Marvel Movie Rankings, Post-Strange

1a.Captain America: Civil War
1b. Guardians of the Galaxy
1c. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
4. Avengers
5. Iron Man
6. Doctor Strange
7. Iron Man 3
8. Avengers: Age of Ultron
9. Thor
10. Captain America: The First Avenger
11. Ant-Man
12. Iron Man 2
13. Thor: The Dark World
14. The Incredible Hulk

Thoughts on Doctor Strange

A few thoughts on Doctor Strange:

-Benedict Cumberbatch is terrific, as you might expect. Marvel wanted a big name for this project and you can see why. Strange suffers more than most Marvel heroes as he becomes a hero and Cumberbatch makes the most of it.

-In the trailers I thought Cumberbatch's American accent might have sounded a bit off. I didn't feel that way watching the movie so it may have just been my brain reacting to the fact that he didn't sound like Sherlock.

-The visuals are the most obviously outstanding part of the movie. Kaleidoscopic would be the best way to describe most of them. Some of the scenes shown in trailers have drawn comparisons to Inception but the whole movie goes far beyond that. There are also a lot of trippy visuals drawn straight out of the original comics drawn by Steve Ditko:

-Because of that it's probably worth seeing this in 3D. I didn't last night but I might later.

-The story bears some obvious similarities to Thor and Iron Man but it is notably different than either. I think there's a lot more depth to the story and themes than you might pick up at first so a second viewing is probably in order.

-Kaecilius, the villain of the movie, has a well-developed point of view and reasonable motivations though I think a lot of people will dismiss him as not being memorable enough.

-There's a vague suggestion that the magic in this movie has some connection to science but it still works as magic, though it's Jedi-like hand-waving and not spoken spells.

-Overall I would put this in my second tier of Marvel movies, somewhere below GotG, Winter Solider, and Civil War.

-Both the mid-credit and post-credit scenes are worth watching. The mid-credit scene ties into the next Thor movie and the post-credit scene is for a Strange sequel.