Last Monday, because I've been feeling out of the loop, I resolved to catch the new Avengers movie. I call it "the Avengers movie" – in fact, the word "Assemble" was added to the UK release so it wouldn't be confused with the 1960s TV series of the same name. Thus the film I saw was called Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D, which sounds like a badly translated Japanese videogame from the mid-90s. Or something you might oil and push up your arse while wearing a confused look on your face, a bit like civilisation has failed.

No visit to a contemporarymultiplex is complete without a bit of shit being rubbed in your eye right from the start, which happened in my case when the automatic ticket-printing machine spewed a rectangle of air at me instead of a ticket. Pathetically, I looked around for human assistance, only to find a big queue at the box office, where a solitary staff member was gradually processing incoming fleshbags with the joyous gusto of a woman forced to slowly count dust motes in a jail cell forever.

A nearby sign claimed I could purchase tickets from the popcorn counter instead, so I rode the escalator to the brighty-coloured ripoff desk, where another lone staff member had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He called a manager, who spent five minutes trying to retrieve my ticket from an uncaring and uncooperative operating systembefore giving up and commanding the usher to wave me through before the computer found out and had me destroyed.

"Where do I get the 3D glasses?", I asked the usher, who looked at me as though I'd asked whether the film would have colours and shapes in it, before explaining that I'd have to go to a different counter and buy a pair separately for 80p.

When I arrived there, a customer was trying to buy pick-n-mix with a credit card, thus hopelessly crippling the cinema's IT system. I asked the cashier if I could simply put cash in his hand for the glasses, but no. Apologetically, he explained that everything had to go through the computer. So I stood there and waited. Cameron's Britain.

Finally, I entered the auditorium just in time to enjoy an anti-piracy commercial depicting an abandoned cinema wreathed in cobwebs, accompanied by a doomy John Hurt voiceover saying what a shame it would be if all the cinemas closed. Yeah, imagine that. I'd have to approximate the experience by punching myself in the kidneys and eating a £50 note each time I put on a DVD.

Then Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D began. Some scientists were worried about a glowing blue cube they kept underground, so Samuel L Jackson had turned up to make things easier by shouting at them. Then the cube went bonkers and spat out a bad guy called Loki, who looks like a cross between Withnail and the sort of grinning pervert who'd have sex with a fistful of Mattesson's liver pate in the window of an apartment overlooking a hospice bus stop. Then some vehicles raced around and everything blew up.

Then Samuel L Jackson gathered some superheroes together on a sort of impossible flying aircraft carrier, and they spent some time mocking each other's costumes in a post-modern fashion before Loki's henchmen arrived and everything blew up again. Then they all went to New York and some aliens in hovering chariots flew through a hole in the sky and everything blew up for the third and final time. And then, because the Avengers had won, the film decided to end.

Despite being almost completely incoherent, it's enjoyable bibble, and as good as superhero films are ever likely to get, which is excellent news because it means they can stop making them now. Seriously, they needn't bother releasing Batman Bum Attack or whatever the next one's called, because it won't be as good as Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D. Finally we can move on, as a species.

Still, entertained though I was, I did find myself occasionally checking emails: a first for me in a cinema, and surprising when you consider the amount of spectacle on display. It's like watching buildings and cars and girders and fighter jets endlessly smashing around inside a gigantic washing machine for two hours, interspersed with wisecracks. That's what mesmerises humans, just as surely as cats are fascinated by bits of string being pulled across the carpet. Up to a point, anyway. Once you've seen 10,000 cars exploding, you've seen them all. I rapidly succumbed to spectacle fatigue.

Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D cost $220m to make and is 143 minutes long, so whenever I glanced at my phone for one second, I missed $25,641 worth of entertainment. As an aside, I bet you could find someone prepared to shoot a stranger dead on camera for $25,641. What if you paid that person $220m to shoot 8,580 strangers dead on camera – that's one per second – and then while you were watching the footage afterwards, in your lair, your phone beeped and you glanced at it for five seconds and didn't notice all five members of One Direction taking a bullet? You'd miss out on a real cultural talking point.

Finally – and this is an odd accusation to level at a superhero film – it didn't feel very real. I reckon only about 8% of what was on screen was actually there. The rest was imagined by computers. And please, leery tragi-men, don't dribble on about "Scarlett Johansson's arse in 3D" being "worth the price of admission". The film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D using software, which means you're actually drooling over a 2D image of Scarlett Johansson's arse wrapped around a wireframe model of an arse that isn't there. You're sitting in front of HAL 9000, jerking off like a monkey. Somewhere, the machines are laughing at you.