In the week that brings the release of Tron: Legacy, the new Disney blockbuster set inside a computer system where gladiatorial combat and neon are the new big things, I read that the 87-year-old film-maker and perpetual adventurer Chris Marker has set up shop in virtual reality. The latest issue of Film Comment reports that Marker, director of La jetée, Sans Soleil and AK, has built a museum in the sky of Second Life, that virtual world where users pilot their avatars through a plasticised parallel reality in which everything seems to be the colour of sports-casual wear on a Florida golf course (at least to these Luddite eyes).

Should you wish to explore the byways of Marker's museum, make a note of these numbers: 187, 61, 39. Those are either the Second Life co-ordinates, or the bus routes that will get you where you're going. Once you've reached the museum's skywalk, writes Film Comment's Jesse P Finnegan, what awaits you inside is a "digital Xanadu . . . strewn with cat-shaped coves, roving humpbacks, a castle keep, and a downed 747 . . . secreted hidden goodies in the nooks and crannies; animated loops, ironically reimagined silent movie posters, and a snapshot of Marker's feline alter-ego, Guillaume, visiting an SL version of Lenin's tomb".

Second Life has already hosted film premieres, but the participation of someone as esteemed and rigorous as Marker brings a hint of class to an enterprise that, for many of us, has never quite shaken its connotations of Dungeons and Dragons. (Not to mention the lunacy of users paying actual money to buy virtual real estate, in an ironic reversal of the situation that precipitated the recession – that is, actual real estate bought with virtual money.) My first thought on hearing about Marker's involvement was: "Maybe Second Life isn't a waste of time after all." This was followed swiftly by: "Peter Greenaway's going to be kicking himself when he hears about this: 'What am I supposed to do with all these bloody CD-Roms?' "

It's possible that there will always be something inherently ridiculous about cinema's dalliances with the virtual realities of cyberspace. Could it be that the art form is too much a limitless virtual reality already? Any portrait of a cyber world can only seem inhibited by comparison. Look at Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, or the original 1985 version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, or the recent Coraline, or anything by Buñuel or Polanski – these films establish quickly and vividly the contours of their respective alternative existences with a formalist authority that makes, say, the Matrix sequels, or the Tron movies, seem improvised and off-the-cuff.

I've reviewed Tron: Legacy in this week's NS Christmas Special, but regardless of that film's strengths or weaknesses, it belongs to a tradition of cinematic storytelling that has to work overtime to impress and convince. Suspension of disbelief is a given when we enter a cinema – we may be handing over cash at the popcorn counter, but I always feel like I'm checking in some of my churlish everyday scepticism as well.

A double suspension is asked of us by pictures like The Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity or Disclosure (which ends with a cringe-making cyber-showdown); in those cases, the correlation between the corporeal world and its cyber stand-in is so flimsy that the stakes tend to fall to the point of being negligible.

Better for a film-maker to spike the visual excesses of these brave new worlds with scepticism. When Kathryn Bigelow, in Strange Days, or David Cronenberg, in eXistenZ, ventured into the virtual, they did so not to dazzle, but to disorientate. The worlds created in those films are unsettling yet still vaguely familiar – the ad-agency gloss of the fantasies in Strange Days, the humdrum griminess (a factory, a petrol station) of the locations in eXistenZ.

Bigelow and Cronenberg showed that virtual reality offers not an escape from our daily problems and neuroses, but a mirror in which they are magnified to new and horrific proportions.