Scott and Amy break down what happens in the new Doctor Strange movie!
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 Hello everybody, welcome to What Culture, I'm Scott, joined by Amy.
00:02 Hello, hello.
00:03 Amy Farmer, we saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and there's a tonne of stuff to
00:07 talk about so we're going to dive into the meatiest things possible.
00:10 This is a spoiler review spoiler discussion, just you know what it's going to be.
00:14 It's going to be all the things that everyone else is talking about, starting with the members
00:18 of the Illuminati.
00:19 So we're going to run some stuff down, me and Amy do have various thoughts on the movie
00:22 overall but they will be threaded throughout this thing.
00:26 Not throwing out the quote that it's one of the worst ones yet.
00:29 People are throwing that about though, we've all been so hasty.
00:33 So yeah, I don't want to get into all the negatives yet, I think it's going to be an
00:35 interesting launch weekend, I'm very curious what people think as they're coming out of
00:39 it.
00:40 But let's talk about the biggest things in there.
00:41 Like I said, starting with the Illuminati, which is, let's just run these down.
00:44 John Krasinski is Reed Richards, which is one of the most fun fan castings made real
00:49 things in MCU history.
00:51 You've got Patrick Stewart coming in as Professor Xavier again, in his yellow wheelchair, did
00:55 that from That's How He Uses It from the original animated series.
00:59 You've also got Black Bolt in here, played by Anton Mount, who I've never seen before
01:04 but the character's very cool, whispers stuff, blows people up, it's awesome.
01:07 Hayley Atwell as Captain Carter, which is the live action version of the thing, the
01:11 version of the character from the What If series.
01:14 And also Lashana Lynch as Captain Marvel, who originally played Maria Rambeau, Monica
01:18 Rambeau's mother back in Captain Marvel.
01:21 So what do you think of all this stuff, all these cameos, before things go in a certain
01:24 direction?
01:25 There was always going to be cameos, wasn't there?
01:27 People were going to be really, really disappointed if they came to the cinema and they didn't
01:30 see at least one big shocking cameo.
01:33 So in a way-
01:34 Not Tom Cruise though.
01:35 Not Tom Cruise.
01:36 The amount of people that have messaged me, especially after I got to see the movie a
01:39 bit early, which was a treat may I say, people would say, oh I've seen Tom Cruise is in the
01:44 movie.
01:45 The other big one, Deadpool.
01:46 Everyone was convinced Deadpool was in the movie.
01:48 And obviously I was like, oh I cannot tell you, I could not tell you, and I was sitting
01:51 there going, where are they getting this from?
01:53 No!
01:54 How did those things happen?
01:55 The follow on from this scene is that they all immediately die.
01:58 They're all used as a way to demonstrate Wanda's power.
02:00 We'll get onto what happens with Wanda very soon, but those deaths are very fun.
02:04 They're one of the most fun parts of the movie.
02:06 I get some of the backlash.
02:07 There's just some of the negative stuff that I think will come out of the movie.
02:10 People saying that, okay so we're not necessarily using Patrick Stewart as this MCU's version
02:15 of Professor X.
02:16 He's the Universe 838's version of Professor X and not necessarily the one that'll be in
02:20 the Universe 616, which is what we've been following so far.
02:23 So there's all that stuff, but all these characters die in quite fun ways.
02:27 Like Reed Richards gets peeled apart into a cheese string man.
02:30 Really enjoyed that.
02:31 Which is kind of fun.
02:32 Obviously we've got the big, big flex of, oh he can blow you up with a mere whisper.
02:36 And she goes, with what mouth?
02:38 Oh, beautiful.
02:39 Wonderful.
02:40 She does the Agent Smith.
02:42 She does the thing and then yeah, he tries to talk, blows his own head off, which is
02:45 really cool.
02:46 What do you think of all that stuff?
02:47 Because we talked about before we started recording all the horror elements that are
02:50 in here and obviously the movie is talked about as the MCU's first horror movie.
02:53 When did you come down on that?
02:54 Because I don't know if it is.
02:56 I will admit there was a few bits that I did genuinely enjoy.
