Saw Dr. Strange tonight. Things, at “vague impression” level spoilers (or as most people would say, “spoiler free”):

  1. In what sense is it meaningful to say that the movie opens on the 4th if there are showings starting at 6PM on the 3rd? Doesn’t that movie open on the 3rd? I don’t understand this.

  2. They had a Rogue Squadron trailer that actually made it look really good? idk, it looks more interesting than Star Wars 7 was, tbh.

  3. Benedict Cumberbatch is basically playing a slightly nicer House, right down to the accent. Which makes me kinda wish they had gotten Hugh Laurie for the role, as I think he’s a much better actor and would have made the part more interesting.

  4. And speaking of actors, the whole whitewashing the Ancient One thing is a thing, right. Beyond that, though, the movie does a good job not falling into exoticizing Asian mystic bullshit, and Wong is handled waaaaaaaay better than in the comics. Chiwetel Ejiofor does a great Mordo who’s v. different from the comics in a more interesting way, too.

  5. The movie was visually interesting, and even borrowed from Ditko a bit, though I thought it would have done better to be more Ditko and less Inception. But it’s visually cool.

  6. The story… is the Marvel Origin Story, Take Twenty-Seven or however many of these there have been. It’s fine. It’s perfectly competent, and it checks off all the boxes on The Official Superhero Origin Story Checklist. I was honestly pretty bored for a good chunk of it, because yeah yeah, we get it, can we just skip straight to the movie where the dude already is the person he’ll become, and then have a story about them? At the end of the movie, it felt like the end of the pilot episode, where you’re expecting the real season to start now. (Although Marvel TV shows have managed to stretch that pilot episode out to ten hours on Netflix, so hey.)

But my wife liked it more than I did, so maybe I’m just getting more jaded about these movies than normal people are. It’s like the longer the movies go on, the less I’m like “omg they made a movie of it!!!” and the more I’m like “enh, the comic is better.”

But I didn’t hate it or anything, it was fine. 3.5 stars on Yelp.