It's a great movie if you like watching your favorite famous people move their hands in weird ways to shoot big red CGI orbs at each other during fight scenes. In between those parts, it's a highly convoluted time jumping/universe hopping story centered around Wandavision wanting to see her kids, who have the hilariously uncreative names of Billy and Tommy. The protagonist (who somehow feels like he has second billing to Wanda), Dr. Strange, a time-traveling British guy who is a Doctor who isn't a Doctor Who, is mostly on screen to move his hands, shoot CGI things out of his hands at people, and be sarcastic when he's not asking people questions about what he is supposed to be doing-at one point in an extremely dialogue-heavy expositional scene, he asks John Krasinski how he can get to a book he's looking for that is incredibly crucial to drive the story forward. John Krasinski reminds Strange that he made himself a huge loophole out of like, time warp magic or something that allows him to just get directly to the book, which we never saw onscreen or heard about at any point beforehand. It's just tossed in to bail out whoever wrote themselves into a corner with the screenplay. Dr. Strange is pretty much just like, "oh yeah, that's right!" and the movie shamelessly plows forward (it prompted a huge belly laugh from me and is far and away my favorite part of this movie).

There are a number of characters who are important parts in what we will call the story of this movie, but the character development just isn't there for us to buy into any particular motivations or desires that they may or may not express throughout the movie in regards to why they are doing what they are doing onscreen. And for the record, I'm not even referring to all of the Easter eggs and crossovers and cameos peppered in-just the mostly disposed-of side characters who for some reason are given notable significance in a number of scenes in this movie that are clearly meant to be turning points in the story, which fall a bit flat because we don't really care about the people involved. Also, Bruce Campbell is here, because Sam Raimi. If it's any testament to the screenplay and how fast and loose it plays with all of its characters, he is arguably equally as important as, say, the big giant bipedal cow/bull guy or John Krasinski in the grand scheme of this story. There's a lot going on here and to try to keep tabs on all of it is a fools errand. Sit back and let it happen to you. Watch this movie the way you watched movies when you were a little kid. Just watch the big loud fights and the bright colors. Cheer for the good guy even if you don't know why. Doesn't matter.

I can go on and on about this movie and trash it for being a really goofy screenplay and complain about nitpicky issues, but I'm not. That's not the point here. Ultimately, it's just another Marvel product like the shirts and the toys. It's made to appeal to the widest audience as possible, it's very clearly something that's made for children to watch despite some of the darker Sam Raimi horror-ish touches (most are CGI ridiculousness, some of them look really cool in brief flashes), and it succeeds in that department-it's a movie for people who do not think too much about what they're seeing and like to see big loud things happen that look really cool, of which there's a lot here.

If we want to look at what this movie is trying to do creatively with the screenplay, character choices, and storytelling, while also appealing to extremely broad, lowest common denominator blockbuster movie sensibilities, it's probably best summed up as Inception for kids. That's as complimentary as I can possibly be.