I watched this one with the whole family in 3D IMAX- seeing anything in that format is a bit of a transcendent experience, like discovering the joys of Tivo for the first time, or losing your virginity. (Can't wait to watch Alice in Wonderland with my 3D glasses on!) You do get a hell of a headache though, a bit like being car sick. But it's all worth it of course.
The movie itself is everything you heard it would be- imaginative, wonderous, absorbing, etc. It all leads to a super drawnout, violence/action packed battle scene that made me think "Wow, this is so juvenile..." When I came out of the movie, I kinda felt like this was a quintessentially American product- inventive, grand, ambitious, delivered with an excessive dose of macho jingoism. But when I put 5 more minutes of thought into it, I kinda realized that I was kind of, completely, wrong?!? This movie is actually deliciously subverted! Usually in a Spielbergian/Bruckbuster action/war flick, it's the cookie cutter American soldiers righteously kicking some foriegn/alien asses. But in this movie, it's the Native American-esque, slim & lithe (very un-American indeed) alien foreigners who kick some American asses in the most unapologetic over-the-top fashion. Awesome!!!!!!!! Now, there's people who will point out that the humans in Avatar are not actually specified as Americans. To those people I will point out, how Cameron uses classic American corporate/military archetypes for 99% of the human characters in the movie, and how all the human weaponry have that classic GI Joe asthetic to them. Coincidence? I think not.
During the car ride home after the movie, my brother IMDB'ed James Cameron on the iPhone- and turns out Cameron is actually Canadian. Go figure that this is a product of a warped Canadian brethren.