REVIEWS

Doctor Strange Movie Review

ByChiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Oct 27, 2016

Title: Doctor Strange
Director: Scott Derrickson
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mads Mikkelsen, Rachel McAdams, Tilda Swinton, Michael Stuhlbarg, Scott Adkins, Amy Landecker, Tony Paul West, Pezhmaan Alicia

‘Doctor Strange’ is a Marvel-ous psychedelic trip! Benedict Cumberbatch plays the titular superhero role, a skilled neurosurgeon who loses control over his hands after a car accident. Doctor Stephen Strange’s journey of healing will draw him into the world of the mystic arts, through a series of visually spectacular adventures.

Doctor Strange must act as an intermediary between the real world and what lies beyond, utilising a vast array of supernatural abilities and artifacts to protect the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The ingredients are diverse, as faith and rationality find a meeting point, whilst wandering through the unification theory, the string theory and quantum gravity.

The secrets of the universe are revealed with imaginative erudition. Thus, audiences confront the mystery of consciousness, and are reminded of the answers we still seek, the questions we haven’t posed yet, and the phenomenas for which we may never have the cognitive capacity to understand.

Metaphysics and science coalesce in a kaleidoscopic experience, where Lewis Carroll meets Joseph Murray. The topology of time is moulded into a mind-gobbling mise-en-scène, where special effects intertwine with Aristotelianism and Platonism. Reductionism and Absolutism with Respect to Time become the grounds for a fantastical film directed by Scott Derrickson, in which world-bending scenes, witty dialogues sprinkled with comedy and a talented cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Michael Stuhlbarg, Benjamin Bratt, Scott Adkins, Mads Mikkelsen, and Tilda Swinton), entertain and provide food for thought.

The blockbuster charms with the beauties of the real world (Nepal, Hong Kong, London, New York), that morph into a prismatic wonderland, where Comic book characters face an epistemological battle.

Technical: A*
Acting: A
Story: B+
Overall: A-
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

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By Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi, is a film critic, culture and foreign affairs reporter, screenwriter, film-maker and visual artist. She studied in a British school in Milan, graduated in Political Sciences, got her Masters in screenwriting and film production and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles. Chiara’s “Material Puns” use wordplay to weld the title of the painting with the materials placed on canvas, through an ironic reinterpretation of Pop-Art, Dadaism and Ready Made. She exhibited her artwork in Milan, Rome, Venice, London, Oxford, Paris and Manhattan. Chiara works as a reporter for online, print, radio and television and also as a film festival PR/publicist. As a bi-lingual journalist (English and Italian), who is also fluent in French and Spanish, she is a member of the Foreign Press Association in New York, the Women Film Critics Circle in New York, the Italian Association of Journalists in Milan and the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean. Chiara is also a Professor of Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at IED University in Milan.

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