I have mostly refrained from talking about James Cameron’s Avatar, mostly because A) we know so little about it, B) it isn’t coming out for a while, and C) it is easy to get caught up in all the hooplah. A project like this is clouded by so much speculation, it can make the mind numb. Well, Josh Quittner over at Time has had the privilege of watching some footage from the film, and from the sounds of it, the hooplah is about to get… hooplahier.

Cameron’s Avatar, due in December, could be the thing that forces theaters to convert to digital. Spielberg predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $200 million, and it represents digital filmmaking’s bleeding edge. Cameron wrote the treatment for it in 1995 as a way to push his digital-production company to its limits. (“We can’t do this,” he recalled his crew saying. “We’ll die.”) He worked for years to build the tools he needed to realize his vision. The movie pioneers two unrelated technologies – e-motion capture, which uses images from tiny cameras rigged to actors’ heads to replicate their expressions, and digital 3-D.

Avatar is filmed in the old “Spruce Goose” hangar, the 16,000-sq.-ft. space where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane. The film is set in the future, and most of the action takes place on a mythical planet, Pandora. The actors work in an empty studio; Pandora’s lush jungle-aquatic environment is computer-generated in New Zealand by Jackson’s special-effects company, Weta Digital, and added later.

I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated – even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.

Cameron wasn’t surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing “is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn’t.” His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That’s possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.

Okay, there is a little tingle of excitement in my nether region after reading that. But oh, Mr. Cameron, it’s going to take more than a few words to get me really excited. I want some footage or at least a photo before I jump completely on board – because I don’t know this Josh Quittner cat. Maybe he is James Cameron’s second cousin or blind or a small child and that is why he couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated.

Lastly, I do know that this is going to be huge and critic-proof, and between this and Terminator: Salvation, Sam Worthington is about to have a hell of a year. I await anxiously.