Originally Posted by
Ibara
Had the displeasure of being dragged to see this movie for a second time and it actually... still doesn't hold up. This was a gripe for me as well. Strange and Wong standing around as the SW attacks, Captain Carter and Marvel standing around as Reed is spaghettied. Much of the action felt subpar. I'd talk about the Illuminati, America and MacGuffins, Christine, Wong, but I think it's clear that the characters done the greatest disservice were Wanda and Stephen.
I still don't mind the SW being a villain, but the lack of progression towards it and the weak motivations to keep Strange untarnished just made the film fall flat. Making Stephen an effective foil to Wanda would have carried much more impact than just having him meander through his own film. They could have explored how the blip, a result of Stephen enacting his plan to save lives, still required sacrifice - lives lost, societies overturned, trauma wrought as chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum of a universe halved. But we get one scene played for laughs because a guy lost his cats. Stephen carries the psychological and emotional burden of being the man with the plan, making the decision to turn over the stone as the 1 way to save half of the universe, but still shaping the universe-spanning damage resulting in the aftermath. He likely saved the most lives possible, but he pulled that lever, made that choice - how does he grapple with that now.
Then follow through on the very clear plot-point established at the end of WandaVision. You know the one scene Waldron and Raimi watched - the Scarlet Witch has opened the Darkhold AND hears the cries of her children needing her help. She dreams through the multiverse of life and love, taken and sacrificed. She sees her other selves living idyllic lives she cannot have and also of worlds in chaos with the lives of her children under threat. Endless happiness, endless pain - she needs to save her boys, all of them. She's willing to make horrifying sacrifices in an effort to get what she wants, it's still a selfish endeavor, but it mirrors the rationale Strange made in handing over the stone. She can save countless lives by taking one. How is she in the wrong - a compelling movie would have you beg that question. Instead we get monster-movie SW, she rampages, she's clearly wrong, we see her as an unstoppable force, but any critical evaluation requires you to almost entirely rely on emotion/instinct, and strip her of any reason and that just digs itself so much deeper into problematic trope territory.
Don't get me wrong. Like the movie if you like it, but this script was weak. I honestly think that everything people are raving about comes entirely from Elizabeth Olsen's performance. It's a film carried by its actors and their charisma. Give her a movie, keep Raimi and Waldron away from it.