![]() And, of course, it multiplies the potential number of properties and story lines that popular characters can anchor. It eliminates all definitive results from the dramas of Marvel franchise products-a mercantile cheat that already reared its head when Thanos’s murder spree at the end of “ Avengers: Infinity War” proved reversible. The elaborate alt-worlds conceit plays a similar multiple role. (Fear not: you can understand everything just fine even if you’ve missed “ WandaVision” and “Inhumans.”) It’s also a blueprint for the building-out of subsequent productions involving these still-underdeveloped assets. It’s an omnium-gatherum of the company’s movies, series, and comics-an attempt to advertise these properties and prop them up as required viewing to understand the action. Neither reason nor moral suasion can deter Wanda from her dastardly mission thus Strange, his longtime ally Wong (Benedict Wong), Christine, and America herself have no choice but to challenge the all-powerful sorceress in cataclysmic combat.Īlong the way, Strange encounters and battles a host of other Marvel characters, notably, the members of a secret society called the Illuminati that includes his friend and nemesis Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and other delegates from such a wide range of Marvel properties that they might as well wear nametags and do team-building exercises. She is prepared to kill the girl and to lay waste to multitudes. the Scarlet Witch, so craves to be reunited, in an alternate universe, with her two young sons that she tries to take America’s power (and, yes, the script is filled with such double-entendres). It turns out that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a.k.a. Leaping off a festive balcony, he flies into battle. ![]() ![]() She initiates Strange into the theory of multiverses, and he gets firsthand experience of them soon enough, when, as a guest at the wedding of Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), a doctor and former colleague whom he loves and hoped to marry, he observes another monster on the rampage in downtown Manhattan. The nightmare turns out to be an alternate reality, because America has the superpower of travelling from universe to universe (and dreams are portals-so much for Freud). In “Multiverse of Madness,” Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), a former neurosurgeon who lost his dexterity in a car accident but gained magical powers, has an apparent nightmare involving his effort to rescue a teen-ager named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) from the clutches of a monster that threatens to tear her limb from limb. The new film isn’t merely branded entertainment it’s branding as entertainment. (The same fate befell the giddy “ Ant-Man” in its sequel.) “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” eliminates the playful idiosyncrasy in the interest of formula-of Marvel’s self-perpetuating business. The sequel is conservative: the weirdness is reined in, and the narrative’s symbolic loose ends are replaced by chains that bind it to other characters and story lines from the Marvel stable. The strength of the first “Doctor Strange” is the embrace of its protagonist’s weirdness, which enshrines him among the franchise’s fictional personalities. The first “ Doctor Strange” film introduced an idiosyncratic character by means of an apt cinematic peculiarity, but its sequel, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” squeezes the character into the Marvel franchise by trimming away all the whimsy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |