Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. If you do not wish to be spoiled, feel free to leave the page. This post will still be here after you've seen the film, jovially awaiting your return.
Before I get into this, can I just point out that this film has an overly long title? Like, seriously? It's longer than The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and that one is stupid long, too...
Anywho... Ever since Iron Man was released way back in 2008, Marvel has been very kind to gift me a film pretty much every year for my birthday (unintentionally, of course). This year it was Doctor Strange's second solo feature, and I waited the two whole days so I could go see it on my actual birthday, which was last Sunday. I'mma tell you, that was an eternity waiting, what with trying to dodge spoilers on social media as much as possible (to varying levels of success, mind).
It was a pretty good pressie, though. Thank you, Marvel!
So the film starts us out hot, with a Strange variant and America Chavez being chased by what looks suspiciously like a one-eyed Malboro (I guess there's only so much variation you can get in a tentacle monster). It comes to light that the Malboro-thingie is trying to steal America's powers, which, rudely enough, would kill her. Ruder still, when this Strange starts getting his arse kicked by the monster, he makes the super awesome decision to just take America's power himself, as she can't control it and he says he can, but thankfully, I guess, before he can completely murder a teenage girl, he gets killed by the tentacle monster himself.
Being under such a great threat, America's powers activate, and, lo and behold, she jumps universes.
Cue our Stephen Strange waking up from what he believes to be a nightmare. His day doesn't get any better, either, as his schedule includes getting all dolled up and headed to a church to watch the woman he loves marry another man (who happens to be a huge fan of Doctor Strange). During the reception, Christine asks Stephen if he's happy, to which he lies that he is, and this is apparently a significant point of the film, but I didn't really get as to why...
Anywho, shortly after that, Stephen hears a commotion outside and goes to investigate. He finds America Chavez being attacked by the Malboro-thingie, so, being that he's a super hero and all, he goes to help. Wong has also arrived on the scene, and the two of them manage to get the thing dead by shooting it through it's gigantic eyeball... and then popping said eyeball out of its head, which, no lie, was kinda gross. But also kinda awesome? But mostly gross.
America tries to bounce (with Strange's sling ring, which I think he called a 'slingie'?), but joke's on her, Wong has a sling ring, too. They confront her to find out why she was being chased by a giant tentacle monster, and she proceeds to explain that she's being hunted by someone who wants her power to universe hop. Wong asks her about the monster that was chasing her, and based on her answer, determines that it was witchcraft rather than sorcery.
So Stephen goes to see an old friend who also happens to be, le gasp, a witch.
He finds Wanda in an apple orchard and proceeds to ask her about the multiverse and seeks her assistance in protecting America at Kamar-Taj, but Wanda suggests instead that he bring America out to her homestead. Problem is, she named America by name, but Stephen hadn't actually said her name yet. That's more than just a little sus, yo.
Wanda being the antagonist of the film was actually the only major spoiler I ran across, which I guess I can consider mildly lucky, but it wasn't until I watched it that I found out what her nefarious scheming was... I have to say, considering that her grief over losing Vision was the entire plot device of WandaVision, it's rather cheap to rehash it for this film. Wanda keeps having dreams about her twins, and it has now been established that dreams are just windows into other universes (which we found out in the conversation between Strange, Wong, and America, as she informed Stephen that what he saw wasn't a dream... like, twice), so she knows that in other universes, she actually has her boys. And she wants them.
As a small aside, I kept seeing a list of what Marvel stuff you need to see before watching Multiverse of Madness, and I'm here to tell you, the only thing you actually needed to watch beforehand was, in fact, WandaVision. Or, at the very least, read a synopsis of the plot. (I mean, other than Infinity War and Endgame, but that's more for timeline continuity for the overall movieverse.)
So this entire thing is so that Wanda can use America's powers to jump to a different universe where her boys are actually real, off their actual mother (herself), and take her place... Because apparently Wanda is fucking mental and learned absolutely nothing from her stint in Westview.
