Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme

This is a lie!

Dr Strange is a very cool character with literally oodles of potential for awesomeness that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream. There was a TV Movie in the 70s, but it tanked and had quite a few changes to the property. Aside from a few guest appearances in Spider-Man cartoons, this is the Doctor’s only other attempt at penetrating anything close to the mainstream.

A penetration as successful as one involving a rubber spoon and a steel egg.

I’ll be blunt; this is shit. It takes a cursory glance at the constituent elements of Doctor Strange and simply shrugs at them before moving on. Ok, yes, we have Stephen Strange, an arrogant surgeon who gets in an accident which cripples his hands, robbing him of the finer use of them. After trying every avenue to heal his hands, Strange is led to Tibet, where the mysterious Ancient One offers him a solution/ Cue Karate Kid style meaningless tasks that are meant to humble Strange while teaching him essential basics. Except that Strange’s meaningless tasks are just that: meaningless. He’s required to break down a wall that is continually being rebuilt. What does this teach him? That persistence can over come all obstacles? No, it teaches him bugger all. He’s just made to do it until the Ancient One deigns to give him a full explanation of magic out of the blue. It’s all just completely arbitrary. Strange is picked to be the next Sorcerer Supreme before he’s even taught any magic for bugger all reason. He’s shown fuck all initiative but just because he doesn’t want to be Sorcerer Supreme, he’s the right choice. I’m sure you could find half a million people on the planet with no interest in being Sorcerer Supreme, but that wouldn’t make them the right choice either.

This is despite the fact that unlike in the comic version, the Ancient One has several students, who form an ultra-hip magical vigilante band. Why is Strange a better choice than all of them? Because he can suck up other people’s magic apparently. He’s even more qualified than Wong, who in this atrocity is an accomplished mage in his own right, despite the fact that Wong teaches Strange. Not only does that completely belittle the mentor – student relationship between Strange and the Ancient One, but it again demonstrates that Strange has fuck all place being Sorcerer Supreme.

Stephen’s lumbered also with some stupid backstory about a kid sister who he couldn’t save from… something. Does it do anything to the plot? No. He doesn’t need extra angst. He’s an arrogant man whose world crumbles away from him, to make him realise how shallow he is. He doesn’t need personal tragedy from earlier in his life to muddle that.

We also get a bastardised version of Dormammu, who ditches pretty much everything that is interesting about him and nicks elements of Nightmare, creating a thoroughly bland villain that’s offed win the most uninteresting manner in about 15 minutes. The entire film is 70 odd minutes and yet you only get Stephen doing magic about 40 minutes in.

The special features has interviews with some of the ‘creative’ team and they all come across as unnecessarily smug for people who churned out such rubbish. They clearly used JMS’s Strange mini from a few years back as a basis for this story, yet rather than do a straight adaptation of it (which would have worked given that it’s essentially a movie treatment) they fucked up all the bits they nicked.

They also mention drawing inspiration from famed Doctor Strange artists Steve Ditko, Gene Colan and Frank Brunner. Fuck off did they! This story features some of the blandest art design I’ve ever seen. It uses that homogenised Western bastardisation of anime that makes everyone seem 8ft tall, stick thin and with bizarre noses. It’s genuinely less appealing than something like Totally Spies or that recent Fantastic Four series. There is absolutely nothing remotely similar to the awesome work of any of Ditko, Colan or Brunner. No-one looks even remotely like they should, but for no good reason. It is in fact the complete polar opposite of Steve Ditko’s work, as the colours are all washed out, everything is drawn with angular straight lines and the designs are shit. The Steve McNiven art on the cover and promo images is a damn lie, promising competent design and style, but we get nothing approaching that. Even the animation itself is jerky and stilted for the most part. CGI is used in places to do some cars that the animators couldn’t be bothered to draw and it also looks terrible.

To sum up, Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme is a travesty, an embarrassing insult to the source material made by charlatans, liars and incompetents.