03:00 There was a few little homages paid that I saw and I went, that is nice.
03:04 That's a nice little nod there.
03:06 But in general, they didn't really go far enough and I know that that was their intention
03:10 because that seems to be the reason that they replaced the director in the first place.
03:14 When we initially had Scott Derrickson set right ready to make this whole thing very
03:19 horror-esque, he was eager to make this almost the MCU's first out and out horror film.
03:24 Yes.
03:25 And when he left because of creative differences, we can all take a very educated guess as to
03:28 what those creative differences were.
03:31 So we did still get bits of horror and I did like the gore.
03:36 They weren't afraid of now showing the big squid's eye getting taken out.
03:40 Yeah, that was a cool opening thing.
03:42 There was a massive random giant squid fight in New York that like Amy says ended with
03:45 the eye being pulled out but the bit when all the Illuminati die, you have Reed Richards
03:49 being peeled apart, you have Captain Carter being severed, completely bisected.
03:55 But the way that they cut around that is very your mind fills in the blanks kind of thing.
03:59 Simultaneously kind of mixed with that fact of like, okay, the MCU's not going to show
04:02 that but they do show a bloodstained shield after it's gone through her.
04:06 So you do get scenes like that.
04:07 It is interesting how much of the Rami-ness is in here.
04:11 It almost feels like his bag of tricks from the original Rami Spider-Man movies with some
04:14 of the transitions, some of the editing tricks.
04:16 Bruce Campbell was recently talking at a comic book event and he said that there were extensive
04:20 reshoots that were done after his cameo scene was done.
04:24 And so it feels like it.
04:25 You said, Scott was saying before, oh I could see the reshoots.
04:28 I could pick out where they were and I thought, oh God, maybe I didn't notice that.
04:32 Maybe I'm unobservant but I think that will be more of a problem for some people than
04:35 others.
04:36 Yeah, there's only one that's really obvious if you want to just have a laugh at how obvious
04:38 the reshoots are.
04:39 It's Wong's hair goes from being shaven indoors at one point near the beginning to a bit longer
04:43 ago to being back to being shaven again.
04:45 Point being though that all the Illuminati are on stage, on screen, for like five minutes.
04:49 They're a nice visual, it's cool.
04:50 We get to see their universe's version of what they did with Thanos, which is a really
04:54 cool thing.
04:55 But we also reveal that their version of Doctor Strange was killed by Black Bolt, which is
04:59 a whole other thing.
05:00 And so we can talk about the overall structure of this and dive into the likes of a new character,
05:05 America Chavez, who I was like watching it going, have I missed something?
05:09 Is this character, were they in the background of Hawkeye somewhere?
05:12 Like what was this?
05:13 Yeah, America Chavez is a new character introduced in Multiverse of Madness as the MCU's way
05:17 of jumping between multiverses after Doctor Strange has largely forgotten the events of
05:21 everything in No Way Home.
05:23 Now I think this stuff is really sloppy and messy.
05:25 Oh yeah.
05:26 Really, really ridiculous movie that opens on America Chavez's power, just her going,
05:29 I can hop between realms to be honest.
05:31 Do you want to go on a bit of a realm hop?
05:32 She couldn't be more of a plot device.
05:34 No.
05:35 They tried to make her less two dimensional.
05:37 She might as well be one of those books that they'll cover Shandi or just another book.
05:40 She may as well have been a prop really.
05:42 I remember.
05:43 And on the one hand, I'm like, okay, I understand why you did that.
05:46 I don't really respect it very much.
05:48 No.
05:49 But you did it.
05:50 It's happened now.
05:51 There's no point complaining.
05:52 Yeah.
05:53 But it was the fact that they tried to make her a little bit more fleshed out as a character.
05:54 Like, oh, she was taken away from her home planet.
05:55 We're parents, guys.
05:56 Oh, she has parents somewhere.
05:57 Which we're not going to do anything with.
05:58 Yeah, we didn't do anything with the parents.
05:59 We had, we never spoke again about how she feels about things.
06:06 She does like a 180.
