Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme

After a long absence, let’s pull another Lionsgate Marvel flick out of the case.
Much like the last one I don’t have a whole lot nice to say.



So we’ll get the good parts out first.  The movie plays out as an origin story, and they try to link in Strange’s backstory, the events of his accident, and his becoming the Sorcerer Supreme together, which works quite a bit better than I’d have thought.  Pinning his bitter misanthropy on a dead little sister is a little much, but tying that into why he’s put off by the coma kids, and hallucinations of the same being what distracted him enough for the accident actually dovetails well.  The whole “Dormammu uses kid’s dreams to weaken the barriers between dimensions” actually is a pretty good idea for the way they present magic; functions of willpower and spiritual enlightenment and suchnot.

Annnnd the rest.

Most basic of basic problems here: this is just cheaply animated.  The flaps are terrible, the shading is beyond terrible, moving vehicles use a cel effect over top of obvious blocky CG artifacts and frankly look less polished than multiple 2003 video games I can think of.  Within the same frame they’ll have multiple levels of detailing on faces and the like, giving the impression that some of the lesser characters have a blur effect or something going on.  Sometimes I wonder if they were going for a no-outline animation style, which has been done to amazing effect, but no I think they just tried to save budget because the backgrounds are awful and they use this terrible slow-mo effect in some of the fights because, oops, we needed to stretch the scene?

Like Thor, the ultraviolence doesn’t really work here.  They use the hell out of the same “skeleton crumbling to dust” effect as that, so I guess they were proud of it.  Not that it’s bad on its own, but they get so much use out of it by inventing a bunch of lesser apprentices for the Ancient One so they had people to kill off, then in the finale by having several dozen civilians get consumed by a swarm of hellbeasts.  Because that’s what’ll draw me into this super hero movie.

They don’t even get the Dr. Strange basics right.  I know to some degree this is suffering because I have the MCU movie to compare it to, but Mordo’s betrayal makes negative amounts of sense and the presentation of magic itself is just boring.  Even if battles had been well animated it wouldn’t have produced very good fight scenes because the scenes themselves just didn’t have much going on.  I guess Wong’s sand effects were decent?  Yeah, I’m stretching here.

There are absolutely times the good ideas here try to come out.  The way they present Strange’s path to understanding and the nudges you see Wong and the Ancient One making to get him there really do come together well.  But even those bits will get horribly interrupted by the crummy fight scenes, completely derailing any sense of momentum.  Any time I tried to like the movie it would seem to notice and go back to its worst qualities to prevent that right quick.

So yeah I think I talked myself into giving this the lowest score I’ve used so far.

Rating- 3/10