I saw Tron: Legacy last night.

SPOILER ALERT: This movie sucks.

Clearly it was inevitable that after Avatar filmmakers would start to figure, “Hey, if we make it look spectacular enough, no one will notice that we didn’t put a whole lot of effort into the script.” Only Tron: Legacy isn’t nearly as awesome to look at as Avatar, so it’s a lot easier to notice how awful some of the dialogue is.

Basically every time a character is introduced, a different character explicitly says exactly who the new person is. “Alan, you’ve been like a surrogate father to me.” “Quorra, you are a loyal assistant,” etc. The only character who isn’t really introduced as such is the main guy, who we learn is a cool guy from the assortment of cool-guy things he does in one of the opening scenes.

If in the first 10 minutes of any movie, you ride a motorcycle and/or leap from death-defying heights only to save yourself at the last second with some contraption no one realized you were wearing, that means you’re probably a cool guy. Xander Cage taught us that.

Anyway, the characters in Tron: Legacy all essentially adhere to the classic Shakespearean archetypes: The Cool Guy, the Old Guy, the Bad Guy and, of course, the David Bowie Guy. The plot is that the Bad Guy has captured the Old Guy and now the Cool Guy has to rescue him, with or without help from the David Bowie Guy. Some of them aren’t actually people and most of them are Jeff Bridges.

Then a bunch of stuff happens and some of it looks pretty cool in IMAX 3D. It wasn’t the type of 3-D where stuff flies off the screen at you, it was the kind where you sense depth in the field of vision, which is also awesome. It’s basically like a big laser-light show, only someone bothered trying to attach a plot to it. They should stop doing that. Just put a bunch of awesome looking stuff on the screen and I’ll come up with my own patter. That way we won’t have to sit through all the scenes before the guy even gets inside the video game.

The main thing is that IMAX 3D is awesome. I remember in grad school, a classmate saying she didn’t like going to the movies because it made her feel violated. She said she hated the experience of becoming lost in a movie, as you really only can in the theater, because she felt like she lost track of reality.

I think about that a lot because all the things she described — and I’m not doing them justice — are the same reasons I love going to the movies. I often go alone, which seems weird to people, but I’m not at the movies to be with people, I’m at the movies to see the movie. When there are people around I feel obligated to make snarky comments so I don’t experience the same sense of escapism.

Anyway, I find — and maybe this is just me — it’s increasingly difficult to really put everything else out of mind and just focus on the movie. I think my iPhone is partly to blame. That’s why I enjoy IMAX 3D. It’s almost mentally taxing just to be able to focus your eyes on the whole screen, and such an overwhelming experience that you really have no other option but to dive headlong into the movie. Even if it’s stupid.