06:07 Like in her first scene, she's sort of like, obviously she's been growing up by herself,
06:09 learned to believe in herself.
06:10 That's why she's more sort of sarcastic or whatever.
06:13 She's like kind of that archetype.
06:14 But then as the movie goes on, she just becomes kind of more generic.
06:17 It also felt like a really convenient way for the studio to like shoehorn in a few things
06:21 that they could give themselves like diversity ticks on it.
06:24 That they had.
06:25 Yeah, the pin badge.
06:26 One of the first things you see is the pin badge.
06:27 And I'm not dunking on that.
06:28 I love a bit, I love representation.
06:30 I'll advocate for that being anywhere.
06:32 But wouldn't it be really nice if they had bothered to make a queer character that had
06:36 a personality or a background instead of sticking that on there?
06:39 And being like, "Whoa, she's got two mums!"
06:41 And then, "Oh yeah, but her mums are in another universe.
06:44 We're never going to touch on that again.
06:46 We know nothing about her."
06:48 Let's move on to Wanda stuff.
06:50 Now some people are absolutely loving Elizabeth Olsen's performance here.
06:54 What do you think?
06:55 I might just go off the stance alone to say that it's a bit of a knockout, but it could
06:57 be in both ways.
06:58 It could be in an exhausting way.
06:59 I've gone so far down the sofa, I've knocked myself out of my own shop.
07:02 I can't even point at it.
07:04 I...
07:05 If anyone followed our coverage of WandaVision...
07:09 Yes.
07:10 I got really into WandaVision.
07:11 I was there talking about it every week.
07:12 I was excited.
07:13 I was ready.
07:14 I was really enjoying the development they were bringing to this character.
07:17 The way we were getting to know more about her.
07:19 The way we got to experience her emotional challenges.
07:23 She was processing her grief.
07:25 She was making progress.
07:26 At the end, of course, we get her flying off into the distance to avoid the consequences.
07:30 But we also know that she has come to recognise that what she's done has hurt people.
07:35 That it wasn't the right thing to do.
07:37 She has grown.
07:38 And then you get this movie and we go into an orchard with her and Doctor Strange goes,
07:43 "Oh, what lovely real trees you have."
07:45 And she goes, "Psych!"
07:47 The first line that she has is, you know, "I hurt people.
07:50 I'm sorry."
07:51 And whatever.
07:52 But then they completely change that.
07:53 I don't know if it was a reshoot thing.
07:54 I have no idea.
07:55 But they completely change that to almost retcon WandaVision and say that the Scarlet Witch
07:59 as an overall entity is this sort of multiversal force that has possessed her and the real
08:04 Wanda is buried underneath that psyche as is explored by Professor Xavier when he goes
08:08 inside her mind.
08:09 So that almost kind of eliminates all the progress and the maturity of WandaVision,
08:14 all the themes that were explored there.
08:15 It also, for me, took away some of the agency of Wanda as a character.
08:18 Yeah, totally.
08:19 If we're saying that it's more of this multiversal witch possession kind of thing and the real
08:23 Wanda is stuck under some rocks in her psyche.
08:26 Also at that time I was also wondering if that wasn't the metaphor they were going for.
08:29 They were more going for this was a trap all along to get Xavier to come and rescue her.
08:34 Yes, but...
08:35 Fake Wanda.
08:36 But in the same way, even if it isn't a possession type thing, it removes all her emotional development,
08:43 everything she learned, all these relationships she built and just reduces her to a nothing
08:49 and it reduces everything that happened in WandaVision to a nothing.
08:54 They do a lot of...
08:55 Because it's weird, like you said, that could absolutely be a trap for Scarlet Witch to
08:58 catch and kill Xavier, which is a cool death.
09:00 But we have other characters talking about the power of the Scarlet Witch, the multiversal
09:03 power of the Scarlet Witch, so it seems like they're still building to this overall idea
09:06 of the Scarlet Witch being an entity around Wanda or whatever, active in the MCU in some
09:10 other way.
09:11 And that was very much similar with the fact that she was enshrined in the stone already.
