The Illuminati scene is the best thing in this film and it’s also the most frustrating, because Marvel assembles the most interesting room it has ever built and then empties it in about four minutes.
Three and a half out of five. Worse than the first one, which I really enjoyed, and I’ve come out of it more annoyed than I expected to be.
Where is Mordo?
Start with the thing that’s bothered me since 2016. The first film ends by setting up Strange’s mentor as his eventual enemy. Mordo walks away having decided there are too many sorcerers in the world, and he starts doing something about it.
Nothing. He’s never properly mentioned. We get a version of him here from another universe, which is not the same thing at all and doesn’t count, and our Mordo remains wherever the franchise left him six years ago.
That’s really disappointing. It was a genuine hook with a proper character behind it, and it’s been quietly dropped in favour of a new antagonist.
The multiverse material is genuinely interesting
The good news is that the actual premise works. Jumping between universes gives the film a structure and some real visual invention, and the sequence where Strange and America fall through a stack of realities is the most imaginative thing Marvel has done in a while.
Sam Raimi’s horror instincts fit better than I expected, too. The possessed bodies, the reanimated corpse, the general willingness to make things genuinely unpleasant. It’s a real director making real choices, which isn’t always true here.
And the mechanics were laid out well enough elsewhere that the film doesn’t have to stop and explain itself. Anyone who watched a certain Disney+ series about variants and branching timelines arrives already fluent.
The Illuminati is the best casting Marvel has ever done
Patrick Stewart in the chair. The floating one, with the fancy power. I loved that.
And John Krasinski as Reed Richards is really cool casting. He looks the part, he sounds the part, and for about two minutes you can see an entire Fantastic Four film that might exist one day. It’s the single most exciting piece of casting in the film and I’d genuinely like to see him get to do it properly.
The detail that this universe’s team already defeated Thanos, and did it comfortably, is quite neat. It tells you these are the heavyweights without a flashback.
And then they’re wasted
Here’s my problem, and it’s the reason this lands at three and a half.
Black Bolt’s death is pretty lame, let’s be honest. Wanda seals his mouth shut so his own power implodes his skull. It’s a striking image and it’s over instantly, and a character whose entire premise is that his voice is a weapon of mass destruction gets removed by the most obvious counter available.
Worse is Reed. This is theoretically the smartest man in any universe, and he explains the exact nature of Black Bolt’s weakness out loud, in front of the enemy, before anyone has used it. That’s pathetic. You don’t hand over your strongest weapon in conversation.
The whole sequence is built to make Wanda look unstoppable, and the way it gets there is by making everyone else stupid. I’d much rather she’d beaten them at full strength. Let her survive the sonic attack because she’s simply more powerful than he is. That would have made her terrifying instead of making them careless.
Love conquers all, again
Marvel keeps going back to this well and it’s wearing thin.
An enormously powerful character is stopped not by being defeated but by choosing to stop, because of love. It happens here and it’s happened repeatedly, and even in the films that are genuinely about a battle, Endgame included, the resolution keeps coming back to somebody giving up for emotional reasons.
I understand what the film is going for. America shows Wanda her children recoiling from her, and Wanda sees what she’s become. Fine. But push on it for a second: across infinite universes there is obviously one where those boys would want her, where it works, where she gets the ending she’s after. The film’s own premise supplies the counter-argument to its own ending.
Let her win.
Marvel has done it before, at the end of the film where Thanos got everything he wanted, and it produced the best cliffhanger the franchise has had. Do it again here. Wanda takes what she wants, Strange fails, and the next film is about him working out how to use the Darkhold and undo it.
That’s a proper story. It uses the thing the film spends its whole runtime establishing as dangerous, it gives Strange an actual arc to walk into, and it doesn’t require the character introduced years ago to suddenly develop a conscience at the exact moment the runtime needs her to.
The stingers keep going nowhere
Related complaint. These films keep ending on a scene promising something, and then nothing happens.
Eternals finished on a man with a sword and a fairly loud implication, and that’s been sitting there ever since. This film introduces a new companion for Strange in its own stinger and I have very little confidence it’ll be picked up.
It works when they follow through. The Spider-Man films do it properly, and the Avengers ones always did. Setting up a payoff and never delivering is just a cop-out, and I’m getting tired of being asked to get excited about a scene nobody intends to use.
Where it lands
Three and a half. It definitely has good elements and some good fight sequences, and I did enjoy seeing Professor X. That could have been the X-Men proper, and it wasn’t, and it was still quite cool. Stewart’s Xavier walking into a Marvel film is a thing I didn’t expect to see.
The word this film keeps using for what happens when two universes collide is “incursion”, and it’s mentioned quickly and moved past. Given how the last Spider-Man film ended and how much of this one is about realities bumping into each other, I suspect that word is going to come back.
Not as good as the first. Still worth watching for the room with Stewart and Krasinski in it, even if what happens in that room is the most annoying five minutes of the year.