My assessment; 5.4/10

Enjoyable trash. Not true to the original story, not true to the original characters, not a brilliant new work using the title as leverage.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Animation; Low quality, jerky. Most of the time when a character speaks the mouth doesn't appear to be doing anything remotely like what a real person's mouth would do... and the animation of the swarm of flying monster piranha was disgustingly lazy.

Art; Completely different from any of the styles used in the comics - not too bad, but not exactly wonderful. Expressions are sometimes hard to understand, and there's a focus on the eyes which is rather undue - they all looked exactly the same except where colour is concerned, and they lack emotion. The art is also of inconsistant quality and has minimal detail and shading. It's lazy art for underpaid animators.

Character design; Well, they changed some of the characters around a whole lot. Wong wasn't supposed to be some awesomely powerful guy, he was just a butler. The butler to the sorcerer supreme, but still a butler, and when did he become some big guy you could mistake easily for a european? Baron Mordo just didn't seem like Baron Mordo anymore - too much of an evil conan the barbarian look to him.

The monsters all looked like dinosaurs or animals to me, nothing really spectacular there. The added characters were pretty generic. Distinctive, but nothing special. They all DIE, so that's probably why there wasn't any effort put into them, but whatever.

Sound; The music wasn't exactly epic, but certainly not jarring in any way. It suited the film and was used appropriately. I liked it.

Sound effects weren't bad. There were a few times when I thought something should have been louder, or could have been done in a different way. Just average.

Voice acting was surprisingly good, with a nice choice of actor for everyone except Doremmamu. How could an ultimate evil being made entirely dark magical power have a normal, boring human sounding voice? It should have been deep and monstrous with all kinds of crazy filters and stuff. Oh, and Wong and the aincient one could have done with more of an accent.

Story; BUTCHERED TO HELL. They did another X-Men 3 with this - Baron Mordo, the Aincient One, Dread Doremmamu, the entire cast of newly added sorcerers DEAD. They made this story to fill in the origin of Doctor Strange - I have it around here someplace - believe me it was a damn short story. Basically 'oopsie, we forgot to tell you where he came from so uh... he was a surgeon! An asshole! Then he broke his hands and went nuts and tried everything to get his hands back and wound up in tibet, learned his lesson, became a sorcerer the end.' So they had a LOT of creative freedom to flesh it out within the existing Dr. Strange universe - and for the most part they did it well. Until they got to the part where he gets to tibet. Thats where the story starts to really go wrong.

I didn't like anything they did with Mordo, the sorc. team could have been done so much better if they had to have it but it didn't really need to exist. The whole sanctum sanctorum holding that vortex (and not being Dr. Strange's house) and Doremmamu wanting to take it was all kinds of wrong... Why the hell did they strip Doremmamu's character so much? Where was his honour? Why didn't we see anything about his kingdom? Hell, where was his character at all? They tried to make him into an even more evil bad guy than he was originally by taking away anything that made him into an actual character... goddamn it failed.

Additional niggles; Where was the cloak of levitation? What happened to the wards and spells and all the crazy chants? Where were all the awesomely powerful arcane artifacts? Why weren't the Vishanti mentioned even once? What about all the other super powerful entities that existed? How come characters can die, but nobody bleeds even when their legs are cut off? HOW THE HELL DID DR STRANGE ABSORB DOREMMAMU? Didn't he try that in the comic and fail because he was a mere human and incapable of holding so much power?

I mean sure, the comic was full of weird plot holes and unfinished story arcs, it was produced as a filler for Strange Tales, but it became an awesome and epic story that didn't deserve the butchering it received in this obviously low budget movie. In the special features they keep saying 'it's for the fans', but they should have known that fans wouldn't be pleased with anything but the original story - I liked what they did fleshing out the origins of Dr. Strange, it was really good... but the rest of it was just dreadful. Where were the characters I loved? Why were they all so changed?

Oh, and I always thought Stephen was pronounced like Stephanie (with an F), not 'Steven'. Ph is supposed to represent the sound of an F not a V.

Anyway, it was dissappointing, but if I didn't know anything about Dr. Strange I'd think it was average but okay.

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That's what I'm worried about too - I can see it now - by the end of the movie, Sosai and all his minions, the entire gatch team except the eagle, nambu and everyone else dead, and utoland terraformed into some pile of craters.

It's one of several reasons I avoid the hype about movies I really want to see - if you aren't hyped up you won't be dissappointed so badly. 'Cos you know with the teaser trailers all they are going to do is show you the most awesome clips they can from the film and make you think 'omg the whole thing must be that cool!'

Like that Godzilla 2000 movie or whatever it was - the ads for that showed this scene where some guy in a museum is telling some school kids 'this is a T-Rex, it's the biggest ever land predator...' and then godzilla's foot comes through the ceiling and crushes the skeleton.

As a kid that was THE one most awesome thing I had ever seen in my life. And when I watched the movie, patiently waiting to see that scene in context, it turned out that it wasn't even in the damn movie. They cut it. WTF? And the movie sucked - the ads were better than the movie. They could have shown a continuous loop of that one scene for 1.5 hours and it would have been better than that crappy movie.

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Well Met apparently Iron Man was #1 @ the box office here this past weekend, though I haven't heard any reviews good or bad.

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Putting the "Con" in Condor....Ooooo... shiny red button!

I hope so too Guy.

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Putting the "Con" in Condor....Ooooo... shiny red button!

I was really worried about the LOTR films as the cartoon film which was Fellowship Of The Ring and Two Towers was interestingly made but the company went bust.

But as I saw and read a bit more about the film, I was started to wonder that it will be okay, even though trying to do those three books in three movies was going to be difficult, but thank god it wasn't as badd as I thought......in fact quite the opposite. I waws sad that it ended, though I knew it would as I wanted to see more.

I loved the music as well which helps to make those 3 films even more brilliant than normal brilliant.

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Tempory Frisker

2 Hobbit movies?

I have The Hobbit and can't really see how they can make it into 2 movies when the LOTR movies were 3 books in 3 films or is it 2 different Hobbit stories in 2 different movies?

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker