How math makes movies like Doctor Strange so otherworldly
For wild chase scenes, it’s hard to beat Doctor Strange. In this 2016 film, the fictional doctor-turned-sorcerer has to stop villains who want to destroy reality. To further complicate matters, the evildoers have unusual powers of their own.
“The bad guys in the film have the power to reshape the world around them,” explains Alexis Wajsbrot. He’s a film director who lives in Paris, France. But for Doctor Strange, Wajsbrot instead served as the film’s visual-effects artist.
Those bad guys make ordinary objects move and change forms. Bringing this to the big screen makes for chases that are spectacular to watch. City blocks and streets appear and disappear around the fighting foes. Adversaries clash in what’s called the “mirror dimension” — a place where the laws of nature don’t apply. Forget gravity: Skyscrapers twist and then split. Waves ripple across walls, knocking people sideways and up. At times, multiple copies of the entire city seem to appear at once, but at different sizes. And sometimes they’re upside down or overlapping.
Read more at Science News for Students, here: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/math-movies-doctor-strange-otherworldly