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Comrade Fakename posted:Just saw this tonight. I thought it was an incredibly by the numbers hero's journey film that is elevated by the visually incredible and inventive fight setpieces. Yeah that was my initial reaction as well. It's kind of odd how safe they play it when audiences by this point would be familiar with films like Harry Potter and Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth where an incredibly diverse and complex magical world exists alongside the mundane world but the fairies and trolls and all that are always kept just out of sight. In Dr Strange you pretty much just have a handful of sorcerers who keep to themselves most of the time and there's not really any indication that there's any other magical beings or even organisations on Earth. But I guess this is the MCU's introduction to magic so they wanted to ease audiences into it.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:29
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A powerful wizard is actually a pretty tricky character to base a movie on right from the start unless you push them to the side and have some other character take centre stage and act as the audience's stand-in so the wizard has to explain everything clearly and patiently to them. This is even more true when it's someone like Dr Strange who is distant and remote to strangers and can appear aloof and secretive. He's a much more sympathetic character when he's struggling against a more powerful foe and it would be really hard to set that up at the start of a film if he's already an all-powerful Sorcerer Supreme without cramming in a pretty severe exposition dump. Think of all the other movie wizards: Merlin, Obi Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore, Maleficent, Gandalf, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter, etc etc.. They're either a mysterious being whose powers aren't really clearly defined and who move in and out of the story in order to affect the hero's journey or they get an origin which laboriously explains what their powers are, what magical items they have access to, who their comrades are and what they're vulnerable to.
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Oct 28, 2016 20:26
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:So it's impossible to show character development over a montage, and introducing a concept as such as "magic" into a fantastical world of superheroes and aliens is somehow a difficult task. You make it seem like the MCU is regressing storytelling. Obviously it's not, it's just running in place. "Magic" is a wayyyyyy too vague and ambiguous super power for a protagonist to have without a pretty thorough explanation on the extent and limitations of their abilities and you can't really do that in a montage. You might be able to do it for someone who was a lovely wizard with severe limitations (like Harry Dresden) but you can't do it for someone as powerful as Dr Strange.
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Oct 28, 2016 21:00
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