UHD Review Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness UHD Review (1 Viewer)

[Josh Steinberg]

My point wasn’t whether or not it was a good, bad or indifferent story choice. My point was that Wanda reading the Darkhold was how WandaVision ended, so I don’t think it’s fair to say Dr. Strange 2 assassinated her character because she made the bad choice to open the book in WandaVision. The ending of WandaVision wasn’t Wanda leaving town, the ending of WandaVision was her reading the Darkhold. She’s gone too far down the bad path before the Dr. Strange movie even begins.

If that’s a choice that doesn’t work for you, that’s understandable, but that’s a WandaVision issue.

 

[Kent K H]

My point wasn’t whether or not it was a good, bad or indifferent story choice. My point was that Wanda reading the Darkhold was how WandaVision ended, so I don’t think it’s fair to say Dr. Strange 2 assassinated her character because she made the bad choice to open the book in WandaVision. The ending of WandaVision wasn’t Wanda leaving town, the ending of WandaVision was her reading the Darkhold. She’s gone too far down the bad path before the Dr. Strange movie even begins.

If that’s a choice that doesn’t work for you, that’s understandable, but that’s a WandaVision issue.

I feel like I can see both sides of the issue because, as a fan of WandaVision, I felt like her motivations and character changes were not explained as well as they could be, despite the large amount of exposition in the film. To be completely fair, I thought the plot was extremely messy and didn't always make much sense, and I had to chalk most of it up to hand-wavey "because magic" and "because the Multiverse." However, I was still caught up in the movie and enjoyed it almost purely because of the filmmaking of Sam Raimi.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I feel like I can see both sides of the issue because, as a fan of WandaVision, I felt like her motivations and character changes were not explained as well as they could be, despite the large amount of exposition in the film.

I get what you’re saying but I think that comes back to it being a WandaVision issue. WandaVision didn’t make it explicitly clear that we were seeing Wanda choosing to throw her life away when we see her reading the book. It didn’t tell us that Wanda choosing to read the book was a conscious decision to give away her soul and become evil. If you knew the Darkhold from the source material, seeing Wanda with the book, you knew what that automatically meant, but if WandaVision was your first exposure to the Darkhold, you didn’t.

But the Marvel films haven’t previously set a standard of understanding the full depths of a magical or cosmic object the first time we saw it. The previous movies didn’t explain that the Tesseract or Loki’s scepter were infinity stones the first time we saw those objects. Showing us the Darkhold initially without revealing the depths of what an abomination it is until later fits well within the standard of storytelling they’ve established.