This latest Marvel entry stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular Dr Steven Strange, a brilliant but arrogant surgeon, who gets maimed in a car accident, ending his career.
Desperate for a solution, he eventually comes to a temple in Nepal, where Tilda Swinton portrays "The Ancient One". There he learns to open his mind to the concept of magic, and trains to master it.
The temple was recently victim to a theft by Mads Mikklesen, who hopes to unleash eldritch horrors upon the world.
Essentially, it fits the same mould of some other origin stories where an arrogant person needs to learn humility in the face of something spiritual, except rather than anything religious it's black magic and utterly mind-bending special effects.
Seriously, it's as if Inception was mixed with LSD, somehow. For the most part they are brilliant, but there are a small handful of effects which look poor, and could break your immersion.
The acting is excellent, with a script that is witty and laugh out loud funny. It was actually very nice to see Mads Mikklesen, who I've only ever seen in serious roles, have a few funny lines and evidently enjoy himself.
Rachel McAdams is also notable as being very funny, in how she reacts to the weirdness going on.
The action is brilliant, though a bit difficult to follow at times, due to a fair amount of it not really taking place within Euclidean geometric space.
While the framework for the story is generic, as it tends to be with these origin stories, the content was more than enough for me to thoroughly enjoy the film.
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