Marvel's Mighty Magic continues with "Doctor Strange"

Fourteen films in, and nobody should get any notion that the Marvel Well of Source Material is in any danger of running dry. After all, they managed to turn the little-known Guardians of the Galaxy into a comic book classic and salvage Ant-Man after the abrupt departure of director Edgar Wright.  So if you think Doctor Strange might be one of the more obscure superheroes to get the feature film treatment, I tell you Past is Prelude, and based on this first feature film outing, this film won’t be the last we see of him.  

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumber-batch) is a wildly successful neurosurgeon — a handsome, arrogant, brilliant man whose skill in his profession is matched only by his seemingly-total disdain for others.  When his career seems to be brought to an end by an accident (brought about through his own folly, naturally) and traditional medicine fails him, he sets out in search of other ways of healing himself. Enter the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her band of sorcerers (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong), all practitioners of mystic arts capable of healing the injured and keeping otherworldly evil at bay — and also currently occupied in a battle against a former acolyte (Mads Mikkelsen) who seems hell-bent on bringing about global destruction.

Okay, sure, it’s yet another origin story, and while many folk who imagine them-selves to be intellecutally superior nerds may gripe that the “origin story” has been done to death, I would tell them that it’s entirely appropriate here.  Some may complain of what they discern as a slow, method-ical build director Scott Derrickson implements in the first half of the film, but my answer to them would be that Christopher Nolan did very much the same thing in Batman Begins.  Doctor Strange doesn’t just rush through the hero-learning-how-to-fight-and-hone-his-skills cliche' before jumping into action sequences. No, with a character like this, a movie really needs that slow build to define how he takes on his ultimate persona.

I had my reservations about Cumberbatch’s casting when it was first announced, but I’m relieved to admit that Derrickson was on to something in choosing him. Cumber-batch is in almost every scene of the film, and he finds a nice balance playing Strange as a cocky surgeon who isn’t afraid to admit when he’s frustrated by the unknown.  He’s not necessarily a likable guy, but not so overconfident that we can’t relate to him (imagine a less-plucky Tony Stark).  The British actor also does a good job selling his American accent, never slipping up (that I could tell) and delivering an awkward sentence as many British performers sometimes do in movies like this.  

The supporting roles are filled out by a mixed bag of greatness. Chiwetel Ejiofor works well as Mordo, a character about whom we don't learn much until after the credits roll (DON'T EVER LEAVE A MARVEL MOVIE WHEN THE CREDITS ROLL!!!), but one that serves as a more grounded confidant for our Strange.  Despite ridiculous cries of “whitewashing,” Swinton is great as The Ancient One, showing a more bad-ass side to the respected actress, as well as an almost-otherworldly quality to her performance.  Benedict Wong is particularly fun as “Wong,” the guardian of The Ancient One’s spell books and library, and a man Strange wants so desperately to make laugh.  Mads Mikkelsen does a fine job as the menacing Kaecilius, a calmly evil nemesis that feels like a true threat, even if he’s working for a much bigger presence.

But hey, the biggest selling point for Doctor Strange has to be those magical action sequences, featuring build-ing-bending kaleidoscopic effects that must have resulted from consumption of massive quantities of mushrooms by somebody.  You may have instantly thought of Nolan's Inception when you saw the trailers for this movie, but Derrickson pulls this trick to levels of which Christopher Nolan probably never dreamed. Derrickson’s direction really, really impressed me with these sequences, as he provides a little ambiguity in them as to whether the normal folks in the scene are supposed to be seeing what we’re seeing. There’s more than a few moments that raise the computer-generated visual bar higher than ever, and with these superhero flicks being what they are these days, that’s an achievement.

Scott Derrickson has never really done anything besides horror (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister), with the one exception being the God-awful remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. However, his passion for this project is evident through-out the movie. Given his track record, I expected this a tad darker than it turned out to be, but that might be a good thing.  I suppose those rewrites by TV's Community creator Dan Harmon explain the greater amounts of wisecracks than Derrickson’s original script probably contained. Yes, Marvel never truly manages to get a really dark bad guy, as the dark forces they always battle manage to have a slight comical element, and it does not differ here.  

