Doctor Strange IMAX Footage Description

Last night, select IMAX theaters across the country screened the first real look at Marvel’s Doctor Strange, with fifteen minutes of the film to show off just what’s coming down the pike. It was, in short, incredible, with audiences around the country cheering, chanting “show it again,” and taking to social media with their excitement over the mind-bending and visually stunning footage.

While that footage won’t make it out onto the internet (entire scenes were shown, after all), we have a detailed breakdown of all fifteen minutes for you – most of which was world premiere material – right here.

The footage started with an introduction from Benedict Cumberbatch welcoming fans to the experience, with a neat little IMAX trick, as he motioned his hands as if to magically grow the screen, making a joke about using his magic to save the world “but this looked cooler.”

The actual movie footage started, then, with Strange as a surgeon chatting with the ER nurse played by Rachel McAdams. The two have some flirty banter about his career and why he’s not helping out with her there. It’s clear that Strange is high-profile – she mentions he’s done CNN interviews about his major cases – but she thinks he can do more by helping save lives everyday. After he invites her to a gala (in his honor, of course) and she declines, she says “everything is about you,” very pointedly.

We next see Stephen Strange in his gorgeous, fast car driving through the city and then out onto a winding road. He gets a phone call from his assistant about some potential cases to take on. The first is a 35 year-old Marine Colonel who broke his back in experimental armor; no, that’s not Rhodey in Civil War (as confirmed by Scott Derrickson), meaning it’s almost assuredly one of Justin Hammer’s volunteers in his knock off Iron Man armor. A 68 year-old female with an advanced brain stem cancer – nope, Strange doesn’t want to mess up his perfect record. A 22 year-old female with an electronic implant in her brain to control schizophrenia that was struck by lightning; now, that’s awfully descriptive, making us think it’s some kind of Easter Egg, but we can’t figure out who it is supposed to be, if anyone. Strange starts looking at her MRI – and crashes into another car, sending him careening off the cliff; as he crashes, his hands get completely crushed between the steering wheel and the dashboard.

From here, we hear Strange talking to the Ancient One, who pointedly says “Not anymore” when he tries to correct her that he should be addressed Doctor. Ouch. That’s undercut by shots of Strange in the hospital, and more narration about his many procedures he’s tried to fix his hands.

We jump to Strange and the Ancient One chatting in a room in Kamar-Taj. She shows him a “map” – this was all in the Comic-Con footage as well – of chakras, then an MRI of the human body. He says he’s seen the chakras map “in gift shops.” She says these maps each show only part of the picture, but Strange isn’t having it. Frustrated, he screams at her that there’s “no such thing as a spirit” and that he (and she) are just insignificant “momentary specks” in the universe. So she punches his soul out of his body, as seen in the trailer. While he looks on at his own body (don’t worry, Mordo caught it), she holds her hands in mid-spell, controlling where his soul is, then pulls it back into his body.

Incredulous, Strange thinks he was drugged, and she tells him he just had tea with a little honey. She explains that the Astral dimension lets the soul exist without the body. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asks. “To show you just how much you don’t know,” she says. “Open your eye.” With that, her next strike sends him careening into a psychadelic journey through other dimensions. There’s one that looks quite a bit like the quantum-verse that Ant-Man shrunk into, many that are just swirls of energy, there’s a moment of him floating through space, and catching a butterfly that sends him zooming around the world, and an alternate world where a massive gaseous face looks on upon him. As he goes through this journey, the Ancient One speaks to him. “You think you know how the world works. You think that this material universe is all there is. What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality. This universe is only one of an infinite number – worlds without end. Some, benevolent and life-giving, others dark places filled with malice and hunger.” She asks him who he is, and specifically calls this scenario a multiverse. Strange’s trip gets trippier, with kaleidoscope images, his face folding in on itself, hands growing from his hands, and getting sucked into a black hole. It’s insane and awesome.

“Have you seen that before in a gift shop?” she asks. “Teach me,” he says. Aw yeah.

From there, we saw Strange meeting some of the other masters, and beginning to train. Ancient One explains that they “harness energy and shape reality” through “the mystic arts.” It will take “study and practice” just as he needed to become a doctor. He meets Wong, who’s the most hardcore librarian ever, and offered up a more humorous moment in the footage. When we see the books, one of them is the Book of Cagliostro, and the symbol of Dormammu is within, as seen on the set.

That’s when things take a turn. “While heroes like the Avengers protect the world from physical dangers, we safeguard it against more mystical threats. Together, we generate a protective shield around our world,” Wong says. We see Kaecilius, the villain of the film played by Mads Mikkelsen, and his followers conjuring up a flame version of that sigil of Dormammu’s. “Those who’d draw power from the Dark Dimension” is how the Ancient One refers to them. Kaecilius says they “don’t seek to rule this world, we seek to end it,” and we start to see them forming weapons, and Strange starting to use magic for the first time. Kaecilius’s appearance looks like it will change throughout the film, whether that’s because of some possession or just his use of dark magic.

From there we saw an extended chase sequence, with Kaecilius and his Zealots chasing Strange and Mordo across a bending landscape. Each time Strange tried to open a portal with his sling ring, Kaecilius would bend the building away from them, sending them careening back into the ground – or another reshaped cityscape. They get slammed into a bus at one point, with a familiar cameo included. Strange and the villain are seen fighting, conjuring weapons and protective spells; the Cloak of Levitation saves Strange at one point, diving after him and bringing him flying back up in front of his adversary. More shots of the insane alternate dimensions include that huge face again, a quick quippy bit between Strange and McAdams’ character about him “joining a cult,” and finally a trippy shot of Strange screaming with his face basically growing out of his face repeatedly.

And that’s all she wrote. It’s an almost impossible-to-describe accurately sequence of events, but one thing’s for sure: it was awesome.

Doctor Strange is in theaters November 4, 2016.