Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Review

The fact Sam Raimi hasn’t made a comic book movie since the Toby Maguire Spider-man trilogy is something that’s just astounding. His vision for Spider-man was almost flawless and only crashed due to the studio not giving them enough time to develop things at a decent pace.

Thanks to Marvel Studios we have seen the triumphant return of Sam Raimi to comic book films with the long-overdue Doctor Strange sequel, The Multiverse of Madness. It’s a new take on the whole comic book movie genre as it has all the magic and action we’ve learned to expect from a Marvel movie but also has twists of Raimi’s classic whacky horror.

We’ve seen a few dips into the Multiverse in recent Disney Plus shows and movies but I think this is the first time they have made the most out of the opportunity.

The movie starts off by introducing us to a new and very cool character America Chavez played by Xochitl Gomez. America is a bit different from everyone else as she’s unique by the fact there are no multiverse variants of her and can jump between universes on her own. She’s been traveling from one universe to another with help from variants of Doctor Strange who have died at the hands of monsters that have been chasing America.

Following on from the Wander Vision show Wander (Elizabeth Olsen) is in search of her two boys. The ones she created at the time were thought to be made up but it turns out they were based on the children of one of her multiverse variants.

This basically makes Wander the villain again in a nice twist, this puts Doctor Strange in an awkward position as he knows she’s not evil but just in a bit of a bad place.

As mentioned before this movie makes good use of the Multiverse, we get to see Captain Carter played by Haley Atwell which was just amazing. I don’t know how they haven’t done more with her character. She had the one season of Agent Carter made which has some good points but just didn’t use the characters in the best way and could have been a lot better with a few tweaks. She has a second chance now though with Captain Carter and I do hope they bring her back somehow.

The film also featured the return of Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, we got teased with his appearance in one of the trailers and it was good to see him again, will this be his last appearance as Professor X? it’s too early to say at this point, I feel like he could pop up anywhere and with the multiverse, it’s totally possible now.

With the Fantastic Four making a come back it was great to see Reed Richards, this time played by John Krasinski along with the return of Anson Mounts Black Bolt and Lashana Lynch as the new Captain Marvel all members of the Illuminate.

Seeing all the possibilities and directions they could have taken this movie I almost wish it was adapted into a TV show with new variants popping up each week. Although saying that Raimi did an amazing job of keeping the story focused on the main story while still exploring the multiverse.

During production there were so many rumors of Tom Cruise playing Iron Man, there were fake leaked scripts, concept art, fan art even fake on-set pictures going around. It would have been amazing and I’m not sure how it got so out of hand. Apparently, there were talks about Tom being an Iron Man variant but he was too busy filming Mission Impossible.

Overall the movie was a lot of fun and totally unmissable for any Marvel fan. The cast is amazing and I really hope Sony, WB or Marvel bring Raimi back as he has so much to give to comic book movies. I’m at a loss as to why Sony made movies like Morbius when they could have made Raimi’s Spider-man 4.

Posted by Adi Mursec on May 21, 2022