Sam Rami perfectly captures the 90s Saturday morning cartoon format into the MCU.
Directly following up Spider-Man: No Way Home, at a bare minimum Doctor Strange 2 surpasses that films positive aspects. The camerawork and direction in No Way Home lacked a certain flair… a certain creativity that Sam Rami and Taika Waititi bring to the table. There are tons of classic Rami techniques: fourth wall breaks, embedded surrealism, running gags resolved in a later act, involving the audience with the action scenes, humanizing the lead, and visualizing heroism by rescuing a damsel in distress.
Visual heroism: best demonstrated by the scenes in the original Spider-Man trilogy when you have the “girl” screaming to the camera. Humanizing the lead: pointing out the relationship problems that our hero’s forced to downplay, and showing the reasons behind selfish actions. Fourth wall breaks: self-explanatory, but there’s narrative reason behind them. Running gags: introducing a joke and resolve it right before the credits. Embedded surrealism: camerawork that incorporates multiple locations in a scene. Remember “There is no spoon”? That kind of camerawork.
There’s even a very clear antagonist for the movie. A complaint I’ve had in recent MCU films.
Back to the Saturday morning cartoon format. Without spoiling, the pacing and writing is just SPOT ON. Remember the 3–5 part stories from your favorite 90s cartoon that aired on Fox? Or… even recently, the three connected stories from What If…? Well, that’s what you’re going to get here. There’s even a fair bit of nostalgia to tickle your fancy…
Ultimately however, I wonder about the divergence going on between the multiverse, the quantum realm and the sacred timeline. As explained in Endgame and Loki, the Infinity Gems were gathered from another timeline using the quantum realm. Presumably, that means one could go to another universe and make another infinity gauntlet by manipulating the quantum realm ala Ultron’s Vision… For clear answers though, we wait for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
First screening June 25, 2022 on Disney+.
