Doctor Strange is unapologetically fantasy - and in fact it is only by rejecting philosophical materialism that Steven Strange is able to master the mystic arts.
The movie is Doctor Strange's origin story, but it's probably for the best because the audience really needs to be primed on the whole other level of reality in which he's operating. Strange begins the film as a world-famous neurosurgeon, clearly at the top of his field and very, very well aware of this fact. He's egotistical but somewhat untouchable due to his skills. However, when he makes the mistake of texting while driving (seriously, don't) he gets in a nasty car accident from which he is lucky to have escaped alive. His hands - the precise instruments of his greatness - are severely damaged, effectively spelling an end to his career as a surgeon.
After exhausting western medicine's capabilities, he finds out that a patient he rejected (largely because the man's problem seemed incurable) is out playing basketball when he should be a paraplegic. The man tells him to seek out a place in Katmandu where he can learn more.
Desperate, Strange spends the last of his money to get to this place, where he meets the Ancient One. To step outside of the narrative for a moment, this character was originally an asian man and is written and performed here as a white woman. It's Tilda Swinton, so it's a good performance, but given the historical underrepresentation of asian characters played by asian actors, it's a little uncomfortable. It's one of those things that wouldn't be a problem on its own, but given that one of the previews played before the movie was The Great Wall, starring a white American and a latino American in a film set in China, clearly there's a pattern. Thankfully there is at least one asian character played by an actual asian actor, but Hollywood in general could be a lot better about this.
Anyway, the Ancient One quickly disproves Strange's philosophical materialist worldview by sending him on a mind-bending trip through multiple dimensions, and it's here that the movie really shows its biggest strength:
The movie is trippy as balls.
While it's not the first time we've had mind-bending visuals in a Marvel movie (see the subatomic world in Ant-Man) this one really takes us into new levels of insanity, like seeing Benedict Cumberbatch's Steven Strange watch his fingers sprout hands of their own, then have hands emerge from his own body, dragging him down into a pit that turns out to be the pupil of his own eye.
The film's villain, played by Mads Mikkelsen (whose performance in Hannibal has made me a huge fan of his,) warps space around him, creating M. C. Escher-like twists in the architecture of the world that make fighting him a complicated exercise in reconciling multiple dimensions.
Plot-wise we're not too far outside the typical Marvel formula. One could argue that Strange's journey from self-centered egotism to self-sacrificing heroism is pretty much the same arc we've seen Tony Stark go through. But A: the formula works, and B: the visuals of this movie alone more than earn its place in the Marvel canon.
I'll confess that I've totally bought in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the movies feel like comfort food to me, and while yeah, they're not the most cerebrally challenging films, they're damned fun. I'm eager to see Strange interact with other members of the Cinematic Universe, though again, he's on a much higher level of power than pretty much anything we've seen before. The first post-credits scene involves a tease for Thor: Ragnarok, and while a literal Norse god is probably capable of at least understanding what Strange goes through, it'll be pretty funny to see him interacting with like, Hawkeye.
Some imagined dialogue:
"I bend reality and interact with infinite dimensions to safeguard our reality from the infinite dangers that threaten it."
"I shoot things with a bow and arrow."
