On the one hand, U2 3D is a film to which I would love to devote 1700 words, if ever there were one. On the other hand, why bother? I’d really rather you just go see it.

So here’s what you need to know.

First, this is a concert film, pure and simple. The band is U2; the venue is 2005’s Latin American leg of the Vertigo tour. The twist is a new digitally-captured 3-D process. The bigger twist is IMAX. In huge, glorious, realistic depth and breadth, longtime U2 collaborators and artists Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington distill into 80 or so what it’s like to be both onstage with and in the crowd watching Bono, The Edge, Clayton, and Mullen perform. It’s electric. It’s huge. It rocks.

It wants to change the world.

U2 has been dogging me since my days as a dorm newsletter editor. In 1981, the wiseass cynic that I was, I suggested that U2 was probably the second-best concert option on a given Friday night. Who can even remember what the first option was? Not me. At least now I can perhaps salve my conscience.

The centerpiece of the set presented in this film is the sequence starting with “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and building through “Bullet the Blue Sky,” “Miss Sarajevo,” and an audio/video montage of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. It climaxes with “Pride (In the Name of Love),” Bono’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his cloud of witnesses, inspirations, and predecessors—and still there’s the spiritually hopeful denouement of “Where the Streets Have No Name” and two other songs to go before the encore.

The sentiments expressed—all framed around the Coexist mantra that the children of Abraham (Muslims, Jews, and Christians) must figure out together how to “make a better future”—are pure wide-eyed nobility and bare-knuckled inspiration. “Is there a time for keeping your head down and getting on with your day?” Bono sings. “Is there a time to run for cover?” Yes, he concedes; but now is not that time. Now is the time to put aside the “difficulties of the past” and act to shape tomorrow.

John Lennon, I love a lot of what you stood for, brother. You contributed mightily to this movement, too—maybe even started it. But Bono is carrying the torch now, and Bono doesn’t exist without religion any more than King or Gandhi did. Huh-uh. Sorry. That’s a world not worth imagining.

So why 3-D? Because, frankly, 3-D finally works. I’m a 3-D snob, one who has never, ever, found the hassle to be worth the minimal entertainment benefit. But five minutes into the film, I was wondering why the members of the IMAX audience in front of me were pumping their fists, too—and I realized they weren’t. It was almost impossible to distinguish onscreen audience members from those in the theater.

This is the promise of 3-D fulfilled—and no David Lee Roth-style mugging thrown in for gratuitous effect.

So that’s enough.

Quit reading. Act.

Get out and do something.

U2 3D is rated G. Start celebrating, all you conservatives who have been whining about stuff you can’t take your teens to. Get out there, now! See this and take your kids with you, if they can stand rock music. Maybe even if they cannot.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of U2 3D.