9 Easter Eggs You Need To Look Out For In Doctor Strange

5) The Visual Influences

The element of Doctor Strange that is garnering the most acclaim is its innovative visuals. Through the sorcerer’s abilities to warp reality or enter different dimensions and universes, director Scott Derrickson and cinematographer Ben Davis get to serve up some truly trippy images. While it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in a superhero movie before, there are some precursors in this field that Doctor Strange pays homage to at points.

Some of the gravity-defying fight scenes definitely echo The Matrix, a movie which also presumably inspired some of the story beats of the movie. For instance, Strange is a Chosen One who’s trained to alter his perception of the world around him in order to gain new abilities. The Ancient One is also clearly the Morpheus stand-in. She even starts a lot of sentences with “what if I told you…” – just like the Morpheus internet meme.

Another visual cue is Inception, which famously also featured action scenes taking place in revolving buildings. Likewise, in the design of the colourful other dimensions, the film is surely inspired by the animation in Disney’s Fantasia and the later Fantasia 2000.