Quick Reviews: Doctor Strange and Rogue One

Doctor Strange. A friend said “go see this in the theatre”. I should have taken his advice, but had been burned by one too many visually-middling Marvel efforts to quite get over the hump of making the effort to pay twelve bucks.  But finally, at home, and sitting there with a touch of some bug wriggling through my veins, I figured "what the hell, at least it has Mads Mikkelsen".  And I don't know if it was the bugs or the phantasmagorical visuals on screen, but the resulting viewing was a decently fun time.

Doctor Strange isn't narratively special; if anything, its story of an arrogant white guy going east for salvation and finding wisdom/magic powers is painfully cliche. Benedict Cumberbatch (No sp! First time, even!) is a Manhattan neurosurgeon whose Dr. House-like photographic memory and brilliant mind seems to have given him a comparably ridiculous superiority complex.

One night he multitasks just a little too much while driving a curvy road and ends up smashing both of his hands to bits. Finding that no conventional means will bring his fingers back to what they once were, he follows a loose rumour all the way to a temple full of mystics in Nepal. Their leader, the “Ancient One” (a bald, smirking Tilda Swinton), goes all Morpheus on the Doctor and before you know it he's bending the laws of reality.

So yeah, it's Harry Potter + The Matrix. And weirdly, it's mostly pretty good, and the way Doctor Strange visually realizes the effects of magic on reality is downright amazing. Sorcerers weave patterns of light and fire in the air. Gravity swings sideways, upside down, in circles. Buildings multiply and fold in amongst themselves. Wormholes fling us from dimension to dimension, from crystalline, shimmering beauty to bulbous, fuzzy disgust.

You probably won't care what happens – Strange is himself such a douche that it's pretty tough to care if he makes it past his rambunctious self-love to a space of “let's save the world!”. But as far as the Marvel side-projects go, Doctor Strange ranks alongside the first Iron Man and Ant-Man as one that people who aren't really into superheroes could check out.

Rogue One. So, it was 1:00 a.m., I'd just finished Doctor Strange and Rogue One was also just sitting there and the bugs hadn't won yet. I thought “well, let's just see how it looks”. Whoops. Before I knew it, it's 3:30 in the morning and my brain is just reeling in wonder.

For those that aren't already entrenched in the “Star Wars” phenomenon, Rogue One is a standalone film that takes place just before the action that starts the original 1977 Star Wars. It follows the story of a ragtag group of castoffs who find themselves at the heart of a plot to steal the technical plans for the very first Death Star.

Again, sort of like Doctor Strange, the plot isn't entirely inspired. Well, that's being kind of unfair, since Rogue One shares some of the baggage carried by the recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens, forced to continually remind you that you're in a “Star Wars” movie by way of little (and big, that said) references to the saga. And I think Rogue One did that better, if only because it didn't have to showcase a clearly bored Harrison Ford.

Where this film really shines is its energy and visuals. Director Gavin Hood, who also did the recent Godzilla, has a great touch for composing action within a frame. Unlike Force Awakens, which kind of suffers from its own director's obsession with keeping everything on the screen at a sort of flat, middle-distance, Rogue One perfectly establishes distance and movement.

A star destroyer pops out of hyperspace, completely filling the frame and dwarfing the half-dozen Rebellion ships with its size, and proceeds to shred them to pieces with a barrage of laser blasts. The camera tracks a squadron of X-Wing fighters, whipping to the side as they pass and then pulling behind them as if on a string as they swirl and dive down to attack a shield-generating space station. A blind mystic fights a dozen stormtroopers simultaneously, twisting and dancing, his staff flailing and smacking them on the head and foot, pure controlled chaos.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't get a little emotional at a couple of points, but interestingly, they weren't the obvious ones (i.e. when the film was making its connections with the rest of the series). It was the smaller moments, the times in between “big moments” when the excellent cast has their banter and whatnot.

So yeah, Rogue One is great fun, a welcome addition to the saga, and I hope that more of these get made. If this new “Han Solo” movie is even close to as good, and it's Lord and Miller (“Clone High”, the Jump Street remakes, The Lego Movie) so it likely will, we're looking at an interesting new trend in the way in which Hollywood does the remake/sequel thing.