As a hardcore Marvel fan, I have watched every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, most of them on opening night or weeked, and Disney+ show, and I frequently watch predictions and upcoming releases. After I watched Spidernman: No Way Home, Loki, What If…?, and Wandavision, I was extremely excited for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (MoM), as it seemed that this movie would cover up all the loose ends of these films and shows due to the heavy implications of the multiverse in each of these stories. Unfortunately, I was relatively disappointed with MoM for a variety of reasons. As a warning, this article will contain spoilers to the movie.

The movie starts off with a scene where Doctor Strange has a dream that he has to sacrifice America Chavez to control her powers, which introduces the first problem of the film: the bad CGI. This first scene is in a space type location, which looks like it was a cartoon. The lighting and the visual effects look very outdated and poorly done. Throughout the film, the CGI was hit or miss with some effects looking very realistic while others looking very animated and not realistic whatsoever. This frustrated me since Marvel and Disney make so much money that they should at least make the films look nice. However, Hannah Bucklin (12) thought the “music note battle was very cool.”

Then, he attends a wedding with his ex-lover Christine, which poses the next problem: too much of a focus on Christine. Rachel McAdams, who plays Christine, and Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Doctor Strange, have essentially no chemistry leading to an uninteresting subplot between them. They spend a lot of screen time together, which takes away from more compelling parts of the story. To go along with that, even in the first movie, people did not entirely like her, as she did not get as much hype as other relationships (Beyond the Trailer YouTube Channel).

After, he meets America Chavez while fighting an eye monster, and she introduces him to her powers of hopping the multiverse and the fact that someone is chasing her to take her powers. Doctor Strange then visits Wanda Maximoff in hopes that she will tell him more about the multiverse, but he is surprised to find out she is the one who wants Chavez’s powers because she wants to find her kids, and she is now the Scarlet Witch. This leads to the next problem: the development of Wanda. Sam Raimi, the director of MoM, did not watch Wandavision, and it is made apparent with how he handles her character (insidethemagic.net). At the end of Wandavision, she is presented as a kind woman who regrets taking a town hostage, but in MoM she is portrayed as a bloodthirsty witch.

Then, he goes multiverse hopping with Chavez and gets in a universe with the next big problem: the Illuminati. In the comics, the Illuminati is a powerful group that is made up of the leaders of certain superhero groups, like the Avengers and the X-Men. In the movie, Reed Richards, Captain Marvel, Mordo, Professor X, and Black Bolt are the superheros that make up the Illuminati, but Wanda kills all of them within ten minutes of their screen time, so why were they even in the movie in the first place? They could have filled up that time with other characters that were important to the plot, and not just put them in to appease the fans because of the lack of cameos they wrote in the movie. 

Overall, I was relatively disappointed with this movie, and I wished it dealt with more plotlines introduced in previous works. Conversely, in my opinion, some of the horror elements were incredibly alluring, so the movie was not entirely bad.