First off since I am writing about missteps in the latest MCU film clearly there will be mild spoilers about the story and how it unfolds. I will try avoid any if the major wow moments of the movie but I will be discussing the villain, his motivations, and ways that might have been handled by the writers. So, if you want to go into the film unspoiled skip this post.
Still here? Okay let’s get into it.
Mads Mikkelsen plays the film’s central villain, Kaecilius a man obsessed with avoiding death. For Kaecilius even the heat death of the universe is too soon, unlike Voldemort Kawcilius truly wants to live forever. Given the macguffins of the movie and such this is a perfectly adequate motivation, in fact the missed elements that I keep thinking about all revolve around this powerful motivation.
We are introduced to Kaecilius in a rather standard scene where he and his band of zealots murder a librarian to gain access to the spells that they believe can give them a shot of truly infinite life. The murder itself is typical bad guy behavior and right there is a missed illumination of Kaecilius’ character. They didn’t have to kill him, They overpowered him easily enough that they could have taken what they wanted without murder and Kaecilus could have left with a vague pronouncement that the librarian would die soon enough. At this point we the audience would interpret that as a villain’s threat about the coming nastiness, but later once Kaecilius’ real motivation were unveiled his words would become about character and not plot.
Second missed chance: Kawcilius’ zealots. His has a few followers, all expecting the same eternal life, and we are never given a chance to see who they are as characters. They end up being just nameless thugs for the heroes to overcome. Even a few lines of dialog would have gone a long way to revealing that these are sad desperate people propelled by their utter fear of dying. We could have that these were dangerous men and women who still were objects of pity.
Third Missed shot: Strange kills one of the Zealots and we get no reaction from Kawcilius. This was a man he was leading to eternal life. This was a man who trusted him to avoid this exact fate. This was someone who trusted him and now the up-start has killed him. I would have loved to have seen a scene where the villain of the piece lectures/berates the hero for his killing; for the villain to remind Strange of his oath to do no harm. Then we could have Mordo later try to convince Strange that he did the right thing and that would have set up a stronger conflict between Strange and Mordo and helped establish Mordo eventual fall.
I think these small changes would have opened up a deeper more character driven view of Kaecilius. But all this is more in the vein of ‘go write your own story, Bob’ than a just critique.
