Open Your Mind With Stunning New Doctor Strange Trailer

Forget what you think you know...

By Simon Gallagher /

Marvel Studios
In the immortal words of comedy legends Monty Python: and now for something completely different.

With Jimmy Kimmel celebrating a week dedicated to Marvel, he's just dropped the first Doctor Strange teaser, which feels simultaneously unique and reassuringly familiar.

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Perhaps it's because of the easy parallels to the Matrix - particularly in the dynamic between Benedict Cumberbatch's Stephen Strange and Tilda Swinton's the Ancient One - and Inception. That's quite a marriage of ideas.

The teaser lives up to its name, focusing mostly on Strange's journey to becoming the Sorceror Supreme, and holding back on too much of Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong's key supporting characters. What we do get of Mads Mikkelsen's enigmatic reality-alteringvillain makes him look like one hell of a headf*ck...

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It's still a little hard to make this feel like a mainstream comic book movie, but that's not necessarily a terrible thing. For Doctor Strange fans, it's a long-awaited chance to see the character on screen, and for everyone else is a trippy, supernatural movie with anchors in other populist films to make it more accessible.

And if Ant-Man proved anything, it's that we don't need every superhero movie to be about conventional heroes.

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All-in-all, it's a stunning, mind-boggling teaser that offers a lot of promise, with plenty of room to expand out into the more traditionally pulpy elements in subsequent trailers.

What did you think of the first Doctor Strange teaser? Share your reactions below in the comments thread.

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