To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie <year>".
If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.
Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.
Also because AI (if I may even call it that) is not yet good enough to answer these things with high accuracy, let alone judge sources. I don't use Google much so I can't really speak for it, but from what I've seen, I'd estimate that 20% of the answers (for non-mainstream topics) are either misleading or false.
https://beta.cliqz.com has some support for bangs. Not as many as DDG but adding !g (google), !s (startpage), !d (duckduckgo), !so (stackoverflow), !w (wikipedia), etc works for me. Needs to be at the end, not at the start.
If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.