The director James Cameron worries that his 3-D movie “Avatar” won’t live up to uncommonly high expectations.

By MICHAEL CIEPLY


LOS ANGELES - In an old airplane hangar near the beach here, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may:

(a) Change filmmaking forever
(b) Alter your brain
(c) Cure cancer

For certain movie fans, the answer might as well be all of the above.

Seven months before its scheduled United States release on December 18, Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar,” a science- fiction thriller filmed with his own specially devised 3-D technology, is stirring a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture.

That might foretell a hit on the order of Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic,” with $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Or it might just be a giant headache for 20th Century Fox, which is backing “Avatar” and must manage expectations for a film whose technological wizardry is presumed by many to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to the arrival of Technicolor.

Neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body, has been made public by Mr. Cameron or Fox.

But Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy in March when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he had been shown just 15 minutes of the film. Mr. Cameron theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual “memory creation,” Mr. Quittner wrote.

Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, California, Mr. Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience.

“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes.

“You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,” Mr. Quittner said.

In a statement Fox said: “Jim Cameron is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.”

In a brief interview reported by The Associated Press in December, Mr. Cameron said he was worried that “Avatar” could not live up to the expectations that were building around it. “Whatever they think it’s going to be, it’s probably not,” he said of those who were speculating about the movie.

Yet he has fed the hype with his repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema would have the power to penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.

Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, said it was possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world. “Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating,” Dr. Mendez said.

At ShoWest, a convention of movie exhibitors, Mr. Cameron in a promotional video compared watching “Avatar” to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.”

But an increasingly restless group of the fans would like to sample the real thing. Some are already teasing their peers about expecting too much.

A skeptical Danny Danger, posting on a MySpace blog in January, wrote, “You would think this movie cures cancer.”