Near the end of my 2022 review I noted that this film says “incursion” quickly and then moves straight past it, and that I suspected the word would come back. It came back as the spine of the entire saga. Two universes colliding and both being destroyed is now the engine everything runs on, and this is the film that said it out loud first, in what amounts to a throwaway line, four years before the film that pays it off.
At the time this played as a loud, messy, horror-tinged sequel with one great cameo scene. Watching it now it’s doing more work than anything around it. It establishes that universes can be killed by contact. It establishes that there’s a body of people who police this and that they can be wiped out in an afternoon. It establishes that the mechanism for crossing over is a person rather than a machine, which matters more than it sounds. Almost every rule December is about to operate under got set here, in a film I ranked below its predecessor. It’s the more consequential one and the less enjoyable one, and those have never been the same measurement.
The Illuminati scene means something completely different now
Here’s the strange part. In 2022 that room was a tease, a glimpse of actors we were never really going to get, in a universe that gets destroyed twenty minutes later, offered as fan service with a body count attached. Then the Fox actors actually came back for real. Patrick Stewart is in Avengers: Doomsday. So is Ian McKellen. What played as “look what we could have done” turned out to be a trial run for something that is now genuinely happening, and that reframes the whole sequence.
I said John Krasinski as Reed Richards was really cool casting and that I’d like to see him get to do it properly. He didn’t get to. The role went elsewhere and the version I liked exists only as a corpse in a film about a woman tearing through a wall, which is a genuine shame and the one piece of this film I’d most want back. As for whether Xavier dying here cheapens his return in December, I don’t think it does, and the reason is the same one I landed on about Logan coming back: it wasn’t him. That Xavier belonged to a universe the film explicitly destroys minutes later, so nothing happening in December is undoing anything that happened here. What it does do is slightly cheapen this film in retrospect. The Illuminati sequence was doing something bold in 2022 by killing recognisable faces to show how dangerous Wanda had become. Now that those faces are turning up elsewhere, the stakes of that scene deflate a little, because it was shocking largely because it looked final.
My complaints, meanwhile, have not softened at all, and two of them have got worse. Reed explaining Black Bolt’s weakness out loud, in front of the enemy, before anybody has used it, is still the single most irritating thing in the film. I called it pathetic for the smartest man in any universe and I’ll stand on that. Four more years of turning it over hasn’t produced a reading where it isn’t simply the script clearing the room so Wanda can look unstoppable. And Black Bolt’s death is still lame, still an instant counter to a character built entirely around one power, still over before it registers. The film’s reputation has settled roughly where I left it, which is to say people remember the room and not much else.
Love conquers all, four years later
The ending I complained about has only looked worse as time has gone on. I said Marvel keeps stopping its most powerful characters by having them choose to stop, that it happened here and had happened repeatedly, and that across infinite universes there is obviously one where Wanda’s children would want her and she’d get the ending she’s after. Nobody has answered that, because there isn’t an answer. The film supplies its own counter-argument in its own premise and then walks past it.
I still think letting her win would have been the better film by some distance. 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 ever had. Do it again here: Wanda takes what she wants, Strange fails outright, 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, and it doesn’t require a character to suddenly develop a conscience at the exact moment the runtime needs one. What we got instead is a story that ends by deciding it didn’t happen.
And Mordo, four years later, is still nothing. I opened the 2022 review complaining that Strange’s mentor was set up as his eventual enemy in 2016 and then quietly dropped, and that a variant of him doesn’t count. That remains true. It’s now a decade since that setup and the character has never been paid off in the universe that established him. I’m repeating it here because it’s part of a pattern I flagged then and which has only got clearer, which brings me to the complaint I’d most like to formally close out. In 2022 I said these films keep ending on a promise nobody intends to keep and pointed at the Eternals stinger with the man and the sword. Four years on, still nothing. This film’s own stinger introduces a new companion for Strange and I said I had very little confidence it’d be picked up, and it wasn’t in any meaningful way. And I can now add the one I couldn’t mention at the time because it hadn’t happened yet: Thor: Love and Thunder ended by introducing Hercules with enormous ceremony, and that has gone precisely nowhere either. Three loud promises, three dead ends, all inside about eight months. Doing this and abandoning it teaches an audience not to care, which is an expensive lesson to teach.
Sam Raimi’s horror instincts remain the most distinctive thing about it, and they’re worth more now than they were. The possession material, the reanimated corpse, the genuine nastiness of a few sequences. In a run of films that mostly look identical, this one looks like somebody actually made it, and I’d take a flawed film with a director’s fingerprints over a competent one without them every time.
Three and a half stands. Good elements, good fight sequences, one unforgettable room, one deeply annoying five minutes inside that room, and an ending that takes the easy way out. But if you’re only rewatching one film to understand the rules Doomsday operates under, this is a much stronger choice than it looks, and I’d never have said that in 2022.
Next in the rewatch: Thor: Love and Thunder, which is where the Hercules scene I just complained about actually comes from.