09:15 Yes, exactly.
09:16 This was always my destiny.
09:17 Destiny and fate is such an easy way to almost completely by accident remove any depth or
09:24 choice from a character.
09:26 It was a weird beat and they needed to do...
09:27 We mentioned the horror stuff.
09:29 They do have...Ramey has a lot of fun with making it so that Wanda does...
09:33 It's called dreamwalking where you sort of possess a different version of yourself in
09:36 a different reality and we have the Scarlet Witch version of Wanda possesses the version
09:40 of Wanda from the other universe, Universe 838.
09:43 She's over there in 616 and then the 838 version goes on a rampage to reclaim America Chavez.
09:49 What do you think of all that stuff?
09:50 Because her whole motivation at that point and the entire movie is to get her kids back,
09:53 but obviously her kids were never real and you have Doctor Strange telling her that.
09:57 But then in the other universe they are still there, but she would have to have gone through
10:01 all the stuff to create WandaVision but then be chill about it.
10:03 So I don't know.
10:04 It's the way they tried to talk themselves out of it.
10:06 They dropped in a few lines about, "Oh, but Wanda, you know your children aren't real."
10:10 And then, "But they are in every other universe."
10:13 And it's like, "Oh, if we give you this one sentence explanation of like, 'They are, they're
10:18 real in other universes,' you don't have time to ask how, why or what implication this has."
10:23 No implication, it's other universes.
10:24 You don't need to worry about it.
10:25 It is meant to be that you're trying to be saving her from herself.
10:28 I get the whole post-Thanos multifaceted villain, whatever.
10:31 That's an interesting, obviously always an interesting way to go.
10:33 The villains have more to them than just an evil cackling plan or whatever.
10:36 But they don't do anywhere near enough with that.
10:38 It's not like she has a conversation with her other self, the one that is also living
10:41 alive but isn't pursuing it in the same way or whatever.
10:44 They don't do anything with the multiverse set up.
10:46 We really walk the line between what is her mind power concoction thing, the WandaVision
10:51 thing, and also what is actually real.
10:54 She sort of flies out of that universe's version of the WandaVision fake TV show to fly into
10:59 the real version of the space between worlds or the realms to access the book to do one
11:03 of the final fights.
11:04 There's just a lot of weird plot inconsistencies with this stuff and even as we talk about
11:08 it, it sounds messy because it is the product of extensive reshoots and multiple films.
11:11 I mean, it's always one of those things where you want to reward ambition and I get that
11:14 Sam Raimi's return, especially to a Marvel themed property or whatever, is a big deal.
11:18 You can see the Raiminess in there.
11:20 It's just, it's very spread out.
11:21 It is in itself quite bifurcated by the fact that it has to still become this wider thing.
11:25 Oh my god, Professor X. Oh my god, Fantastic Four, whatever.
11:28 But because all those things go sideways and they don't really run with any of the character
11:31 development stuff, it's very telling that we haven't talked about Doctor Strange himself
11:34 at all because he gets one actual scene towards the end where he finally talks to a different
11:40 Universe 838's version of Christine and has an actual scene and I was like, oh my god,
11:44 an actual scene.
11:45 Like, finally in this film.
11:46 An actual scene that's about Doctor Strange who's got his name in the title.
11:49 Because that to me just illustrates as well the fact that so much of the movie was just
11:54 like glossy over, they took like a really simple block of concrete that was this plot,
12:00 this really safe, predictable, annoyingly straight plot.
12:04 They could have had fun with it, you know, they could have done the multiverse thing,
12:06 cameos galore, they could have done that stuff.
12:08 And they covered it in this glaze of some cameos, a little bit of gore to make you think
12:13 that they're doing something different, these new characters, all their classic cynical
12:18 humour, a couple of scenes where we see them going through universes but getting no elaboration
12:24 on that whatsoever.
12:25 One of them's paint.
12:26 And because they've done all that, we don't recognise that what's underneath it is just
12:31 concrete.
