A superhero with spirit

Doctor Strange is one of those movies that drove me straight to Wikipedia upon leaving the theater. I’ve never been a comic book reader and had no knowledge of the Strange arc going in. I assumed the heavy emphasis on Eastern religion was a feature of the source material. But what about Doctor Strange’s other spiritual themes? Did they come with the comic, or were they due to the influence of writer/director Scott Derrickson, a professing Christian and horror film aficionado? (If you think those two descriptions are mutually exclusive, read WORLD’s 2005 interview with Derrickson, “Horrors,” Sept. 24, 2005.)

Derrickson’s Doctor Strange may be the most overtly theological superhero movie ever produced (and yes, Matrix fans, I’m including that franchise). Certainly it has the first villain whose argument sounds persuasive. Normally, when we hear the bad guy give his speech about why he wants to destroy or fundamentally transform the world, we never for a moment conclude he’s anything but evil or flat-out loony tunes.

In Doctor Strange, when Kaecilius (Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue mage from an ancient fellowship of sorcerers, waxes desperate and poetic about the lure of immortality, he sounds pretty convincing. He sounds, in fact, like someone you might encounter in the Garden of Eden, and for a moment all the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve in the audience might understand why our foremother made such a tragic choice. Even more unusual, this hero’s journey requires that he come to embrace, to a limited degree, the villain’s worldview.

When we meet arrogant neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), he’s speeding through the streets of New York in his Lamborghini Huracán wearing one of his many luxury timepieces. A piquant mix of James Bond and Gregory House, his only belief is in what his sharp senses apprehend. That begins to change after an accident crushes his hands and everything that gave him self-worth. Literally and figuratively broken, he travels to Nepal in search of a miracle. He can have one, a Celtic oracle known as The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) tells him, when he accepts that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in his science and learns to train his spirit as well as his mind.

“There’s no such thing as a spirit,” Strange insists, adding that we’re all nothing more than “momentary specks within an indifferent universe.” He soon learns differently.

The Ancient One weighs the motives of Strange’s heart and sees that whatever good he’s done, he did only for selfish reasons. But it’s Kaecilius who really challenges Strange’s thinking, explaining that humankind naturally longs for eternal life. This gives Strange pause, because, of course, Kaecilius isn’t wrong. Only his method of achieving it is. Plenty of other elements, like the Dark Dimension, which sounds an awful lot like hell, will give Biblically minded superhero fans plenty to chew over.

Like certain spoof articles in The Babylon Bee, I’ve rolled my eyes a time or two at Christian critics claiming to find gospel messages in popular entertainment. But Doctor Strange’s are too overt to overlook. All this subtext wouldn’t be worth parsing, however, if Doctor Strange weren’t also a good movie. It’s better than that. It’s a great movie, ranking with Marvel’s best.

Buoyed by magnetic performances from Cumberbatch (sporting an American accent!) and Swinton, Derrickson takes exhilarating visual and storytelling risks and carries the genre to new heights. Again, the inclusion of New Age–sounding hocus-pocus could give some pause (as will a few instances of PG-13 language). But it feels like magpie borrowing as “astral projection” and “third eyes” transform into something more like superpowers. Such were the parameters of the original text Derrickson had to work with, yet he nonetheless pulls a little of what C.S. Lewis called deep magic out of the airy-fairy mysticism.

One final note: I don’t say this often, but don’t cheat yourself. If you go, go for the 3-D.