Doctor Strange 2’s villain is the MCU’s best so far

“What makes a good villain?” will always be a subjective question, but allow me to lay out a few bad-guy qualities that matter to me personally. They should be scary to me. They should have a wicked side. It must be clever, sinister, and deliciously brutal. They should be equal in size, charismatic, powerful and a shadow of the hero. And here’s an important, if counterintuitive one: I only care about their motivation up to a point.

Sure, it’s important for any well-constructed story to make it clear why the antagonist is doing what they’re doing — to give them both a clear goal and an emotional driver for it. Too much detail, or too deep a dive into their psychology, can make it difficult to set up an effective villain. They are often scarier and more entertaining if they’re unknowable to some extent, with a hint of humanity, but not too much.

Here are four super-famous examples that meet these criteria, off the top of my head: Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

Here are the villains from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — the most successful movie franchise of all time — that meet these criteria: none of them. Until Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers for Multiverse of Madness ahead.]

Warner Bros. Pictures

The MCU’s villain problem is well documented. It was particularly endemic in the series’ early phases, when screen legends like Jeff Bridges or Hugo Weaving would queue up to play forgettable, one-shot antagonists in heroes’ origin stories. Part of the problem was Marvel Studios’ reluctance to spend time developing these characters and its enthusiasm for killing them off after a single appearance, in stark contrast to the way it built decade-long arcs and complex, interwoven storylines for its heroes.

Another issue was simply that the cream of Marvel’s rogues’ gallery, including Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Venom, had all been licensed away to other studios. Can you remember anything meaningful about Christopher Eccleston’s baddie space elf in Thor: The Dark World? Me neither.

The villain problem has been so persistent that it’s started to seem like a kind of aesthetic or storytelling preference. Marvel movies don’t seem overly interested in evil, or even literal darkness. The dominant theme, strangely for films that feature so much violence, is not conflict but the comic opera of the heroes’ internal struggles and interpersonal strife. It is arguably the best-known action scene of all time in this franchise. Civil War Captain America, when Earth’s mightiest heroes fight not an external threat but each other.

There are some exceptions to the bad-villain rule. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is devilishly charming, and his resentment of his father Odin and brother Thor makes a fun and effective driver for his mischief. But with his wit and his venality, he’s always been more slippery than scary, and fans responded to him so well that subsequent outings have progressively morphed him from an antagonist to an antihero to a sort-of-lovable black sheep. He did hint at an evil edge. Thor — and in The Avengers, when he orchestrated an alien invasion of Earth in a fit of pique — it’s long gone.

Image: Marvel Studios

Black Panther’s Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, presents a different side of Marvel’s reluctance to make its best bad guys really bad. He’s a complex and morally thorny character. In his case, it’s his twisted righteousness, rather than his charm, that holds the filmmakers back. He symbolizes the tragic reckoning of the African diaspora with its history and ancestry, and his resentment of Wakanda’s smug seclusion during centuries of Black suffering is more than justified. In that context, it wouldn’t sit well to portray him as outright evil, so the most despicable villainy in the film is outsourced to Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaue.

Cate Blanchett’s iconically styled Hela, goddess of death, from Thor: Ragnarok This deserves to be mentioned. (I suppose it’s not surprising that figures from Norse mythology should furnish the Marvel universe with two of its most memorable and clearly defined antagonists.) Hela is fearsome and cruel, but she’s an abstract creation — more of an idea about entropy, decay, and death than an actual character.

This is my main complaint about Thanos the great villain. He’s the antagonist of Avengers and all three phases of MCU. Perhaps it’s the character’s weightless CG bulk, or Josh Brolin’s measured diction and melancholy eyes, but something about him doesn’t connect on the visceral level that a great villain should. He’s too intellectual, academic almost, in the way he pursues his terrible goal to wipe out half of all life. With a degree of regret and reluctance, he seems to be the worst person in all of the universe. He doesn’t even extend us the courtesy of enjoying himself.

Image: Marvel Studios

The Scarlet Witch — also known as Wanda Maximoff, but I’m referring to her by the character’s alter ego deliberately — is a terrific baddie. She’s frighteningly powerful and devious in the ways she uses her power. She’s a good match for the hero, Stephen Strange, in both themes and temperament. She’s not so much morally ambiguous as amoral, or perhaps post-moral; she thinks she’s right and doesn’t care if what she’s doing about it is wrong.

