The minute my screening for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ended, the man behind me loudly proclaimed that the movie felt like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. I am so sorry to this man, but he’s very wrong. Someone save those friends around him who nodded in agreement.
The reality is that this movie feels exactly like The Evil Dead. For the uninitiated, Sam Raimi’s feature directorial debut was a movie called The Evil Dead, starring Bruce Campbell as Ash, a man who must do battle with … well, it’s right there in the title. The movie would go on to have two sequels and a television series that expanded the universe that Raimi and Campbell built and it’s also the reason that Campbell is, to this day, in all of Raimi’s work.
And there are shots in Multiverse of Madness that straight up feel like an Evil Dead movie (and those shots never appeared in any of his Spider-Man movies). This isn’t to say that Raimi can only be one of two things. He’s a very distinct director, but even his style can be broken down into different levels. A movie like For Love of the Game is very different from Spider-Man 2, which is nothing like Evil Dead II.
He has a style and he knows how to apply it, but the horror elements of Multiverse of Madness are best served by the fact that he uses some of the same (if not similar) shots that he did in Ash’s journey and battle against the Evil Dead.
Raimi’s demon camera
A thing that was featured very rarely in his Spider-Man trilogy was his use of the camera as the point of view of something onscreen. It’s featured heavily in Multiverse of Madness, but more importantly, it started with The Evil Dead. In that first movie, we see the dead flying towards Ash, Linda, and the group as they’re heading to the cabin, and we see it as Ash is in the forest and beyond.
So when the same shot happened a couple of times in Multiverse of Madness, I was delighted that this was the Raimi we’re getting. Not that I don’t like his directorial style in the Spider-Man movies. I do, I just think that it has become more of the norm for the superhero genre, so I love that he threw his horror spin on this movie.
A New York Raimi shot
The one distinctly New York (and Spider-Man) bit of Multiverse of Madness comes in the very beginning of the movie. From the trailer, we know that Rachel McAdams’ Christine Palmer is getting married, and at one point, everyone runs out to the balcony at the wedding reception, and it’s so very much right out of his Spider-Man movies that I expected Kirsten Dunst to be there.
And that’s honestly it in terms of how it feels like the Tobey Maguire movies. So, sorry to the people out there who will tell you that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is just like the Spider-Man trilogy. In reality, it is all my Army of Darkness dreams.
(image: Marvel Entertainment)
