The money-powered scramble for every superhero studio to outdo its competitors in budget and effects seemed to have hit a wall. Yet here Marvel Studios churns forth a stunning, death-metal parable of good’s attraction to evil — with a startlingly professional cast and even silences in which sub-tales unwind. Like a Terminator, it’s likely to crush any opposition.Recent films such as Interstellar and The Martian have almost primly asserted their scientific credentials. To thrust viewers into virtual unreality, Dr Strange throws in such quantum phantasmagoria as multiverses, wormholes, time loops, and overmuch E = mc².Yet such quasi-realistic hallucinatory swerves are as nothing to the supernatural pastiche into which the improbably weird narrative is permitted to curdle. We might almost be back in the dumb-old-days of Fu Manchu and the wily Oriental criminal.Culturally correctHowever: it’s 2016 and the film-makers are very conscious of not committing cultural or other offences. So St...
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