Still, Doctor Strange is another Marvel success.  The House that Stan Lee Built has given us yet another pretty darn good (if not great) story, told in a visually fantastic manner, and there are many much worse ways to spend your hard-earned money and two hours of your time.

"Doctor Strange"

Directed By Scott Derrickson.

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mads Mikkelsen and Tilda Swinton.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 115 minutes

Distributed By: Walt Disney Pictures

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" is both a feast for the eyes and food for thought

Barring the outbreak of World War Four or another round of some Black Plague-like pandemic that might thin out the human population a bit, the day when Mankind must address the question of depleting the Earth's resources will certainly come.  I personally think it will come much, much farther down the road than most of the more fervent Environmentalist-Wackos claim it will, but I agree that it will happen someday.  What Mankind will do as that day approaches is the central question of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.  Would Mankind look outwards to the stars to find a new home, possibly sacrificing ourselves and the lives of everyone we know in order to prevent our extinction, or would we be unable to put aside our own individual lives in order for our unknown descendants to have lives of their own?  

As I am childless, I cannot make any claim of being able to relate to the dilemma faced by Interstellar's main character.  I would suppose the scenario of knowing you may never see your child again, but that child and his/her offspring may live full lives versus remaining with your child while knowing he/she will not live very long would be fairly obvious - of course, you want your child to have the longest, fullest life possible, even at the cost of your own life.  At the risk of sounding pessimistic, though, I personally don't have enough faith in the ability of Mankind as a whole to be selfless enough to choose Mankind's survival over the survival of one's own immediate family.  I happen to believe that individuals, given the opportunity, will choose a self-serving course of action over one for the "Greater Good" 99.99% of the time, give or take a percentage point or two.  While I leave the question of whether I am right or wrong in that belief for some other essay, some of the characters in Interstellar seem to share my grim assessment of people's priorities.  However, I do find Interstellar to be a very hopeful, positive outlook on how some people in particular, and Mankind in general, may face that problem when it arises. 

The film shows us a time in our near-future, perhaps later this century, perhaps a bit farther off than that, when Humanity has all but exhausted the soil of Mother Earth.  Crops are no longer yielding enough to keep us alive, and the depleted soil billows in clouds of dust that create a new Dust Bowl era - one that stretches a bit farther than the American Midwest this time around (perhaps we could call this the "Eco-pocalypse").  A family consisting of a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), his fairly-grounded son, his head-in-the-clouds daughter named Murphy (as in Murphy's Law) and his father-in-law struggle to raise corn in the weak Texas soil.  An almost divine-appearing set of happenings and coincidences lead Cooper and Murphy to the hidden location of a now-underground NASA, as the space agency is now an off-the-record government agency.  In this future, the ignorant tax-paying masses demand their tax dollars be spent on needs more pressing to them than space exploration, but thankfully, a few more deeper-thinking folks still believe the subject to be important, so the work continues in secret.  

NASA is now conveniently headed by one of Cooper's former teachers, one Professor Brand, (played by Nolan's own little good-luck charm, Michael Caine), who fairly quickly convinces Cooper to pilot an exploratory mission into a conveniently-placed Einstein–Rosen bridge ("wormhole") near Saturn that leads to habitable planets in another galaxy, in order to find a new home for Mankind.  Leaving his family behind, Cooper, along with Brand's own physicist/astronaut daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other scientists and a couple of sarcastic robots, begins a decades-long mission into the wormhole.  By the end of the film, we see how all of those cosmic coincidences and lucky breaks fell into place, and how Mankind may ultimately play a part in its own salvation.