On paper, it’s not surprising that the most effective villain in a Marvel movie to date should be a character who’s had the luxury of extensive development over the course of several movies and even her own TV show. Wanda is already a beloved character in the hearts of her fans, and so she makes a bold turn when it comes to the movie’s opening. Multiverse of MadnessIt packs a powerful punch. Elizabeth Olsen can use a great deal of material as she guides Wanda toward the dark side to find a way to be with the sons she envisioned into being. WandaVision.

But I’m not sure how relevant this backstory is to the reasons Scarlet Witch works so well in the villain role. If anything, it’s an impediment. I’m not going to get deep into the heated debate over whether Wanda breaking bad does right by the character; for me, it felt satisfying and consistent with the end of WandaVisionIt is, however, something I can accept as a deranged-mother archetype.

Setting that aside, it’s definitely a structural problem for Multiverse of MadnessThis requires that you are familiar with the plot. WandaVisionit doesn’t seem to make any sense. Chris Ryan, a podcaster, pointed out that a evil Scarlet Witch who is simply trying to wreak havoc on our world with her mind may have done a better job.

Scarlet Witches are the most amazing thing. Multiverse of Madness, and the thing that most distinguishes her from all her MCU predecessors, is that she’s It’s scary. Olsen was a great actor with a wide range of skills. WandaVisionThis gives her an immovable and deadened appearance, with suppressed grief, controlled anger, and a visibly roiling beneath. She screams and her eyes burn. Ob she’s wearing Scarlet Witch garb or Wanda’s casual attire from alternate universe Wanda, her face is frightening. Sam Raimi gives the film a final touch by covering her in blood (a tribute to SissySpacek). CarrieHere’s another story about how a disturbed woman unleashed her fury.

Image by Marvel Studios/Disney

Raimi’s playful, gruesome visual imagination emphasizes the Scarlet Witch’s immense power, but also her ingenuity and cruelty. Both in her mind-bending escape from the mirror world Strange attempts to contain her in, and in her shocking demolition of the members of the Illuminati, the Scarlet Witch doesn’t just outgun her opponents with her ability to bend reality — she out-thinks them, too. The deliciously wicked icing on the villainous cake is the way she turns the Illuminati heroes’ powers against them. Reed Richards unravels like a scarf. Black Bolt explodes his head. Professor X becomes entangled in a mental trap and snaps his neck.

There’s humor and poetry to these kills, a pleasure in wickedness, and a shock value that goes beyond how almost-gory they are. Marvel’s audience expects some surprises but not the kind that these films offer. They expect cameos from fan-favorite actors like Patrick Stewart and Hayley Atwell, but they don’t expect them to be summarily murdered moments later. Raimi and Michael Waldron, screenwriters, are trying to rewrite the MCU formula. However this is within the confines of an easily deniable multiverse story.

But it’s also the only time, aside from Thanos’ snap, that a Marvel villain has been allowed to shred the moral and physical invincibility of the heroes in this world. Scarlet Witch takes apart alternate-universe heroes because she can and in a manner that shows just how stupid she considers them. There’s a frisson of perverse pleasure to be had from her disregard for everything their universe holds to be important. She’s repeatedly held up as a meaningful parallel for Strange, who is as seduced as she is by the unfettered power of the dark arts, but who still tries to cling to a moral compass. Her casual murder of the Illuminati also ups the stakes for Strange’s quest considerably. Surely someone so powerful can’t be beatenThe sequence indicates that. and someone so hollowed-out can’t be reasoned with.

She can do it, but she must. Scarlet Witch is purely focused on fantasies. America Chavez shows her the truth of her own villainy by showing her how terrifying her behavior and what she’s become would be to her beloved boys. Meanwhile, the variant Wanda shows her enough compassion that she’s able to understand how she’s gone wrong. She frees herself from the Darkhold, and she destroys it. It’s not a traditional villain takedown, but in the context of a character who had previously been a hero, it’s fitting.

A character that they love may not be accepted by fans. They should be able to take comfort in the fact that she was a great monster. Good villains are meant to make us uncomfortable, challenge our beliefs, and do the impossible, unthinkable. Supercharged by the mischievous Raimi, Scarlet Witch is powerful enough, frightening enough, and seductive enough to rip through the MCU’s conventions — if only for half a movie — and show us a world where bad things can happen that we can feel good about. This dimension is my hope.