Pun Salad

Well, it appears my desire for exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be waning. Possible spoilers ahead.

Doctor Strange, Mister of the Mastic Arts, is being tormented by nightmares involving spunky young America Chavez, ones where he tries and fails to save her from some nasty fate in the semi-supernatural realms of the Multiverse. Then in (so-called) real life, he manages to rescue her from a giant one-eyed space octopus. It seems she can traverse the Multiverse at will, a pretty neat trick. And it's eventually revealed that the source of her troubles is Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch. Wanda wants to be transported to a universe where her two young sons actually exist, unlike the figments of her tortured imagination in this one. (It helps if you've seen Wandavision.)

So we're off on a CGI-heavy conflict between two magical masters. And it goes on until it stops.

Call me old fashioned: I can put up with a certain amount of disbelief-suspension. I'm pretty sure every superhero movie involves some physics-defying nonsense. But (as near as I can tell) DSitMoM, with its combination of magic and multiversatility, operates in a rule-free anything-goes environment. And at a certain point it becomes boring. Who cares what happens over in Earth 838?

But Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen are fine actors, even more so that they're spouting absolute gibberish with a straight face for the entire movie's runtime. Extra star for that.