Much like Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of science fiction/science prediction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar is a story that begins with the question of what Mankind must do when we have reached a point in our evolution where we've gone as far as we can without becoming something else.  In the same vein as 2001, cosmic occurrences are placed in Mankind's path by unseen/unknown entities that act as motivators to drive Mankind to move forward when we seem to have lost the drive to do so on our own.  Unlike 2001, a fairly emotionally-sterile film by design, the notion of love as a force of nature, one that can affect not only decision-making, but actually play a part in natural occurrence, comes into play in this story.  More so than in any of his other previous films, Nolan uses the dynamic of family love as a driving factor, as we see how Cooper's relationship with both of his children suffer as they grow to adulthood without him, and how Professor Brand's own daughter believes her love for others might be a factor in the mission's direction.

Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan share credit for the screenplay, and their script does a phenomenal job of balancing such things as explanations of quantum physics with emotional insight into the human beings explaining them.  Maintaining the emotional power of the story among the fantastic visual effects is also attributable to the performances of the cast delivering the soul of that script, some of whom make the most of limited screen time.  Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain in particular, who portray the Cooper children in adulthood, both give powerful performances with their relatively little screen time, effectively conveying in different ways how abandoned they feel, and how their lives, along with the rest of Mankind, seem to be slowly spiraling to a halt as the Earth dies around them.  

Interstellar, much like Gravity from last year, uses its superb visual effects to emphasize the emotional impact of its story in a marvelous fashion.  I didn't find any of the effects sequences to be self-indulgent, and even more remarkable for a film with an almost-three hour running time, the effects never seem to overwhelm the movie's message.  The sound design in particular was Oscar-worthy, in my humble layman's opinion - the silence of space, then the abrupt thunder of ill-happenings when atmosphere is introduced, laid out in the 360-degree realm that is zero-gravity was fantastic.  The sound mix, however, had a few hiccups, as a few lines of dialogue were overwhelmed by the effects around the character speaking, but I suppose that could have been a case of McConaughey mumbling much like he does in those Lincoln commercials...

I have a list of filmmakers in my mind, composed of directors whose work will get me to buy a ticket, no matter what it is, and Christopher Nolan's name is on that list.  Much like he did with Inception, Nolan has created something that accomplishes a task that is much easier said than done - a movie that both greatly entertains me and forces me to spend several hours afterwards thinking very deeply about a subject. If there is anyone making films these days who can legitimately claim to be the heir-apparent to Stanley Kubrick, it is Nolan, and I do not say that solely because Interstellar may very well be this generation's 2001.  It is not the equal of that film, but it is certainly worthy of being included in any conversation along with it, and it is definitely one of the best films of this year.

"Man of Steel" lives up to the hype

As one raised a Southern Baptist, and who has lived in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire life, I’ve always thought I have a fairly good notion of how I believe people in general would react to evidence of, or contact with, an extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The short answer is that I don’t think folks would handle it very well at all (the Robert Zemeckis film Contact depicted that possibility more believably than any other film of which I can readily think).  So many of us are unable to conceive of anything greater than ourselves or our image of God, or even worse yet are conditioned by religion and societal norms to consider such thinking as heresy, that having evidence to the contrary dropped in our laps would most likely result in some pretty ugly reactions.  This is the premise from which director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300) and screenwriter David S. Goyer (Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies) approach their telling of that story with which we all are so familiar, how an alien baby came to Earth, adopted it as his home and became its champion and protector.

Man of Steel (an interesting title, not even mentioning the name he’ll have assigned to him by humanity) begins with a prologue depicting the few days leading up to Krypton’s demise, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El, an eminent Kryptonian scientist, and his wife Lara, both of whom have bucked their society’s notions of reproductive morality and produced a child the old-fashioned way when Jor-El deduces that Krypton is doomed to destruction due to environmentally-disastrous practices.  We see General Zod (Michael Shannon), commander-in-chief of Krypton’s military, attempt to assume control of the government and save their people in his own way.  This vision of Krypton is one we have not been shown in previous iterations of the Superman story, as the twenty minutes or so of the prologue gives us so much more of Krypton’s technology, government, wildlife and landscape than Superman: The Movie gave us thirty-five years ago that we can feel more sense of loss when this civilization comes to an end. 

