will basically always be the same.

It's pointless semantics to argue it since even fantasy novels generally depict their thaumaturgical arts in a scientific-influenced manner, regardless of whether they call it magic or not.

right but in this situation i believe were arguing the difference of technology and mystical force

sure they both might technically be science but one of those is "science" and the other is "magic"

I see no difference. Technology isn't science. Science is a method for understanding laws and processes of the world(s) around us through repetition and confirmation.

I consider the techniques in Doctor Strange to be magic because that's basically what they call it, but I consider most magic to be basically a science anyway so in the long run I'm not fussed.

Fairly enjoyable movie, but not really something I'm dying to see again.

The film proves that Marvel's formula still works.
It's pretty much beat for beat the first Iron Man movie, with some trippy fight scenes to distract you.
The biggest problem I had with the movie was that the pacing felt very rushed. It's beautiful to look at, the camera should have slowed down and let the audience soak in the world.

Also, Dr. Strange mastered the mystic arts to fast. The film needed a montage to convey the passage of time, and him mastering the mystical magical arts.

I liked it, but I'm not so keen on the idea of Strange being the MCU's new face once Iron Man goes.

Kaecilius can return as a skeleton wizard

I doubt you die unless Dormammu kills you and he had no reason to do that

How will they explain Mordo suddenly becoming a bloodbender? How can he make people suddenly become unable to tap into other dimensions to draw power, like this guy did to walk?

I liked that Mads and the Ancient One both had good reasons for their respective stances.

Mads had every right to feel like he was being cheated, because the Ancient One was using magic that she said was banned.

But TAO was also right to ban it in the first place. Drawing on the dark dimension is incredibly dangerous, bot to ones self and the world as a whole. She was wise enough to not abuse it, because she knew the consequences, but the vast majority of people who hear 'this magic makes you immortal' are going to want it for the wrong reasons and with terrible consequences. Its just easier to tell people its off limits than to explain to them the nuances of why dealing with Dormammu is generally a bad idea.

Its like powerful painkillers. It has a use, and if used correctly its not evil, but there is a reason its a controlled substance.

>Fight scenes got messy and hard to track

Biggest beef with the movie right here, it had shakey-cam shit worse than any other movie I can think of that doesn't use a found-footage gimmick.

And OP, I liked it well enough, it wasn't super memorable, but at this stage, which of them are? I appreciated that Strange was still, by the end of the movie, a pretty amateurish sorcerer even though he was depicted as being a prodigy, it really drives home how hard this stuff is to learn, and doesn't have the usual problem of the MC being SO prodigious everyone else looks like an idiot by comparison (looking at you Kung Fu Panda).

>Also, Dr. Strange mastered the mystic arts to fast.

He could basically only conjur a whip, teleport and use the one time spell he stole by the end of the movie. He gets by largely on guile and bumbling in equal measure through most of the movie.

>He could basically only conjur a whip, teleport and use the one time spell he stole by the end of the movie
You forgot astral projection and hand shields.

But in any case, that's about the same or more than what the Kaecilius mooks could do. They could conjure those crystal things. whips and do astral projection. Maybe teleport if they got a sling, but we never see them do it.

In any case, there was barely any variety in spells regardless of character. Outside of the matter manipulation from A1 and Kaecilius, and the time stone, it was all fireworks constructs.
Only during the after credits scene we see Strange magically creating beer and Mordo doing some weird power sapping thing.

That's all true, but here's a question: did the movie NEED more magic?

Once you introduce that magic can do a thing, it can always do that thing. Even if you only have it in the background as a gag, once you establish that I can use magic to turn someone into a mouse, thats now a trick I have. Once that's the case, there better be a damn good reason I don't solve my problems by turning the bad guys into mice instead of fighting them in fancy wizard laser battles.

The flip side of this logic is also true: its sloppy writing to include elements and details that don't actually contribute to the story and in fact distract from it. AKA Chekovs gun: don't include a gun unless it has a purpose.

There's no crime in keeping the magic restricted to a few tricks so the audience doesn't get distracted or confused. The worst thing you can do is have so many magic spells in the movie that when you get to the final battle your wizard does something and the audience legitimately doesn't remember what the spell does or why this was supposed to be clever.

Did strange actually astral project? I haven't seen the movie since it came out but I thought pretty much every instance of strange astral projecting had him basically shoved out of his body by somebody else.

And the other sorcerers conjured more elaborate weapons than just the whip didn't they? It's been a while, I admit.

He willing astral projected to go talk to the ancient one during their final scene.

We see him doing it three times. One when he learns it, another when he fights this guy in the hospital, and then

Formulaic and competent, poor use of magic overall (glowy sticks and teleporting) other than mirror dimension stuff, good characters but strange himself didnt have all that much of an arc and could of used more personal change other than gaining power, a little to much trying to recapture tony stark but its understandable why they would do that, a little more obvious use of the designs they had and used (ie a lot of people i know didn't recognize Dormammu's giant energy body and thought it was just glowing space energy with a vague face), pretty great thematic world building, fine start to shifting the public conciousnes of marvel movies towards magic to make space for later stories, would personally have enjoyed a somewhat drier tone, 7/10.

I thought the magic effects looked really cool.
Mads was wasted, too bad they didn't try to cast him as Strange instead.
Strange wasn't very likeable.

It was carried entirely by the visuals.

Everything was decent/average but the action sequences pushed the film a notch up for me.

The fight scene where time is reversing was fun as hell.

>The fight scene where time is reversing was fun as hell.
That's the highlight of the movie. More than the inception scenes or the bargaining.

Outside of the 4 minute trippy scene in the beginning, it wasn't good at all. The humor was really godawful and elicited either silence or groans. The movie as a whole felt really generic and boring and really noticeably formulaic. The sling ring thing was a stupid addition. All he really did was summon a sash to kung fu fight with, and learn to use the infinity gem like a stop watch. I don't understand how you manage to make a dr. strange movie feel so goddamn boring. Didn't even stay for the after credits, partly because I just didn't care for the movie at all, and partly because I don't give a shit about hemsworth as thor in this universe.

Wait. She was in mean girls?