people keep bashing the cgi monsters and over the top color palette but that's iconic dr strange. reading dr strange is to shrooms what taco bell and funyuns are to weed.
i think the primary issue with the movie is sort of intangible. there was SOOOOOO many re-writes, we're all familiar with the joke being that the only thing that stayed the same throughout the process was the name of the movie. they had already postponed the movie so many times that they just needed to get it out and were becoming less and less concerned with quality.
it's like when you're working on something and it's fine, but you know it could be better, so you keep futzing with it over and over. initially it was something you were happy doing and enjoying the work, but you start enjoying it less and less with every iteration. so it becomes some grudge work, you KNOW you can knock it out of the park but you're so stressed about it not being as good as you know it can be, but every time you rework it you bake all your frustrations into it and it just keeps getting worse and worse. finally you basically fail upwards and accidentally make it better somehow so you just put your hands up and release it. it's definitely nowhere near what you originally wanted but it's "good enough" and now you can move on.
as a viewer we don't see any of that behind the scenes grind, and we should definitely not take that into account when judging it, but i think understanding that can help you appreciate it in some ways. and at the very least, help bring a fresh appreciation for the MCU up till end game. the amount of work that goes into coordinating all these interwoven stories is mind bottling and we SHOULD have gotten a lot more movies on par with strange 2 because of it.
the MCU post end game is falling a part for a lot of reasons, but this is a huge part of it.