12:32 We absolutely need to talk about the fact that for a movie called Doctor Strange and
12:34 the Multiverse of Madness and in the same release period as Everything Everywhere All
12:38 at Once, a movie that is drastically better in regards to multiversal philosophy and everything
12:42 else, go see that movie, oh my god.
12:45 This movie is not about a bunch of different universes, it's about one.
12:48 There's a cameo, sorry, there's a montage where they go through a bunch of different
12:51 universes like Amy said and there is one where they turn into paint for a split second.
12:55 I like Meet Cubiverse.
12:56 Meet Cubiverse is cool, like all the things that were in the trailer that made you think
12:59 they were going to be going to all these different places with all these different versions of
13:01 Doctor Strange.
13:02 That was cheeky.
13:03 It's very cheeky, like the short-haired version of Strange dies in the very beginning.
13:06 We don't do anything with all the different universes that we see, instead we go through
13:09 all of them to get to Universe 838 and then we stay there for the rest of the movie.
13:12 It's a very good hook and obviously there was a whole thing about Doctor Strange's trailer
13:16 numbers on YouTube had this massive spike alongside Thor, people did still care about
13:19 the MCU even though the recent TV shows haven't gone down very well and that's interesting
13:23 but the reality of the movie is that you're multiverse hopping into one specific reality
13:27 and then we spend a lot of time just walking around.
13:30 Things like that I think come across as just being inconsistent and sloppy and messy in
13:33 regards to the script overall.
13:34 And it all just felt incredibly contrived.
13:36 Just weird.
13:37 And the thing as well, to very quickly touch on the Bruce Campbell cameo and it's not that
13:41 Bruce Campbell's not having the time of his life, the post post-credits scene is quite
13:44 fun, it's weird though because the thing that they do, they have Campbell interrupt Doctor
13:48 Strange and America as they're walking down the street and say 'hey you must have stolen
13:51 that costume because Doctor Strange just died in our universe and that's the memorial thing,
13:54 what are you doing?'
13:55 And then Strange makes him punch himself in the face for three weeks.
13:59 That man didn't have a solid meal for three weeks, nor did he see his family or leave
14:02 that spot.
14:03 I just felt sorry for him, I was just like I get that it's funny but...
14:06 Don't get me wrong, I thought Bruce Campbell was so funny, he was there, I think he did
14:09 a really fun bit.
14:10 I was like oh, Ramy got his way, you were in, but at the same time I was like is that
14:14 not a bit off character for Strange?
14:16 I don't know who that is.
14:17 Is that a bit vengeful and mean?
14:18 Yeah, a little bit.
14:19 Like why would he do that?
14:20 Especially in that moment because he's just been thrown through the universe, he needs
14:22 to try and save everyone else and he's just stuck there going 'I'm going to torture this
14:26 guy' for three weeks.
14:27 Yeah, I felt incredibly overkill.
14:28 And yeah, it was nice getting a little gag payoff at the end, a very tongue in cheek
14:33 looking at you and saying it's over.
14:35 I enjoyed it, I thought it was fantastic.
14:37 But what was that?
14:38 I don't know.
14:39 The thing is, we can talk about post-credits stuff too, the second one is what Amy just
14:41 said with Bruce Campbell just punching himself again saying 'oh my god, it's over'.
14:45 Feels like something that he said on set and they just sort of left it in.
14:48 The mid-credits scene is Charlize Theron's debut as Claire or Clara?
14:51 I've been saying Clea because that's how I've been reading it.
14:54 Who debuted in the 60s, I think 1964's Doctor Strange comics, who is almost like an equal
14:59 or someone who can sort of tango with Doctor Strange.
15:01 The two of them leap back into its hair in reality which looks a lot like the Dark Dimension
15:05 from the original Doctor Strange, the one where maybe Dormammu's still there or whatever.
15:09 And that's kind of just where we end.
15:10 What do you think of that stuff?
15:11 Well yeah, I read up on that yesterday because when I first saw her I was like 'I know you
15:16 but I can't really remember what happened'.
15:19 But on reading about it, yeah people are pretty sure that they're going into the Dark Dimension.
15:24 To bargain I assume?
15:25 Yeah, like what are they doing there?
