Dr.'s Cure for Insomnia

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2016)

Marvel movies have progressively gotten more focused on style over substance and nowhere has it been more obvious than with Dr. Strange. If your friends have told you that the visuals in this film are amazing, they weren't lying to you. I wouldn't call anything about it groundbreaking because you've already seen these things in movies like Inception, Interstellar, The Matrix, etc. - all of which were better movies in every regard. This manifests as a number of sequences that are all essentially the same and get boring very quickly: "Oh, they're folding reality again....yawn."
Because I had no comic book relationship with the Dr. Strange character I went into this movie as a blank slate with no expectations (despite having been told it was the most amazing movie ever). Right away, Cumberbatch did an out-of-this-world job of making me loathe Stephen Strange as a human being. Instead of embodying the confident playboy like RDJ did with Tony Stark, they achieved a self-absorbed, self- aggrandizing, entitled, snobbish jerk that didn't even allow me the opportunity to like him. From that point on, every time he opened his mouth I just wanted him to shut up. Even the attempt during the third act to redeem him and show his growth as a person (over, what, a few months? It's unclear) fell flat and came off as more of the same.
Strange sets himself up as a man of science, reason, and intellect. He refuses, like Uncle Vernon in Harry Potter, to acknowledge that there could be any "such thing as magic" yet with a single, acid-trippy, out-of- body experience he falls to his knees and pleads, "Teach me!" This sequence was too long, too overblown, and not in the least bit compelling for such an impulsive change of a stubborn person's world view. It felt disjointed as an "Ooh, look at the pretty colors" scene created because there was still money left in the CGI budget.
The introduction of The Ancient One character is jarring and disappointing amid a swirling Hollywood whitewashing controversy because Tilda Swinton just doesn't communicate the type of human being you could accept as the Eastern spiritual supreme guru - even if you make her bald. It just doesn't work. She turns out to be this weird Obi-Wan type of teacher who has never ending patience when it suits the story and no patience when the script calls for it. Her interactions with Mordo over his interpersonal conflict with Strange take a sort of "vague, poetic philosophy professor" approach that never pays off since Mordo just walks off toward the end in a huff and, presumably, will become the bad guy in the next film.
This movie ends (not soon enough, unfortunately) in a battle of the wills with Dr. Strange fighting Dormammu, who apparently isn't amused by being able to murder Strange in every way conceivable for eternity (why not?) and begs the fledgling sorcerer to stop making him kill him over and over...? So Strange makes a deal with Dormammu to take the bad guys to the Dark Dimension and leave. I mean, are we able to assume he could have asked for anything? Is that the best he could have done?
Overall, this movie is just boring. There's nothing remarkable about the story, there's nothing lovable about the characters, there's nothing surprising about the visuals. Coming off of the huge disappointment of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, this constitutes an official break-up between the MCU and me. I'm not pouring any more money into this if you're not willing to make more of an effort, Marvel.