And! The reason she is down with killing someone else's kid so she can get to 'her' kids is because she wants to be able to jump the multiverse again in case something happens to one of the twins, like they get sick with some disease the universe they're in doesn't have a cure for...
All of which completely ignores the fact that Wanda Maximoff is the fucking Scarlet Witch, one of the most powerful mutants (sort of) Marvel has created (if I remember correctly), who can manipulate reality to her whims. So... yeah, there's that massive gaping plot hole.
Anyway, going back to the film plot, after inadvertently letting Wanda know exactly where her prey is, Doctor Strange goes back to Kamar-Taj to await her arrival (onslaught). Wong gathers all the students and sorcerers there, as well as pulling sorcerers from other sanctums in to help protect the place.
This goes about as well as you might imagine. Wanda, who says she's currently being reasonable, kills just about everyone in Kamar-Taj. Strange manages to trap her in the Mirror Dimension, but it is only temporary. She gets out and goes after America again, but America's power punches another hole in the walls between multiverses and she and Stephen end up taking a little road trip.
They end up in a universe where the local Doctor Strange variant is, well, dead. Instead, Mordo is Sorcerer Supreme. They seek assistance from him, but he opts to drug them and stick them in not-quite-plexiglass cages instead. Here they run into this universe's Christine, who is something of a multiverse expert, apparently. She names the universe that they're in as Earth-838 and the one Stephen is from as Earth-616 (I kind of wonder if Marvel got tired of the Earth-19999 thing).
Stephen gets marched from the holding-cells-with-absolutely-no-privacy to a room where he meets the Illuminati (which was also spoiled beforehand, but that's been spoiled since the first trailer where they teased Professor X). They consist of Reed Richards, Maria Rambeau's Captain Marvel, Captain Carter, Mordo, Black Bolt, and Professor Charles Xavier. They're there trying to decide what to do with our lovely Stephen Strange, as their Stephen Strange kinda went over to the Dark Side.
Okay, so in among all this, it has come to light that Wanda has been using an evil magical tome called the Darkhold, which contains pretty much all the dark magic anyone could ever conceivably think of. It takes a toll on whoever uses it, though... As the Marvel site says, 'anyone who reads it will lose their mind...or their soul'. Basically, it is teeming with bad juju.
In this universe, the defenders of Earth weren't doing so hot trying to hold off Thanos, so Doctor Strange did what Doctor Strange does: he used whatever was available to him to get the job done, regardless of the consequences. So he delved into the Darkhold and found a way to defeat Thanos. And his friends in the Illuminati decided that he was now too dangerous for having done this, so they had Black Bolt apologise to him... vocally.
The Illuminati also considers Doctor Strange to be the greatest threat to the multiverse... Something about versions of him basically doing things that break universes, causing them to crash into each other and completely obliterating one or both of them. They called it an 'incursion', and they almost rightly view this as a greater threat than the Scarlet Witch.
Almost rightly.
One of the joyful spells Wanda has learned from the Darkhold is something called 'dream walking', where she projects her consciousness across the universes into another her and then controls it like a walking meat puppet suit thing. This she does, and so this universe's Wanda Maximoff's body with our Wanda Maximoff's crazy, leaving her twin boys home alone asleep, pops over to Illuminati's offices to say hello and cause some mayhem.
The Illuminati leave Strange with Mordo (because that's an awesome combi to leave alone in a room) and go off to handle the Scarlet Witch, which they are so sure they can do. Let's see if I can remember these deaths in order... Wanda makes Black Bolt's mouth non-existent (that whole reality at her whim thing, yeh?), and his dumbass makes a freaked out sound, but seeing as it has nowhere to go, it sort of gets trapped and makes his brain implode. She basically turns Richards into string cheese and shreds him to literal ribbons. She plays around a bit with Captain Carter, but then cuts her in half with her own shield... And then, also playing around with Captain Marvel, she ends up crushing her under a statue.
