Mild Spoilers

The year is 2012. Will Smith plays Robert Neville, a scientist who couldn’t cure a virus that began as a cure for cancer and ended killing most of the Earth’s population and turning the other several million into mindless, bloodthirsty vampires. New York’s bridges were cut off before everyone was killed or transformed. Neville is immune to the virus, both airborne and physical contact, and is the last man on Earth. He has New York City all to himself. His only companion is his dog Sam, who helps him hunt deer through the city, fend off lions (yeah, I was a little confused by that too) and gives him someone to talk to so he doesn’t go insane. Neville spends his time exercising, watching movies, hunting, and capturing vampires to run human trials whenever he thinks he may have discovered a potential cure for the virus, some way to use his blood to reverse the effects.

Through the first act, I thought I was watching one of the best movies I had ever seen. I loved the “last man on Earth” scenario and it really takes its time to depict in detail what that would be like. New York City looks great, everything left wherever it was when the city was evacuated. There are cars parked all over the streets, debris all over, and advertisements in Time Square for whatever shows were playing before the evacuation. Neville has only been alone for three years so nothing has deteriorated horribly yet.

I enjoyed the psychological nature of the film. How do you stay sane when you’re all alone with all this space? Neville watches taped news segments with his breakfast to make his routine feel more normal. He goes to the video store every day to “rent” a movie. Sure, he could just take all the dvds home with him, but then he couldn’t pretend to have these normal life moments. So he’s set up mannequins all over the store as customers and workers. There’s even one attractive female mannequin he’s too shy to talk to. He does some of the fun things anyone in his situation would probably do if he wasn’t too depressed to go outside. My personal favorite is the scene where he drives golf balls off the wing of a jet in an aircraft carrier.

Then come the vampires. They’re really only vampires in that they drink blood, can smell it from a mile away, have sharp teeth and sunlight hurts them. They also move and climb very fast. Nothing Gothic about these vampires, but of course not, since it was science that created them. They’re quite terrifying when they’re in shadows and then jump out and start biting and ripping. The cinematography during these scenes is very dark, jumpy, and doesn’t give you a very clear look at them, and combined with the loud, unnerving sounds they make, both growling and crashing into things, the horror effect works well. It’s when you do get a good look at them that I felt mistakes were made. I can’t help comparing this movie to 28 Days Later (and in many ways, this is a PG-13 version of that film), in which a virus turns most of the population into zombies instead of vampires. The zombies are all played by real people, which makes it scarier if shot correctly.

But these vampires are all very obviously CG and any time there was a good closeup or we saw several dozen of them in a wide shot, I was taken out of the story and much less frightened. Oh no, computer generated vampires are going to kill Will Smith! I also think they look suspiciously like a cross between Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and Voldermort from the Harry Potter films. CG is necessary to make a lot of the big city shots work and they look great, but I wish something a little less fantasy-esque had been done with the vampires. The year is supposed to be 2012 and these things really don’t look like they belong in the picture.

The theme of the film gets a little convoluted. Neville, both in flashbacks and in the present, says “I can still fix this” on several occasions. Even when he’s the last man on Earth he thinks he’s found a cure and he says this. Sometimes the message seems to be about knowing when to give up. But other times it seems to be the opposite– never quit, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against you. By the end of the film (which I won’t give away) I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to come away with.

I’ve never read the book this film was based on and so I don’t know if the problems I have with the plot were film choices or author choices. If they’re author choices they’re more forgivable because the film is trying to stay true to the book. But I found the third act very weak compared to the first two. I found the latter half of the story too predictable, although Will Smith’s acting surprisingly continued to shine throughout. The final scenes seemed inconsistent with the rest of the movie, working harder to make the title of the movie fit the film than to create a satisfying resolution to the audience. I spent the whole movie wondering why it was called I Am Legend, and once I knew, I wished it had been called something else so I would have felt like I was watching the same movie in the last half hour I was watching in the first half hour. I’m sure others will find it completely satisfying. But it left me flat, and as I said, after watching Neville fight to stay sane while swearing he could “still fix this,” the end made me unsure what to take from the movie as a whole.

What I will remember, though, is Will Smith’s fine acting– this movie actually made me believe he was a scientist!

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: Movie, new film, Vampire, Will Smith

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Capt Logan, Movies, Sci-Fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.