As powers go, not much would beat sorcery. Who among us wouldn’t love instantaneously conjuring ourselves through the Holland Tunnel or banishing that subway fingernail clipper to an alternate dimension?
But as movies go, magic can be problematic. Being all-powerful tends to undercut drama and provide a convenient deus ex machina for solving nearly any problem.
Rival mobster Sollozzo giving you trouble? Simply cast a sleeps-with-the-fishes spell.
The makers of next Friday’s “Doctor Strange” were determined to not let the magical elements of the story undermine the tension.
The film introduces Stephen Strange to the increasingly crowded Marvel Cinematic Universe. More important, the movie gives audiences a glimpse into a heretofore unseen part of the universe.
“We’re throwing the doors open to the mystical world,” says “Doctor Strange” co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts.
Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is an arrogant New York surgeon whose career is jeopardized after his hands are mangled in a car accident.
When Western medicine fails him, he heads east to Nepal in search of a mystical guru known as the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). Soon, Strange is being trained in the magical arts and joins the Ancient One’s battle against a rogue sorcerer (Mads Mikkelsen) who hopes to deliver the Earth to an evil spirit.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Marvel Studios has dropped this movie late in its years-long rollout of comic-book heroes, who have already included Iron Man, Captain America and Thor.
“There are a lot of ways in which the mystical realm represents the greatest hurdle to a popular audience,” Spaihts says.
The filmmakers first set out to ground the magic, wherever possible, rooting it in the “physics of our universe.”
“You can’t explain everything in the mystical world with a pseudoscientific rationale,” Spaihts says. “But at the same time, you want the magic to be rooted in the universe that you know.”
Strange has the power to cross into parallel dimensions. True, we puny humans can’t magically jump among them, but the theory that infinite universes exist beyond our own is one championed by actual scientists, including Stephen Hawking.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank served as the film’s consultant for potential links between science and magic.
Spaihts and the filmmakers made a list of Strange’s powers, and did their best to carefully define them.
“One of the challenges with Doctor Strange, is that the character first appeared in [Marvel comic books] in 1963,” Spaihts says. “There’s a huge body of work that surrounds him, and his powers have ebbed and grown and shifted over time. We had to make some choices on what he could and couldn’t do.”
You can’t explain everything in the mystical world with a pseudoscientific rationale.
- Co-screenwriter Jon Spaiht
Strange’s Cloak of Levitation is an iconic part of the character, but using it in the film also ran the risk of making the character too powerful.
“It helps him fly, and that’s not a trivial power,” the writer says. “That could unravel a number of story possibilities. So we had to define how fast he could fly, how high.”
The story also benefits from being an origin tale. Doctor Strange is still learning his powers, helping limit what he can and can’t do.
Consistency was also key. Cumberbatch took great care in figuring out the specific hand motions his character used to cast spells, knowing that fanboys would be analyzing every frame. He and Swinton trained for weeks on the gestures.
One surprise in “Doctor Strange” is that much of the magic doesn’t involve standing still and reading spells out of dusty old tomes. The sorcery is often combined with good, old-fashioned action.
Strange is able to conjure a shield when fighting enemies, for example, but he still takes them down with lo-fi fisticuffs.
“It was very important to [director] Scott Derrickson particularly that our magic be physical and that it have a momentum of its own,” Spaihts says. “If a fight began with fists and expanded into magic, the magic should preserve the sensibility of the fist fight, so it’s more like a kung fu battle rather than a battle where two people are standing there saying words at each other.”
Here on the nonmystical plane, we call that kind of ugly tussle a presidential debate.