Doctor Strange: A sharp wit and spiritual popcorn: Movie Review (English)
Visually distinctive, classily cast and mostly coherent, this latest picture from the Marvel stable is that rarest of beasts, a comic-book movie that fully justifies its reliance on CGI effects. This superior hero-origin story nods to the spatial origami of Christopher Nolan’s Inception and has something of the baroque enchantment of the Harry Potter series. It’s also, at times, the most brain-meltingly effective piece of psychedelic cinema since Peter Fonda got himself comprehensively wigged out in The Trip.
But crucially, Doctor Strange is very much its own entity: a handsome, endlessly fascinating conundrum of Escher-like complexity. Director Scott Derrickson, who also co-wrote the film, effortlessly negotiates the leap from quality horror pictures (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister) to this daringly spiritual popcorn movie. There’s a sharp wit to the screenplay, which credits the audience with enough smarts to catch the punchline to a joke that was set up a full hour before. But Derrickson’s greatest achievement is incorporating so much cosmic guff into the story – astral planes, third eyes and mandalas abound – without ever seeming like a stoner’s motivational bedroom poster.
