Both Fresh and Generic Simultaneously

Rating: 8/10 (26 October 2016)

Doctor Strange is the story of celebrated neurosurgeon Stephen Strange who loses the use of his hands in a car accident and seeks one-hundred percent recovery in order to get back to his life's work. This leads him to a mysterious place in Nepal run by what appears to be mystics and monks, but are actually a group of sorcerers and sorceresses that protect the Earth from multiversal threats and unseen dimensions. In time he becomes one of them, and is thrust into a conflict with a rogue sorcerer who seeks to bring the dark dimension into ours.
In many ways, you can see how Doctor Strange might be a relic from an earlier Marvel Studios. Despite the claim of never doing origin movies, Doctor Strange is absolutely an origin movie, and makes no attempt to hide that either. It feels a lot like the origin stories of Phase One, mixed with the kind of humour and lightheartedness that permeated early Phase Two. It doesn't help that the character of Stephen Strange is a mirror image of Tony Stark; wealthy, genius, arrogant, charming, joke-quipping. On the surface, Stephen Strange is about as generic as a Marvel movie can get, often feeling like a retread of old ground and things we've seen before.
This also extends to, but also simultaneously is undone by the visuals. Yes, the imagery of cityscapes folding in on themselves is reminiscent of that one scene in Inception, but Doctor Strange takes that concept, splinters it, and exaggerates it to levels where it's almost unrecognisable. Doctor Strange is easily the most psychedelic Marvel movie to date, and that includes the folding cities, which appear more kaleidoscopic than anything. There's one scene in particular that is one of the most visual mind-bending sequences I've ever seen, feeling almost 2001 in execution. The Ancient One opens Strange's mind up to the multiverse of hidden dimensions, and he's flung through a psychedelic montage of trippy images that feel like a bad acid trip. Just like the end of Ant-Man, I just wanted this bizarre place beyond the law of physics to be developed further, to take us on a bizarre mind-bender. This is all without mentioning the slow-motion backdrop of snow and lightning, or the extra dimension added thanks to the introduction of magic, including the mirror dimension and the astral plain.
As I mentioned though, the tone is on par with some of Marvel's more lacklustre movies (looking at you Iron Man 3), with quips and one-liners aplenty. Some of them are quite funny, others not so. Strange listing through celebrities with only one name is a definite high point, while his cloak flicking his cheeks while trying to look cool is a low. Derrickson also puts his history of horror movies to good use to create a few jump scares that are played for laughs as well, like Strange unexpectedly re-appearing from the astral plain to Christine's surprise.
The acting is unsurprisingly top-notch. Benedict Cumberbatch slips effortlessly into the role of Strange, proving that he would be a worthy replacement for RDJ as the franchise's mascot. That said, I did feel like his accent was a bit off. He sounded like a Brit trying really hard to do an American accent, which is pretty much exactly what he was, and that took me out a little bit. Chiwetel Ejiofor was also great as the more straight-edged Mordo, and hopefully he'll be used to good effect to become Marvel's third most memorable villain further along down the line (behind Loki and Wilson Fisk). Tilda Swinton is fantastic as The Ancient One. Haters be damned, she owns the role, and is almost unrecognisable.
Unfortunately, as great and talented an actor as he is, Mads Mikkelson feels sorely under-utilised here. Like the majority of Marvel villains before him, he draws the short straw on screen time and character development. He wants to live forever by bringing the dark dimension into ours, and that's the extent of his motivations and backstory. The only reason I will remember him is because he's Mads Mikkelson. Rachel McAdams has her moments, but is again reduced to little more than Strange's on-again-off-again love interest that feels almost archaic these days. Benedict Wong and Michael Stuhlbarg both do the best with what they're given, which is about two minutes of screen time each. Here's hoping they get a little more attention in future sequels.
Doctor Strange is not the best Marvel movie out there, and it doesn't quite do enough to mark out it's differences from the rest of the roster (like Guardians did, quite successfully I might add). As the introduction of magic into the MCU, it would have benefited greatly from a more mystical tone, but instead it just felt like a generic Superhero origin story. Whether his powers came from magic or not seemed irrelevant. However, as generic as Doctor Strange feels at times, it has plenty enough going for it, most notably in the visuals department (which required several paragraphs of Digital Artists in the credits), and it is a fundamentally very enjoyable movie that at least flirts with new ideas. I give Doctor Strange a very respectable 8/10.