I wrote recently about how 300 has moved film into a new artistic realm, and now I'm hearing whispers around the Net about James Cameron's latest project, Avatar, which sounds like it'll make 300 look like a crayon sketch.

Or else it's all so much fanboy hype. See, the online contingent is psyched for this flick in an unprecedented way: shooting is only just beginning this month, the film won't be released till summer 2009, but there's already a fan site, the project is hot on Hollywood Stock Exchange, and just yesterday, fandom was abuzz with news of the first unauthorized look at a possible teaser poster, which /Film picked up after the initial posting at Ain't It Cool News was taken down.

This kind of excitement is unusual for something that isn't a sequel and isn't based on an existing property -- Avatar is an original science fiction adventure created by Cameron more than a decade ago. The script has been featured on British magazine Empire's list of the 12 greatest unproduced scripts in Hollywood, according to the British newspaper The Independent. (This Avatar has nothing to do with the cartoon of a similar name, which M. Night Shyamalan is bringing to the big screen.) What has fanboys and fangirls the world over intrigued is how Cameron is making this film: with a combination of live-action photography and a new, photorealistic CGI technique invented by Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment -- oh, and it'll be in 3D. Peter Jackson's Weta Digital will be handling postproduction.

So what will this mean, potentially, for movies as art? Cameron says:

We're creating an entire world, a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language. The story is both epic and emotional.

The worlds that George Lucas created in his second Star Wars trilogy are visually stunning, but not emotionally involving. 300 is a magnificent film, but it didn't make me sob tears of joy at its movie magic. Cameron's Titanic, on the other hand, is emotionally powerful and technologically impressive, so I believe that he has the capability to pull this off and create a movie that you don't have to be a geek to be enthralled by.

And we only have to wait two years to find out.

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