The film, however, doesn’t go sequentially from there to baby Kal-El crawling from his spacecraft into a Kansas cornfield.  No, it quickly jumps to young-adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill, an excellent casting choice), already grown and off into the world, attempting to find some sense of self.  Since we all know the Superman story, we really don’t need to have it all spelled out note for note again, and to their credit, Snyder and Goyer don’t even try.  We revisit important moments in the Superman/Krypton/Kent family mythos via flashback when those moments apply to current happenings in the film, a brilliant move on the filmmakers’ part.  As Clark comes to critical points in the plot, he’ll recall life-lessons instilled in him by his adoptive father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, whose understated acting style is the perfect tone for conveying fatherly wisdom), and his Earthly mother, Martha (Diane Lane, in some fairly-impressive aging makeup in later scenes).

The second and third acts are of how Clark’s existence, but not his identity, is revealed to the world by the arrival of Zod and his henchmen, having escaped from banishment to another dimension before Krypton’s destruction.  Zod’s vision of “saving” Krypton’s civilization require Clark/Kal-El’s death, and subsequently, Earth’s destruction, leading first to mankind’s question of accepting Kal-El as trustworthy, then to an all-out battle for Earth’s survival.  I liked how the movie takes a little time, even during all the carnage, to show how we might would go from hostile distrust of a being such as Superman to even accepting him, using a few Army officers’ coming to grips with him as a metaphor for society in general.

Oh, and Michael Shannon as Zod is fantastic, folks.  Shannon always has a borderline-psychopath look in his eyes, and he must be aware of it, as he always seems to find some way to utilize that physical characteristic to some advantage in whatever character he’s playing. Mania does not always necessarily equate to evil, and Zod honestly believes he’s pursuing a noble cause, and that his zeal in pursuit of that cause makes his actions just.  I think Kal-El/Superman even realizes this on some level and knows he must destroy Zod, anyway.

I suppose my only complaint (and I’m a little reluctant to use that word) is Amy Adams being cast as Lois Lane.  I’ve not been very happy with any of the actresses cast in that part in any of the previously-produced Superman films, with Kate Bosworth being the biggest joke of them all, and I was hoping Adams would break that streak for me, as I’m such a fan of hers.  Alas, the streak continues, but I’m not totally sure if my hesitation in accepting her is any fault of her own, or am I just unsatisfied with how David Goyer wrote the character.  The character isn’t anywhere near as annoying as Margot Kidder’s Lois, and is even written as having some empathy and restraint, but she still whines and cries a bit too much.  But, I guess if this is the biggest quabble I have with the movie, there must not be very much to quabble about.

Man of Steel is most certainly a product of the time in which it was made.  It seems that superhero films of this day and age must portray their primary characters full of angst and self-doubt, and loved ones will die, and there must be orgies of carnage and property destruction, and sure, those qualities are all present here.  That said, I found all of them appropriate here, and without any sense of stereotype.  First Contact, when that time comes, WILL result in mass hysteria and destruction in some form or another, so seeing New York City (and let’s face it, gang – that’s what “Metropolis” is) almost razed to the ground when aliens do battle there sorta makes sense.

While the term “reboot” has been applied to this film, that term often is self-defeating.  Sure, by definition, it means that it’s a new starting point for a potential series of stories, yet it seems that most folks never, ever allow themselves to forget the history of the source material, or keep that history from skewing their opinions of the new product, generally to the negative.  I admit I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion (Casino Royale in particular), but I’d like to believe myself objective enough to overcome such gut-reactions.  Seeing this film with fondness or nostalgia for the Christopher Reeve films of the 70s and 80s, and expecting something similar would be a great mistake on a viewer’s part.  This movie is a science-fiction film at heart, and I suggest you see it with that mindset.