Then there's Charles, who isn't exactly an offensive player ever. Wanda meets him and he uses his abilities to go into her mind. He finds the body's Wanda buried under some rubble, and he tries to get her out, thinking that if he's able to free her, she'll be able to push out the invading Wanda and take her body back. This is all well and good, save that Scarlet Witch has a way of getting into people's heads, too, and she does so to Charles, preventing him from helping the body's rightful Wanda, and then snapping his neck inside her mind, which apparently does the same to his physical body.
It took her maybe five minutes to deal with all of them.
Stephen, meanwhile, is attempting to get free of the handcuffs he's in, which are inhibiting his powers. Mordo, who is apparently a stubborn, self-righteous knob in every universe, is unwilling to listen to reason, so Stephen improvises. He starts goading Mordo, saying that he only was good on killing this universe's Strange so that he could take the seat of Sorcerer Supreme for himself. Mordo, having absolutely zero chill, attacks him, and Stephen is able to use this to break one of his handcuffs off, slip it on his opponent, and then he jogs off to find America and Christine.
So, we're going to back up again for just a second. That opening scene with the Doctor Strange variant and America running away from the Malboro-thingie took place in a sort of in-between space. They're trying to get over to the Book of Vishanti, which would totally be a deus ex machina for this film, if they can just, you know, get to it. Which isn't as easy as it seems like it would be.
In this universe with the Illuminati, their Doctor Strange had set up a waypoint to get to the Book, and so, after finding Christine and America, Stephen decides that's where they need to go. Christine takes off Stephen's remaining handcuff/restraint, and he and America follow her through the building to where the entrance is. All while being pursued by a right mad Scarlet Witch.
They get to the in-between space and even to the Book of Vishanti, but just as Stephen is trying to use it, Wanda catches up with them and destroys the book. She captures America, whose powers activate due to her extreme duress, and Wanda shoves Stephen and Christine through the portal that opens, then uses her own magic to get America back to her universe.
Speaking of which, a bit earlier in the film, while Wanda was initially dream walking while having Wong held prisoner, one of the surviving sorcerers from the Kamar-Taj destroyed the Darkhold. Wanda freaks out, and she drags Wong into the courtyard, demanding he tell her what information he knows of the book. He says she'd have to kill him, but Wanda, prolly still thinking herself to be being reasonable, threatens to painfully murder the handful of survivors from her initial attack.
Because Good Guys™ can't sit back and watch someone being tortured to death even if those sacrifices are for the ultimate greater good, Wong ends up blurting out that the Darkhold tome was a copy, and that the spells are actually elsewhere. So Wanda makes him take her to the actual Darkhold, which straight up looks like Sauron's Tower from Lord of the Rings. It is to this tower that she brings America Chavez, and then she sets about to do her little spell to murder this child and steal her powers.
Back to Strange, he and Christine have ended up in a universe that looks to have been victim to an incursion. They do find the Sanctum Santorum, though, and Stephen goes up to speak with his alternate self.
This Doctor Strange wears the Darkhold on his belt like a frikkin' accessory. He's apparently gone mental due to the fact that he and Christine couldn't have their happily ever after. He also asks our Stephen if he's happy, and then relays that he'd been asked that by Christine at her wedding, and he'd lied, and he didn't know why he did that. And now he has taken it upon himself to straight up murder any other Stephen Stranges he runs into, because he knows they aren't actually happy, so he's putting them out of their misery.
Because that makes a lot of sense...
Anywho, Stephen wants the Darkhold and dude doesn't want to give it up, so they have a short battle involving magical musical notes (for whatever reason) that ends with crazy Strange being defenestrated and impaled on the wrought iron fence outside.
So now Dr Stephen Strange has the Darkhold, and he does what Doctor Strange does best: he uses what he has available and damn the consequences. (This is an incredibly bad habit he has, but it tends to work out in the end, so...)
Stephen has always been pretty good at rationalising absolutely horrific ideas if he thinks they will yield the results he needs, and that's exactly what he does here. Using the Darkhold, he searches the multiverse to find which one he needs to be interacting with, and then decides that he, too, is going to dream walk. Christine, who has come up to the Sanctum after witnessing the other Strange suddenly become a kebab, questions this plan, saying she thought there had to be another Stephen Strange in that universe to actually dream walk into.
