Doctor Strange vs Iron Man movies – Beating Hearts and Blind Eyes
How could the coolest, most unique thing about a Marvel movie turn out to be the worst thing? Maybe because it was all that happened in Doctor Strange.
I was looking forward to this movie too.
After all, Benedict Sherlock Cumberbatch as our Sorcerer Supreme? It seemed like a redux of the insight that made Iron Man. A lesser-known but major player in the comics… actually someone who should be downright iconic, the Marvel world’s greatest wizard, same as Tony Stark is its greatest engineer? In fact they’re mirror images of each other, both scholars of power, ancient secrets contrasted with bleeding-edge tech. (They have similar last names and barbers too…)
What’s more, it seemed like this time Marvel would recreate some of the, um, magic, but with all their cards where we could see them. This time the whole moviegoing world knew how good Marvel Studios and the Marvel characters could be… and the lead wasn’t an on-and-off success like Robert Downey Jr. who’d never quite gotten his real shot, he was a cult superstar with almost more fans than Marvel itself.
What I didn’t expect is that it would be so much like Iron Man, but without the heart.
(To be clear: it’s not a bad movie. It covers the basics, with plenty of Marvel quality, and Cumberbatch and the rest do a decent job. It’s just more on the level of a Thor 2 or Iron Man 2 than a new Ant-Man or Guardians that holds onto what it wants to be.)
Stark Enough – not Strange Enough
It doesn’t help that Stephen Strange and Tony Stark have a lot of the same journey. They’re both studies in Pride—which they almost have to be, a character primed to become a super inventor or wizard ought to already be a genius and have a genius’s issues—who learn to care about more than themselves.
Except… Stark shows us that journey; Strange just gets dragged along.
What’s the thing we love most about the Iron Man movies? Their commitment to Tony Stark’s dysfunctional, irreverent, completely convincing nature as a man who can carry a nuclear weapon into a hellgate without really growing up.
- He starts out a weapons-dealer caught up in the human cost of his trade, and rebuilds the industry to be more responsible… hasn’t that happened in real life? (Well, it should.)
- He drinks, dances on stage, and fights with his teammates, even while he saves the world.
- Even his views of saving the world might be as unstable as ever (Avengers Ultron, Cap Civil War). What’s more arrogant than tempting fate with the infamous promise “peace in our time”?
- And yet… even with all those past and present ties of how broken he is, he keeps going.
[bctt tweet=”The greatest pun in Marvel history may be that “Iron Man is powered by an ‘Arc’ Reactor.”” username=””]
Come to think of it, Tony’s character arc isn’t so much about moving forward as how he brings everything he’s been with him. It’s why he’s so convincing, that he finds his own ways to grow and twist instead of moving in straight lines. Plus, he always stays close to his own world, facing everything from ex-girlfriends to Sinister Senate Subcommittees that play on every part of the life he’s lived.
But Stephen Strange… we see a few scenes of him as an arrogant doctor (dazzling with one patient but refusing another because “You want me to ruin my perfect record?”). And then…
Car wreck.
Desperate for healing—for his own sake, of course.
Ancient sorcerer school. Wizard wars.
And… all his old issues just fade away, pushed back by the new struggles. Apart from needing some proof that magic’s real, he has one moment of “resisting the call” after his first fight (“I took an oath to do no harm, and I just killed a man”), and a minute later he runs straight toward the next attack. He fights one battle in his old hospital beside his Pepper, um Dr. Christine, enough to touch base. But where Tony shuffles toward heroism with one foot balanced in his past, Stephen just floats up to his destiny and leaves the rest.
It’s those ties to what the character has been that one movie revels in and the other could have gone after. Instead we have a first scene not of the fledgling hero himself (like Tony’s confidently was) but of the existing sorcerers battling. We have Stephen’s doubts about magic blasted away by the Ancient One knocking him out-of-body; later she simply tells him he needs to learn “it’s not all about you.” But we aren’t seeing that growth.
Or, compare to Captain America, who doesn’t change his good nature much but constantly shows us the struggle to hold onto it in a hard world. Or Thor, whose growth is clumsy but vivid with all of Asgard bringing the pressures on him to life. Stephen Strange may do his hero-ing under his own name, but the man he was simply disappears.
“Too Many Sorcerers”
So, what does Doctor Strange focus on? Dimension-folding special effects… that doesn’t even matter to the story, until it finally does.
One defense of the movie is that it has a whole world of magic to introduce, unlike how Iron Man builds on real technology and celebrity life. Of course Stephen has to leave the familiar to explore the supernatural step by step… and maybe that doesn’t leave time for as much of the old character.
–No time? More careful writing would steal time along each step to keep us aware of who this hero is (and this is a story that holds up time-magic as the ultimate power).
In fact, check out the animated film Dr. Strange – Sorcerer Supreme. In half an hour less than the movie’s running time it makes Stephen’s growth in the sanctuary much more powerful (“But I need my hands!” “No. You do not.”), and the action is nearly as good. Just less flashy. (Take a look at The Invincible Iron Man too; it’s a clever way to condense Tony’s story into eighty busy minutes, and the Mandarin too—yes, it actually uses him.)
Instead, the big movie brings us worlds that shimmer and fold whenever sorcerers fight in them… and that’s it.
Are there real plot issues with what could make those worlds bend, and how it affected who won a fight? No, the folding could almost be a side-effect of battle magic, and sorcerers jump around the twisting gravity like they do it every day. The real fighting’s done with energy whips, shields, and other contained spells that seem to have no relation to the mirror effects. (Until at the climax, Strange pulls out one forbidden warp-spell he’d dabbled in before, and uses it to outwit “the devil” with a heroic sacrifice to make it cooler.)
I know, “magic” takes work to put in a story. It can come off as the ability to do anything, the “there’s a zap for that” toolkit that destroys story challenges. A busy superhero story has always had trouble making us feel a sorcerer has limits… but if he does have limits, how is he different from every other super-guy? Maybe the movie did what it had to by embracing the unlimited scale of its subject, even if it didn’t use it enough.
Still, it’s an old writing challenge: if a character or plot device were removed, would it change the story? In Doctor Strange, the mystic background has replaced almost all of the character touches that could have made it more real… but in story terms, most of the effects that make up that setting could vanish and not leave a trace.
A pity.
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