Let’s Count All the Christopher Nolan-esque Moments in the ‘Doctor Strange’ Trailer

Yang-Yi Goh April 13, 2016

The first trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange premiered last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and — as far as superhero movies about neurosurgeons-turned-astral-tripping-sorcerers go — it looks pretty cool. But it also feels, well, a little familiar.

Oddly enough, Doctor Strange doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to any of the other MCU movies, which are often at fault of treading the same ground over and over. Instead, the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring blockbuster appears to borrow heavily from the oeuvre of a filmmaker most closely associated with that other comic-book colossus, DC: Christopher Nolan.

More specifically, the teaser trailer plays like a mash-up of scenes from Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Inception. Given how outrageously popular those movies were — along with the fact that DC’s moved on to Zack Snyder’s peculiar brand of slow-motion nihilism and Nolan is off making a WWII epic with Harry Styles in tow — it’s a smart, calculated move on Marvel’s part to pepper their Universe with a little Dark Knight flavouring.

But just how many moves from the Nolan playbook was Marvel able to cram into a single two-minute teaser trailer? We took a closer look and broke it down trope by trope.