Awesome moments in Doctor Strange (2016).
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Teasers and Trailers
- In the teaser trailer:
- The Ancient One's monologue to Strange, set to juxtaposed shots of his life before and after the car accident.The Ancient One: You're a man looking at the world through a keyhole; you've spent your life trying to widen it. Your work saved the lives of thousands. What if I told you, that reality is one of many? [...] You wonder what I see in your future? Possibility. [slams a hand in Strange's torso, knocking his soul out of his body]
- The trailer features several scenes of Kaecilius warping the fabric of space with hand gestures, giving a small glimpse of both the film's visual spectacle and the sort of power the characters here wield.
- The ending with Doctor Strange walking up the stairs of the Sanctum Sanctorum in his iconic costume.Strange: [to the Ancient One, having just been sent through several parallel universes] Teach me.
- The Ancient One's monologue to Strange, set to juxtaposed shots of his life before and after the car accident.
- The visuals of the second trailer are just plain amazing, honestly making Inception stuff look downright crude.
- Strange flipping on his cloak one-handed is a badass cherry on top of an already incredible trailer.
- The visual effects in general are amazing, especially in IMAX. Early critical reviews agreed that whatever else could be said about the film, it had locked an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. And they were right.
- The fact that, in keeping with the film's theme of time-distortion, Marvel compiled a special teaser that can be played forwards or backwards.
Film
- The new Marvel Studios opening sequence, which features incredible illustrations and footage of pretty much every major Avenger we've gotten to know so far.
- The Ancient One on her own takes out most of Kaecilius's zealots in the Cold Open, using the very environment to crush them to death while fending them off in close combat, with only a few Zealots besides their leader managing to escape.
- While it may seem mundane compared to what he can accomplish later as a sorcerer, at the start of the film, Doctor Strange shows off exactly why he's considered one of the greatest surgeons in the world by extracting a bullet from the brain of a man who other doctors had already written off as a hopeless case, saving his life.
- In their first battle, Kaecilius easily slams Strange across the New York Sanctum, smashing him through cases of artifacts. One is the Cloak of Levitation, which acts on its own to stop Kaecilius from delivering the death blow. Kaecilius throws Strange off a balcony...and after a pause, Strange floats up, Cloak billowing behind him, wearing the iconic cloak of the comic book character at last.
- Bonus points for having Michael Giacchino's score hit max bombast at just the right moment.
- The Cloak of Levitation. Between it viciously beating the shit out of a zealot, being a Silent Snarker Jerk with a Heart of Gold to Doctor Strange combined with its unflinching loyalty to him note , quite a few people found themselves loving the Cloak more than Strange himself. And as seen on this very page, that's not a mark of how bad Strange is, it's a mark of how well-written the cloak is. To reiterate: Marvel made a movie where an unspeaking piece of clothing is people's favorite character.
- Strange has Christine hit his physical form with an over-charged defibrillator to channel that energy with his astrally projected self into an astrally projected Zealot, electrocuting him so hard that his astral self explodes.
- The last battle against Kaecilius and his zealots takes place as time is being rewound thanks to the Eye of Agamotto's power, so instead of seeing Hong Kong being destroyed because of the battle, we're actually seeing everybody fight while everything is getting rebuilt around them. And Strange and Mordo are using this to their advantage, trapping their opponents in the reconstructing structures, albeit temporarily.
- Five words: "Dormammu, I've come to bargain."
- It’s not just the line itself. It’s how Strange says it. He starts out timidly saying it, since he is fearful that the plan won’t work. The next few times he says it, it’s now being spoken in an casual, almost upbeat tone. By the final time, Strange makes it clear he isn’t asking for mercy. He’s telling the enormous, inter-dimensional demon to go away and never come back.
