The instruction appeared in giant letters: put your glasses on now. As one, the audience in screen three of Cinema de Lux at Cabot Circus reached down to put our 3d specs on. I was open-mouthed midway through the trailers. This was incredible stuff, with rain falling around us, Shrek flying through the air in front of us, and a hat thrown at such speed towards us that I ducked out of the way.

When the main event started, it continued to be breathtaking, with the 3d effects not being used as a gimmick, but helping to create a fully-formed world that you could almost touch.

We were immersed on an alien planet of majestic beauty, with endless forests of vivid colour, huge waterfalls, floating islands in the sky, all populated by blue creatures with a magical relationship with nature.

Humans want to colonise the planet to mine its precious mineral reserves, and in attempting to better understand the creatures that live there, they have created the avatar programme, whereby humans can have their consciousness linked to an alien body. We follow a disabled former Marine as he befriends the aliens, the Na’vi, until he is accepted as one of them.

The screenplay will not win any awards (although that will probably be the only award this movie does not win), but director James Cameron has made an incredible cinema experience, and one that may have set the benchmark in film for many years to come.