Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: The Rule of I [critique]

Sam Raimi has succeeded in putting his stamp on this MCU superfilm, even if it ultimately resembles a super big episode of Rick and Morty.

Doctor Strange 2 arrives this Sunday unencrypted, on TF1. This sequel to Scott Derrickson's blockbuster, nice surprise of 2016is it worth it? Here is the review of First.

Doctor Strange 2: what you need to have seen to understand the Multiverse of Madness

Sam Raimi is like us. He also finds that having to direct a Marvel Cinematic Universe film means saying no to the status of author, and it means having to fit into a mold. Refuse to be the master of the game. As he says in our May issue of First : “We have to accept the rules of the game. We are part of a continuity, we are not master of everything. I don't see that as a restriction, there is a real pleasure in having to make the best possible film in a specific framework.“

It's quite honest, actually, and a very valid take on the role of the director – a big fan of Wizard of Oz (like, randomly, Sam Raimi) cannot ignore that the film has had no less than three successive directors, each completing the work of the previous one within the Hollywood studio system.

It was almost a century ago, sure, but it's still a still-valid industrial lesson. at a minimum in an MCU where a director like Jon Watts surely wasn't hired for his brilliant movie personality. Unlike Raimi, who not only has style but also set some pretty little milestones in the garden of super-cinema.

So does Doctor Strange 2 is a Sam Raimi film? Good news: yes, undoubtedly, and we play Samraimian bingo with a certain pleasure in front of Multiverse of Madness by identifying the effects of cuts stamped by its faithful editor Bob Murawski, the cameo of Bruce Campbell and very surprising visions of gore within such a locked franchise.

The other good news is the refusal of the dreaded fan service. After No Way Home and the return of previous Spider-Mans, we expected that this “crazy multiverse” would be one of crazy cameos. We won't spoil anything, but this big cameo scene is defused in a pretty funny way… which is rather reminiscent of the series Rick and Morty than the MCU and its sense of self-citation.

But now, Raimi's style is obviously part of a “precise framework”he must follow the “rules of the game”. The few exciting sequences are introduced by endless tunnels of dialogue in shot-reverse shot where the nanar folklore of the MCU unfolds (Mount Wungadore, the book of Vishanti, the demon Chthon, Chiwetel Ejiofor in dreadlocks…) until exhaustion.

Its extremely short duration (2h07!) suggested a act compact and effective: the Marvel framework, which uses the rules of the game from the TV series (the lovely reinvention of Scarlet Witch aka Elizabeth Olsen is based on the consequences of WandaVisiontoo bad if your Disney+ subscription is not up to date) finds a nice reinvention there, remaining too rigid to let anything breathe.

In fact, the film especially bears the mark of its screenwriter Michael Waldron, one of the writing pillars of Rick and Morty : like a typical episode of the series, the film breaks out storyline in several sections across several levels of reality before bringing them together in a grand finale that sums up all these elements with more or less inspired writing discoveries. Perhaps especially inspired by the novels of the Cycle of the Princes of Amber by Roger Zelazny, with its alternative realities and its characters dialoguing with doubles who are both evil and fascinating.

Like his friends, and like any good Disney film, Doctor Strange 2 jumps from concept art to concept art, sometimes establishing this hopping as a principle of cinema: the passage of Strange and his protégé America through all dimensions, supposed to be one of the climaxes of the film, is especially reminiscent of that of the underrated Men in Black 3. Basically, Raimi is never as good as when he follows a kinetically and cinematically firm trajectory, like the hallucinatory trajectories composed by a camera attached to a motorcycle during the filming of the first two evil Dead.

Juan Antonio Bayona, who managed to film the awful script of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdomtold us when it was released in 2018 that he had still managed to find a cinematic space in which to express himself in this terrible blockbuster. Raimi also succeeded, in this Doctor Strange shared between movement and immobility, finding your space.

Patrick Stewart hated making his cameo in Doctor Strange 2