“Carlllllll, why is there a dead body in our house.” is the starting line of a well known YouTube Video titled Llamas with hats. Later on in the video we realize that the llama ate the dead human’s hands and has a strange obsession with hands. Like this llama had a fantasy with hands, so does, Doctor Strange (Played by Benedict Cumberbatch). The character's mental state, and self confidence are entirely reflected and tied to his hands. While that might seem a little weird, it shows tremendous character growth, so even though it focuses on hands, which seems strange at first, it overall makes the film better. With Doctor Strange being one of the best Marvel movies to exist. Doctor Strange expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while at the same time still being a great film, through advancing the Infinity War plot, portraying tremendous character growth, and by having its only problem be it’s villain unlike most other Marvel films where they have multiple other problems.

The first thing that Doctor Strange does to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is it moves along the Infinity War plotline. Now to all of you who are new to Marvel, you might not know what this is. This is where all the Avengers  team up to fight off Thanos, an evil being, who is assisted in power by the Infinity Stones. Infinity stones are stones of great power that Thanos uses. In this movie, another Infinity Stone is revealed, leaving only one stone left undiscovered. This also strengthens the ties between Doctor Strange and the rest of the MCU, because with Doctor Strange’s amazing visuals, and his magical ability, it is easy to forgot that this guy lives right next to Tony Stark. Since Doctor Strange added so many new abilities and powers to the MCU, when they put in all these little hints to tie him into the greater universe, it gives the movie a more connected film. By introducing this new stone, along with a few other hints, it gives Doctor Strange the opportunity to be with the Avengers, and helps to incorporate him into the team. While this movie subtly points toward other Marvel movies it is also a great standalone film through the tremendous amount of character growth it displays.

Doctor Strange portrays great character growth. Instead of having the always ready superhero who is willing to help out the poor and elderly on any given day, Doctor Strange gives us a very reluctant superhero, but who wouldn’t be reluctant in his situation. He was a very successful neurosurgeon, with a perfect record of never failing an operation. Then, an accident changes everything and he must find a new path for himself to take for the rest of his life. When he is faced with a world destroying event, he runs away from it. Doctor Strange didn’t ask to become a superhero. As he and his friends get together and learn more about themselves in these life threatening situations, he learns that he was meant to be a superhero. This is what he actually wants to do with his life, even though it takes most of the movie for him to realize this. It isn’t just the main character who shows character growth in this film. Two of the other characters turn out to not be who we expected and we learn more about the backstory of some of the students at the temple where he goes to learn. In fact, there was only one character in the film who didn’t get the character growth that they deserved. Sadly, that character was the villain.
Doctor Strange was such a wonderful masterpiece of a movie, that you almost don’t notice the one problem with it. However, as with most other MCU films, we see that the villain is yet again undercut by the fact that we get almost no information about him, and aside from him having a handful of lines in the film, we almost never see him. In the Marvel Universe, it isn’t unusual to see a villain fall flat of our great expectations of him. There have been countless reviews of Marvel movies saying that “Ultron wasn’t developed enough,” or “Gosh, Loki ruined the movie.”. Even with this problem of an undercut villain, Doctor Strange, scoring an amazing 90% on rotten tomatoes, and 94% on google play, he was probably one of  the best villains Marvel has ever had. They explain why he is actually doing what he is doing, and we understand him a little bit more than what we really expected to. So maybe Marvel is actually going to get better with their villains. But even though the villain wasn’t fully developed, it is still a good movie to watch if only for the stupendous character growth that is evident throughout the film, that caught all of our hopes and expectations for this film.

Through the way that Doctor Strange advances the Infinity War plot, features great character development, and only has one main problem which is with it’s villain, Doctor Strange has to go down as one of the best movies of 2016. So even though Doctor Strange had a weird obsession with hands, it still was a great movie that didn’t sink any of our hopes, unlike the llamas with hats, who have sunk cruise ships when the need arises, so it is a must see movie. And besides, who doesn’t want to see Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Junior become awesome facial hair bros on the big screen.