The eagerly awaited “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” directed by famed horror director Sam Raimi and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, released on May 6. Despite being delayed a year, when the film was finally released, it brought in droves of fans excited by the rumors of cameos by a whole array of guest stars, both new and old to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Still reeling after “Spider-man: No Way Home,” fans filled theaters during opening weekend expecting similar movie greatness, but this time with horror and design elements new to the MCU. However, what they got was something a little different. Be forewarned, there are spoilers ahead.
The film reveals pretty quickly who the main villain is, which was a bit of a surprise since that particular element of the movie was surrounded with so much mystery by the cast and crew during its promotion. Wanda Maximoff, portrayed by Elizabeth Olson, finally took the moniker of Scarlet Witch and was driven mad by the Darkhold after using it to locate her two sons, which she lost after the events of “WandaVision.” She chased after America Chavez, played by Xochitl Gomez, who had the power to jump through the multiverse at will. The only problem is the teenager had no control over her reality-shattering power, forcing Dr. Stephen Strange to intervene and follow her through the multiverse in order to protect her.
Raimi delivered on his promise of “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” leaning more towards fantasy-horror. If you’re a fan of body horror in particular, this is the movie for you. Fans saw Maximoff demon-crawl through a solid wall, breaking all the bones in her body before snapping them back together again. At another point in the film, a character’s facial features are erased entirely and his head implodes from the inside. There’s a scene that sees an entire elite team of superheroes gruesomely wiped out one by one, showcasing Scarlet Witch’s true power. Not only were the horror elements of the film hard-hitting, but the fantasty and CGI spellcasting effects were flawless.
However, that’s pretty much where my praise for the film stops. Raimi leaned too much on shock value, as the storytelling was sloppy and boring at times. While the film was packed with guest stars, seeing characters revived from seemingly long-forgotten Marvel movies and TV shows and even seeing a cameo from Raimi’s pal Bruce Campbell from the “Evil Dead” franchise, it felt like all of the characters were just thrown into the movie and given no purpose other than to be wiped out by the Scarlet Witch in five minutes. Whereas the cameos in “Spider-man: No Way Home” felt like Marvel was paying homage to old fans and characters, the cameos in “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” felt like they were cleaning up loose ends.
Even though the movie was about Dr. Strange, it featured and focused on the plights of other female characters, a refreshing deviation from the male-dominated MCU. At least, that’s what it tried to do. The character development for all parties involved felt almost non-existent, and the romantic subplot between Dr. Strange and his ex-girlfriend Christine Palmer felt weird and forced. For a movie with so many strong female characters, it did not even pass the Bechdel test.
My real bone to pick lies with the absolute decimation of character that was received by Maximoff. Maximoff, one of the few surviving female characters in the MCU, was given a beautifully fleshed out storyline in “WandaVision” exploring the trauma of losing her family during the war, losing her bodily autonomy through experiments by Hydra, dealing with the grief of losing Vision to save the world from Thanos and finally losing her two sons which she manifested with her powers during the events of the show. As a longtime comic book fan, it felt like she was one of the only female comic characters whose story had been fully developed on-screen.
All of that progress was absolutely demolished during “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” While Maximoff was supposedly corrupted by the Darkhold, a magical book filled with evil spells that corrupts anyone who conjures from it, the movie’s only attempt to show that her pursuit of killing Chavez to gain her powers was driven by the book and not by Maximoff herself was a short and confusing scene that shows Wanda trapped by the rubble of her bombed childhood home in her own mind.
Instead, Maximoff was turned into a one-dimensional villain, portrayed as baby-crazy and constantly gaslit by Strange and his allies about her mistakes in “WandaVision.” Although at one point Maximoff herself tried to point out that it was unfair male superheroes got to fix their mistakes and be turned into a complex hero while female superheroes who made mistakes suddenly were turned into villains, it felt as though that’s exactly what this movie did unintentionally. Raimi recently revealed that he did not finish “WandaVision” before production started on “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” even though the show had already aired, and the result of that was one of the worst defamations of a fully developed female character in Marvel movie history.
