If before watching this picture you are lost in guessing who the main villain is, I'll tell you - the mediocrity of the screenwriters. And the heroes could not defeat this villain even by the end of the film.
The writers had so much scope for flight of thought and imagination. Every act of the movie could have included characters and events that would have moved the story forward and contributed to the development of the characters and at the same time would have blown the minds of the audience, causing them to cry out "Come on! There are too many 'BEs' as much as there is confusion in the story itself.
Marvel cheated fan expectations from the beginning by claiming that this would be the first horror film in the superhero universe. And it seems like a good choice of director, because Sam Raimi has experience shooting both Spider-Man, which has become a classic among superhero movies, and the classic of the horror series, The Evil Dead.
And the formula, it seems, is simple - take the best of both genres, shake it up, but don't mix it up! And another fan delight is ready. But in the end, the two genres were both stirred and mixed, and a little blundered with the ingredients, resulting in a 'Cultivated Universe of Misunderstanding' instead of a 'Multiverse of Madness'.
Such a promising idea, first laid out in the 'Loki' series, then touched upon in 'No Way Home' failed to live up to the expectation for a further full exploration of the phenomenon in 'Strange'.
Theses:
-The complete lack of a coherent motivation for the villain.
-Flat main characters who for the entire film find no reason to empathize.
-The most mediocre, but also the most vilely memorable cameos of the Illuminati, which were included in the film for a couple of minutes just to have them.
-The whole aesthetic of the footage was shown in the trailer, almost everything else is second-rate footage left in the film.
-The Madness Multiverse didn't show the other universes. Just two cheesy variations of the main universe.
My advice- Don't be charmed lest you be disappointed later.
This is not a horror movie or even a superhero movie. It's something inarticulate, where you won't find anything you've probably been waiting for.