Doctor Strange
It’s a bit harder to do a book vs. movie exploration for a movie based off an ongoing, decades long superhero franchise, where one character has been written and drawn by hundreds of people since that character was first created. That being said, I’m going to have to give this one to the book, simply because the film does not take full advantage of the sheer level of WEIRD that Doctor Strange can offer. Iconic creators such as Steve Ditko, Steve Englehart, and Frank Brunner take full advantage of the inherent, well, strangeness in the concept of Doctor Strange, having Strange battle all sorts of demonic cultists, travel through different surreal dimensions, and making one of his greatest foes a guy who’s head is perpetually on fire. Doctor Strange the film interprets Stephen Strange learning magic as a relatively paint by numbers superhero origin story, with the “magic” straying less towards the fantastic and more towards a beefed up version of Inception. There’s so much potential for the SURREAL here that it’s really disappointing that the film sticks to a safe story we’ve seen before countless of times.
(Katie Gill)
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