15:27 We don't really know.
15:28 I was like, there is a lot of ways that that could go.
15:31 So in that respect it is a good mid-credits scene because it does open up quite a wide
15:35 rift for us to go into.
15:38 There's lots of things in the Dark Realm that can be interesting, especially when you look
15:43 through the comics.
15:44 There's lots and lots of stuff in there.
15:45 There's lots of history of all of this.
15:46 Cool visuals as well.
15:47 I don't know.
15:48 It's a bit flat the way they do it.
15:49 It was flat, yeah.
15:50 It feels like a reshoot.
15:51 It's cool that they've got Charlize Theron, obviously massive A-list actor and it's really
15:53 cool that she's there.
15:54 I just thought her-
15:55 It's cool that her thing was to tear holes in it.
15:57 Yeah, she's just tearing through reality.
15:58 That was very cool.
15:59 There's a lot of stuff just in the middle of New York though.
16:01 Just tear reality.
16:02 Everyone's just, oh there they are, tearing reality again.
16:04 Don't worry about a giant squid, anyone.
16:06 Things just happen now.
16:07 We should also talk about zombie Doctor Strange.
16:10 Now zombie Marvel characters, obviously a big deal.
16:12 One of the What If episodes is all about zombie MCU stuff.
16:14 What do you think of that stuff?
16:16 Because they do a whole thing where regular Doctor Strange beams into the other version
16:19 of himself, Dream walks across and resurrects himself.
16:22 The second that body version got buried, I knew he was going to punch through.
16:25 I was like, that's going to be a Raimi 101.
16:28 I loved it.
16:29 I'm sorry.
16:30 I know.
16:31 All of my-
16:32 It was fun.
16:33 Every logical thought in my brain is like, Amy, you shill.
16:34 You mark.
16:35 You fell for it.
16:36 That's exactly it.
16:37 This is all you needed, is it?
16:38 Just zombie Strange.
16:39 But as soon as he was like, who said they had to be alive?
16:42 I was like, oh yes, resurrect him.
16:45 But then you get the moment where his hand comes out and I was like, is that the evil
16:49 dead?
16:50 To be fair as well, taking all these souls of the damned and sort of rethreading them
16:54 into a new cave, that was really cool.
16:56 Yeah, visual wise, awesome.
16:57 Visual wise, it was fantastic.
16:58 I wish they did more because obviously in the trailer, you get to see the multi-armed
17:02 version of him, which is still the biggest shot you get kind of thing when he becomes
17:07 a zombie Strange.
17:08 But still, as something that again, very cool fan service.
17:10 Like I said, a lot of people love the zombie comics and stuff.
17:13 It was a good way to go.
17:14 It's an interesting thing to throw in there.
17:16 Quite random, but it worked.
17:17 And it kind of goes in with the whole horror thing, alongside all the zombie stuff they
17:20 do with Wanda when she's storming the complex near the end, all the shuffling and everything
17:24 else.
17:25 Did people react to it in the cinema for you?
17:27 Not really, to be honest.
17:28 The cinema I was in were very like, okay.
17:31 Kind of like I was, I was just kind of going with it.
17:33 Like we've not been that negative about this video.
17:35 No, I mean I'll be the first to say I had a good time.
17:38 Yes, okay, so I very much didn't, but that's a whole other thing.
17:40 We might do a video on it, I want to see how the general reception is to this movie is,
17:44 because I want to see what other people think of it.
17:46 The reviews are all over the place.
17:47 I'm firmly in the it's an absolute pile STEM category.
17:50 And I'm desperate to know what everyone says about it.
17:53 Yes, that's the whole thing.
17:54 So I'm curious how the launch weekend goes, especially because some of the early responses
17:57 have been quite mixed anyway.
17:59 It's a thing, but let us know what you think down in the comments below.
18:01 At this point, hopefully you've seen it.
18:02 What do you think of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness?
18:04 For now, I've been Scott from WhatCulture.com.
18:06 I've been Amy, also from WhatCulture.com.
18:08 And we'll catch you very soon.
18:10 Bye bye.