And Stephen replies that no one ever said that Strange had to be alive.
When Stephen and Wong were questioning America after the fight with the Malboro-thingie, she explained to them that she was from another universe. Stephen, with his particular brand of tact, demanded she prove it, so she took them to where the other Doctor Strange, the one who died while trying to take her powers from her, lay covered with a blanket.
And it is into this corpse of himself that our Doctor Strange decides to project into. Apparently this is super taboo to do, because as soon as he does it, both the zombie Strange and his prone body back in the incursioned universe's Sanctum are attacked by... demons? Shades? Wraiths? Some sort of entities from Hell.
They almost overcome him, but Christine whispers to his body that they're spirits and he should just use them, and so he does and we get this awesomeness:
He goes to battle Wanda (who is more than a little miffed at his hypocrisy), and he does end up trapping her for a moment, but the Scarlet Witch is still more powerful than he can actually deal with. Wong tells him that he needs to take America's powers himself, and this time she's willing to make the sacrifice, but Stephen Strange definitely took up Tony Stark's mantle as the Avenger's dad figure, so he can't make himself do it.
Instead he pushes America to try and focus on using her powers, telling her that she's been guiding them the whole time, that every time she's used them she's taken them exactly where they need to go.
And so she does. Just as Wanda is breaking out of her prison, America opens a portal back to Earth-838, to that Wanda's home where she is with her twins. Our Wanda ends up attacking the other Wanda, to which the boys take a dim view. They end up cowering from her behind the stairs asking her not to hurt them. She says she would never, that she's not a monster, and then, suddenly, it clicks that yes the fuck she is.
Returning to 616, Wanda uses her powers to destroy the tower with the spells of the Darkhold carved into the walls... and herself along with it, it seems. This also destroys all copies of the Darkhold tome across the multiverse, which is a nifty little trick.
Strange, Wong, and America all go back to Kamar-Taj. The film ends with America, having become a student of sorcery, thanking Stephen and telling him she's glad she ended up in his universe. Awwe...
Oh, and Strange also has a third eye now.
Multiverse of Madness has two extra scenes, a mid- and post-credit. The mid-credit scene has a woman, who is apparently Clea, popping out of a portal and accusing Stephen of causing an incursion and demanding he come fix it, which he does. Woo.
The post-credit scene, though...
Okay, so one of my favourite post-credit scenes is this one, from Spider-Man: Homecoming:
We got trolled hard by Sony and Marvel, and I was mad, but I loved it, right?
The post-credit scene for Multiverse of Madness calls back to an earlier scene, right after Stephen and America end up on Earth-838. America had gone to find food, and Strange asked her how she paid for it, to which she replied that food is actually free in most universes. This actually turns out to be false for this one, though, as the owner of the stall she got the food from, Bruce Campbell's cameo (because this was directed by Sam Raimi, after all), demands payment.
Not wanting to deal with him (partially because he starts accusing Stephen of having stolen his cloak from the Doctor Strange museum), Strange casts a spell on him that causes him to beat himself up... which he says will wear off in about three weeks. (The practical part of me would like to point out that he'd have starved to death before that time, because how can he eat or drink while punching himself?)
Anywho, the scene that you sit through about forty hours worth of credit scroll for? The spell wears off, and the guy says something about it being over. And then it's done.
I loved the Captain America troll move, but I gotta say, this one did not spark joy.
To be honest, this film, while enjoyable and a very nice birthday present, isn't anything... special. It doesn't have the impact one might normally expect of a Marvel project. A friend on Twitter described it as 'forgettable', and I can't really argue with that assessment. It really doesn't help that they rehashed the idea that Wanda is a mad woman who can't handle her grief. I mean, again, that was the entire premise of WandaVision. First she flips because she can't handle that Vision is dead, and here she flips because she can't handle that her twin boys weren't ever real for her but are for other versions of her. Okay...
All in all, though, it was fun to watch, so I think I will give it a 7.5/10.
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