Review of Doctor Strange (2016) by Longjetty7 — 07 Nov 2016

This movie was practically unbearable to watch. First of all, the characters are boring and one-dimensional. Tilda Swinton is the only interesting character, and Doctor Strange himself is so pretentious and unlikeable, I legitimately did not care at all whether he succeeded. As far as the plot goes, it's incredibly basic and poorly written. Basically, Doctor Strange gets in a car accident and has nerve damage in his hands, so he goes to Nepal or whatever and learns magic from the "ancient one" to heal them. But then there's a guy who used to be a student of the ancient one who is searching for eternal life, which I guess makes him a villain, so Doctor Strange tries to stop him. And then there's some evil demon in another universe who wants to destroy our universe, and Doctor Strange defeats him, and then defeats the original bad guy. It's so stupid. Anyway, my biggest complaint with the movie is how they never really explain how the magic works or what the limitations of it are. It seems like they can teleport wherever they want, and turn back time, and look into the future, and do pretty much whatever, which had me constantly wondering why our heroes had any troubles at all. For example, when the one bad guy stole the page out of the book, why didn't the ancient one just teleport the page back? Or make the book go back in time like Doctor Strange did later on? And when Doctor Strange was stuck in that infinite loop in that dark universe, how did he manage to break out of it? What's the point of making such a big deal about getting stuck in an infinite loop if you can just end it whenever you want? That doesn't seem very infinite to me. It was all so silly and confusing, and not really because it was complicated, but because the writers probably didn't think this stuff through.

The one good thing I will say about this movie is that the special effects were pretty impressive. Unfortunately, good effects alone don't make for a good movie, so I still would not recommend this movie to anyone.