The kind folks at Cineplex provided passes for me and a few cinepanions to take a ride on their new local attraction: The D-Box Motion System has been installed in Cinema Eight at the Scotiabank Theatre in Bayers Lake.

It’s three rows of seats at the very back of the cinema. Each seat is roughly the size of a business class airplane seat. They’re a little hard—my ass was going to sleep after about an hour—but you do get your own armrests that you don’t have to share with anyone else.

The seats vibrate and move precisely in time with the action on the screen. If the camera swoops up, the seat leans back. The camera dips, the seat moves forward. Left, right, pans and zooms, the seat will move accordingly. You can even feel a car engine rumble as it goes by on-screen.

You can adjust the intensity of the movement/vibrations, four different settings. The low setting is pretty mild, light movements and rumbling like being somewhere above a subway tunnel when the train goes through. The high setting is pretty dramatic. It’s not a rollercoaster, but it will move and shake you during the action sequences.

Think twice about bringing in any hot liquids to the movies. Or eating a big meal beforehand. Here’s the disclaimer, just FYI.

If you want to take a D-Box ride for a 3D movie, it’ll cost you an extra $11 on top of the average ticket price.

I saw X-Men: Apocalypse in 3D in a D-Box chair. I’d seen it earlier this week in 2D, so I could compare the experiences.

As usual, the 3D didn’t bring much that was fresh to the film. Other than a handful of cases, I find 3D a pricey gimmick. It’s headache inducing, and almost never worth the extra cost.

The second time through X-Men: Apocalypse I did notice a few things about the film: There’s a lot of posing in the movie, especially from Olivia Munn’s Psylocke, which I suppose is being true to all those 1990s Jim Lee illustrations from the comic. That really was Ally Sheedy as Scott’s teacher in the opening scenes. And the heartfelt thank you from actor Alexandra Shipp before the opening credits—for coming to see the film at the cinema—this time around felt like a little more calculated: thank you for not staying home and downloading this film, more like it.

And my feeling about the D-Box? It’s another way to generate excitement for spectacle movies that you can’t get at home. It didn’t do much to improve my impression of X-Men: Apocalypse.

For the first 20 minutes of the movie it was funny and novel. The chair settles down during scenes that are mostly dialogue driven, and I’d forget about it, and then it would suddenly move in tandem with some action onscreen, shaking me out of the movie-going experience. It’s literally distracting. Vibrations in the seat are also achieved in IMAX and UltraAVX cinemas too, by a terrific sound system. But that’s not distracting at all.

I have to admit: There was one place in X-Men: Apocalypse where I enjoyed it—and this is a spoiler, for those who haven’t seen it:

It was when Wolverine, then known as Weapon X, escapes from the Alkalai Base. He alternately gouges, eviscerates, and throws the soldiers around. That was more fun in the D-Box chair than the first time I saw it. It could mean a great kung-fu movie or something like The Raid might be enhanced by this feature.

And it did occur to me that the D-Box might really be something for horror movies. Something visceral, with a lot of jump scares.

But I’m otherwise far from sold on this, especially not for the price. Good movies, whatever the genre, don’t need 3D or vibrating seats to engage.

But I get the idea: Anything to make the in-cinema experience special as our home entertainment options get more attractive and sophisticated.