5 Ways Marvel's Doctor Strange Movie Let You Down
3. The Villain Needs Better Motivation
Everyone gives Marvel movies a hard time for their lackluster villains. The first Iron Man kicked off a long tradition of weak antagonists who cause the final act to suffer. Even the movies that are almost universally loved like The Winter Soldier and Guardians have lame villains.
Kaecilius is basically Darren Cross from Ant-Man. They’re both mad at their former mentors because they withheld information for selfish reasons: The Ancient One forbids breaking natural law but calls on dark powers to be immortal and Hank Pym kept his particle a secret from his protege because he thinks he’s the only one who should decide how it’s used. They’re even dispatched in similar ways: banished to another dimension. The thing is, for both of these villains, just a little bit more time spent on them would make their motivations not only understandable, but more relatable.
The best villains are the ones you kind of agree with. Loki captivated audiences because, well, I guess because Tom Hiddleston is hot, but also because all he really wanted was the love and respect of his family. He lashes out when he discovers he’s been lied to his whole life and has understandable bitterness toward the one who’s deceived him. Looking across the aisle, Ra’s Al Ghul from Batman Begins wants to destroy Gotham City for the same reasons Batman wants to save it: it’s full of corruption and crime; they just have different ways of handling it. General Zod lost his home and only wants to save his practically dead species, even if another culture has to die to do so. We throw parades for guys whose colonization atrocities were harsher.
Kaecilius is just another designated bad guy, even though there was so much potential there. He and the Ancient One have the exact same motivation and fear. They both don’t want to die and they both want to use Dormammu’s power to be immortal. One is the villain and the other is not, just because they say so. While their similarities end up providing motivation for Mordo to strike out on his own, imagine a movie where this comparison between the two forces us to confront whether or not desiring immortality is inherently bad. Maybe Kaecilius feels it’s his duty to save the world from eventual death because he failed to save his family from dying and vowed never to let such a thing happen again. As usual, they only scratch the surface of the possible themes that could be explored. It’s supposed to be light entertainment, after all.
The Marvel movies love to have a clear and tangible threat, like a blue beam and a hole in the sky that spews bug warriors or a giant metal man that shoots fire from its face. They seem to fight situations rather than individuals. When Loki unleashed aliens upon Manhattan, that took a long time to deal with, but Loki himself was handled in like ten seconds by the Hulk. Ultron was an individual threat, but the Avengers had to spend half the movie dealing with his giant army and floating landmass scheme. Once again, we find a major city thrust in disaster as Hong Kong gets absorbed into the Dark Dimension. If the conflict with Kaecilius was more personalized, we wouldn’t need such an over-the-top threat to make us care about the outcome; we’d be invested because of our investment in the characters’ conflicts. Zemo from Civil War was very underpowered and lacked the resources to threaten the entire planet, but he was still very dangerous and effective. Instead of blowing their load early on Dormammu, they should have made Kaecilius more engaging.