I saw Spider-Man: No Way Home for the first time two days earlier to prep for this. The experience of being in my first crowded theater for opening night of Doctor Strange 2 instantly brought me back to this memory of watching fan reactions to scenes in Endgame during lockdown in order to transport myself to a more innocent time.
Friend whispered to me a few months ago while seeing the trailer for No Way Home that Doctor Strange must not be who he says he is, because the real Doctor Strange would never try to mind wipe an entire world in order to protect one kid’s identity. The fact that there’s only a few passing mentions about this premise goes to show that there’s still some unstable character building happening for this character, or at least that Marvel was willing to throw Strange under the bus in order to have the multiverse.
The experience of watching No Way Home within 24 hours of Doctor Strange 2 is really satisfying in a way that I’m not sure is replicable for very many other people. Hard core fans of this movie saw it last year — and I guess they may have kept seeing it hundreds of times (?), but for the most part, I think of them as not really viewing these movies as a double feature, when they really do seem in conversation with one another. No Way Home, to a large extent, is void of plot and, I contend, basically unwatchable if you’re under the age of 25, since so much of the movie is concerned with commenting on the truly deranged devil’s bargain of a contract that has led to a constant flux of reboots every five years into perpetuity and the shared custody of one of the most profitable IPs in the history of movies.
Watching Andrew Garfield and Tobey McGuire cheekily comment on the ridiculousness of their own franchises really did make me fall in love with the nuances of each Spider-Man in a way that wormed its way into Friend’s heart when I urged him to see it, if only with the fast forward button close at hand. But at the same time, I kept wondering how the teenage boys and girls who had faithfully followed Tom Holland through thick and thick, lo these past six years, and showed up to this feature film only to learn that this was a stealth nostalgia tour for all the millennials in the room who grew up shipping Emma Stone with some dork named Garfield. How cheesed is that gonna make you?
So, into that breach comes Doctor Strange 2, saying fuck your nostalgia. Fuck you and fuck X-Men and fuck Fantastic 4 and fuck your fan theory about Wanda and Captain Marvel teaming up in another movie. Fuck your Evil Doctor Strange headfake from the trailer. You don’t know what we’re doing. And I have to say, I love that. I love everything about that energy. Sitting in that theater, listening to my seat mate whisper, “LET’S GO!” over and over as they introduced new cameos in that Illuminati moment, and the gleeful culling of those cameos just moments later was so satisfying and gratifying as a viewer with no emotional connection to the fandom. It feels good to see them have their hopes dashed and just imagining the articles they’re writing to cope and self-rationalize how this doesn’t mean that their treasured IP is doomed to live in the dog house outside the MCU.
There’s a lot that works in this movie, that moved the football down the field for some meaningful character development on the part of Doctor Strange and Wang. The best part about the MCU’s first phases was the assertion and the understanding that heroes are not, in fact, static set pieces that forever rearrange in meaningless permutations. Except America Chavez, who seems to have really lost her drive to find her parents at the end of this one, but hopefully we’re just putting her on the back burner until we can release a Young Avengers movie of some sort?
So now that we’ve established that this movie, or at least this set of movies, deserves some praise, there are some other things that are worth lamenting. Like the fact that after an award-winning television series made primarily to rid her of a questionable accent, the MCU does Wanda Maximoff dirty by Medeaing her. Wife asked me a few days ago if that meant she rode off in a chariot pulled by dragons.
I said that’s the dream sequence version of what happened, I suppose? Please no one tell her and hopefully in a few years when we’ve dropped off our little warden at her grandparent’s permanently, Wife will sit down to catch up on ten years of Marvel movies and watch with great disappointment as Wanda is crushed to death by her own cult temple. There is some joy whenever a talented actor is able to lose her golden handcuffs, however, and in that sense Thor: Love and Thunder will be a satisfying romp with stakes and Endgame allowed for some much needed catharsis on the part of helplessly wealthy Robert Downey Jr. Jonathan Major’s character from Loki doesn’t make an appearance as the Big Bad of the multiverse in what is clearly a missed opportunity. Although I’ve been told that he is the explicit Bad for an upcoming Marvel movie.
I have some questions about how queer America Chavez is: she has the explicitly gay parents backstory and she wear’s some conspicuous swag like the rainbow flag pin and the jacket that reads, Amor es Amor. I really enjoy the challenge for Chinese censors who must’ve had a fun time cropping her out of a lot of shots, but at the same time, I can’t help but wonder how central this is going to factor into her identity. More than any other hero so far, she’s got some explicit markers of queerness and I’m interested to see where it goes.
After having invested a great deal of time and energy into Euphoria, in the intervening time between the last Marvel movies and this one, I am amazed that one of the biggest rising stars continues to have such a minor role in the films. Zendaya is not allowed to have any magic, meanwhile even Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) can open portals. Her primarily role appears to be trying to scrunch herself small enough for Peter not to feel too self-conscious about how tall she is by comparison.