- It gets even more awesome when you consider that Strange confronted Dormammu, fully prepared to die and setup the loop to trigger with his own death. Even after Strange suffers from being impaled, vaporized, crushed, and many more horrifying deaths, he keeps coming back for more every time. By recognizing his own weakness and surrendering to itself, he was able to find the strength, not to win, but to allow himself to lose to Dormammu, forever, as long as that means that the Earth is safe.Dormammu: You will never win.
Strange: No. But I can lose. Again...and again...and again...and again, forever. And that makes you my prisoner. - Dormammu threatens Strange with an eternity of agony for his audacity, and Strange calmly replies with the utterly fearless declaration of defiance: "Pain's an old friend."
- At one point, Strange uses his powers to temporarily counter several of Dormammau's attacks before being overcome, to make things even more frustrating and difficult for the Eldritch Abomination.
- Eventually Dormammu can take no more and is begging him to stop. Let's make that abundantly clear, Doctor Strange pushed Dormammu past its breaking point.
- To drive the point home: Doctor Strange annoys an Eldritch Abomination into submission. Before it was stated that Dormammu's Dark Dimension has no concept of time. So Strange introduced him to the concept of time and he simply... couldn't stand it. Doctor Strange did the impossible and mind fucked a cosmic entity into submission.
- Strange also becomes the first MCU hero in over a dozen movies who saves the day not by punching or blasting his opponents, but by outsmarting them.
- Remember the Red Skull touching the Tesseract and disintegrating? Remember the Aether being barely controlled by an Eldritch Abomination from the darkness before the universe was born?? Remember the Guardians of the Galaxy needing all their members to channel the energy of the Power Stone - the one actually touching the stone the son of a sapient planet? Well, Stephen Strange, Just One Man, a Puny Earthling, Incompletely Trained, is using an Infinity Stone to manipulate time like he was winding a watch, though he doesn't come in direct contact with it. Truly, this is a man to be careful of.
- In previous MCU films, we've really only seen the Infinity Stones used for fairly mundane applications, generally as a power source for something else like Loki using the Tesseract to power the portal, the Mind Stone being used to power Vision's body, and so on. For the first time, we're seeing the truly reality bending powers that these artifacts can unleash.
- Even better is when you consider most eldritch horrors manipulate time and space and regularly tell our laws of physics to go fuck themselves by simply existing. Doctor Strange used our laws of time and space to do the exact same thing to an eldritch horror.
- Another way to put it: to Dormammu, Strange IS the Eldritch Abomination, existing in dimensions Dormammu cannot comfortably perceive.
- Another thing to note - in The Avengers, Captain America talked about how a hero must be willing to take one for the team. Strange wins by being willing to take one for the team several times a minute, every minute, forever. Because as long as the abomination is killing him, it can't harm anyone else. Don't forget, Dormammu is outside of time - if Strange ever faltered, Dormammu would still claim Earth, and Strange wouldn't have delayed it by a single moment. Dying to save the world is something most would only have to do once. Strange — knowingly — chose to do exactly that forever until the monster got tired of killing him. He demonstrated himself in this scene to be quite possibly the single most badass character in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Word of God is that Dormammu killed Strange millions of times, not just the handful that were depicted on-screen.
- The line, "I can do this again. And again. And again," is a reference to Albert Camus, who once said about Sisyphus' absurd task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll down at the end of the day, "One has to imagine Sisyphus happy." A task may be painful, impossible, and ultimately meaningless... but what matters at the end is our choice. Strange has finally made his choice, out of a willingness to fail. Again. And again. And again.
- Another notable thing is that CinemaSins named this one of the best movie scenes of 2016.
- A subtle one in the first stinger (seen in Thor: Ragnarok): Strange casually mentions to Thor that he keeps a list of other dimensional visitors to Earth, showing that he has definitely taken over for the Ancient One, and changes Thor's drink into an automatically refilling beer mug as they talk. He does nothing close to this during the movie and achieves it here without so much as a twitch of his fingers.
- He's also finally wearing his iconic yellow gloves, showing that he has indeed become the Doctor Strange we all know and love.
