4-Color to 35-Millimeter: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

The second Doctor Strange movie in the MCU was hugely anticipated by your humble rewatcher, especially since it had Sam Raimi returning to superhero films. The end result is a crushing disappointment, mainly due to it perpetuating the character assassination of the Scarlet Witch that started in the comics in 1989. The great superhero movie rewatch joins Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

An excerpt:

Because all the men responsible for this movie can think to do with Wanda Maximoff is make her the mother from hell, turning a grieving character struggling toward heroism in several previous movies and a TV series into a mass-murderer who will commit any depraved acts necessary as long as she can be a mother. Because that’s all the ladies really want, am I right, fellas?

When I first saw the movie, it wasn’t bothering me as much, because I know from the comics how foul the influence of the Darkhold can be, but this movie doesn’t do nearly enough to sell it. Maximoff’s redemption arc is weakly done, and requires her to kill herself, which is just horrible. It’s especially galling after the complex meditation on grief that was WandaVision. To have the character be so completely capital-E evil this time is disappointing, lazy, and not fair to a character who was finally given some depth on Disney+, only to be shit upon in the cinema. It’s a bad look for a cinematic universe that has already shit upon Gamora, the Black Widow, May Parker, and Jane Foster in recent movies, not to mention the sidelining of the Wasp in favor of the much-less-interesting Ant-Man and taking way too long to have a movie headlined by a woman.