Marvel is pushing itself. It could quite happily have kept churning out its conventional cannon of superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America. But who needs convention? After the roaring success of a film about a man who can shrink to the size of an ant, Marvel clearly decided that anything was possible. Logically, therefore, the next step was to cast aside the very fabric of reality and replace it with sorcerers using magic to tap into infinite dimensions. This is not the ‘normal’ world of robots and gravity anymore. This is Doctor Strange.

The film opens by introducing us to the life of the arrogant but successful neurosurgeon, Steven Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch). After a car accident destroys his professional career, he finds another path in the enclave of the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) in Nepal by connecting with his astral self. Strange proceeds to delve into the complexities of the mystic arts, and mysteriously improve; credited once to his “photographic memory”, by which logic I should now be crowned Sorcerer Supreme of Earth.

Thematically, Doctor Strange seemed unsure of its direction. Hubris runs throughout the film, with director Scott Derrickson beautifully drawing out the trope of a ‘great’ man’s downfall and his ultimate redemption. Yet this is contrasted to a dizzying onslaught of magical terminology, as the viewer is introduced and then immediately expected to care about moments such as Kacellius’s (Mads Mikkelsen) theft of pages from the Book of Cagliostro. As a result, certain pivotal later scenes in the film lose their emotive impact. The viewer is left to struggle to process decades of fantasy lore, when they should be absorbed in the unfolding inter-dimensional drama.

Cumberbatch gives a strong leading performance as Steven Strange, delivering complexity to a role the viewer could easily disregard as another superhero in a cloak. He gives majesty to his clashes with the forces of the Dark Dimension. But he also makes an item named the Cloak of Levitation into a device for physical comedy; a gargantuan feat which adds welcome levity to the film’s darker moments.

Sadly, the film struggles to hold onto the vast tapestry of life at Kamar-Taj. Tilda Swinton seemed bored in much of her dialogue as the Ancient One, hinting that this was a role done more for its sizeable Marvel Studios pay cheque than its artistic merit.

However this pales before a far greater crime: Mikkelsen is wasted as the villain in this film. His nihilistic hatred of the laws of the Universe is never really developed. As someone who re-watches Casino Royale regularly just to see his performance of Le Chiffre, it was soul-destroying to see Kacellius warped into little more than a plot inconvenience to Steven Strange assuming his role as the Sorcerer Supreme.

Doctor Strange is a gloriously unconventional work of sci-fi. The CGI set pieces are some of the greatest I have ever seen. Every Marvel film to date has relied on sprawling special effects, but here they have a purpose. The screen frequently explodes with a dazzling spectacle of colour, whether in the aptly named “Dark Dimension”, or shattering reality to enter the (again, innovatively named) “Mirror Dimension”. The visuals engross the viewer in this mystical vision of our world and give the action a pulsating and totally unpredictable quality; typified by the fight scene across the skies of New York which challenges every conventional idea of an action sequence – and is all the better for it.

It is difficult to capture such a kaleidoscope of imagery and an avalanche of fantasy lore in one piece of writing. As a work of art, director Scott Derrickson has created something that is now the benchmark for the effective use of CGI. As a fully formed film, Doctor Strange is a mixed bag. A strong leading performance from Cumberbatch is lost as we are thrust headlong into a chaotic world populated by underdeveloped characters and disparate plot lines. These inter-dimensional set pieces will have a future in Marvel films only when they remember the value of holding onto the viewer’s attention. It is a rare film review that ends by defending CGI. Strange times indeed