Stark portrayal of the madness of loneliness and terror
Disadvantages:
A bit slow, fails to take the risks of not being quite so mainstream
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
I Am Legend opens with a news report: It's 2009, and - without as much fanfare as you'd expect - Emma Thomson calmly announces they've created a cure for cancer. Every human trial has been successful; a genetic re-engineering of the measles virus has eliminated mankind's biggest health fear.
Fast forward 3 years, and it has eliminated mankind.
Almost. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the sole survivor in a desolate, ground-zero New York. A virologist involved in the original fight against the new, mutated disease, he continues his work to find a cure in a basement laboratory, all the while struggling to survive in the bleak new world.
What really works for me in this movie is the glimpses of a psychological profile of a man so utterly alone. However, it takes a good while to get going: for the first half hour or so, I was very relieved to have a dog in this movie - Sam the Alsatian, Neville's sole companion - as it provides the sole emotional tie to the story, for me. And it's the moment Sam is placed in danger that Will Smith's character suddenly shows real emotion and the whole thing becomes a bit more interesting.
For, in the dark places, the remnants of humanity lurk. Some complain that the vampires of the book have been changed to zombies, but I'm okay with it: they are plague victims, and still pretty vampiric, with an allergy to sunlight and habits of biting. I'm not quite as okay with the special effects: these zombie creatures remind me a lot of 'The Mummy', with their gaping mouths! However, I can see how it'd be scary being alone with the things, which I suppose is the point.
After this initial (for the viewers) run in, there is a slow break down in Neville's mental state. The toll of being so utterly alone for three years - can you imagine? No human contact for over 1000 days?? And worse, all that time not just alone, but being hunted by creatures from darkest horror? It's really no wonder Neville is so obsessed with finding a cure: what else does he have to live for?
It's the glimpses of day-to-day life in such extreme circumstances that completely intrigue me. Sam, the dog, is fed very human-looking plates of food, and spoken to as if a child. Neville creates strange tableaux of mannequins, with whom he attempts to interact, as if this small part of life at least is as it was. He returns a DVD to a rental store - I thought this was a brilliant little nugget: he could easily take the whole collection of DVDs home, but chooses to simulate a more normal life. And yet, working through the entire DVD collection alphabetically has such end-of-world connotations.
While I found bits like this quite interesting, I do feel the film as a whole lacks... Something. I was rather expecting more action - more zombies, quite frankly! I appreciate that the film makers are trying to do something a bit different from your average Hollywood action flick, but I also feel the jumps'n'frights ratio could have been a bit higher.
Overall, though, I did enjoy this film - although suspect it will be easier to take from the sofa rather than in the cinema. My viewing companion was a bit restless through the slow bits... So, most of the movie, then! And while I enjoyed what there was, the whole piece did feel a bit flat and one-dimensional. The flashbacks to Neville's former life, before the plague - or rather, at the very start of it - didn't add as much interest as I'd guess they were supposed to.
Alas, the ending is absolutely awful. Without spoiling anything, it comes from neither the original source material nor fits the tone of the rest of the film, and as a result it feels woefully tagged on.
I left this movie with an overall impression of bleakness. For, the thing that really sent chills down my spine wasn't the monsters roaming around. It's the thought of medical science genuinely tinkering with things like the measles virus, and the (remote!) plausibility of something so drastically universal really going wrong.
~*~ And now ...why you should read the book instead!! ~*~
I've yet to read Richard Matheson's horror classic, I Am Legend, although the 1954 novel was so groundbreaking - taking the vampire myth out of pure horror and plonking into sci-fi - that I've managed to read plenty about it over the years. Thus, I'm rather with the ranks of book-lovers who are somewhat dismayed at the changes the movie makes to the story - in fact, the bulk of the complaints about this movie centre around the deviations from the original tale.
As the film stands on its own, it's fine - dark, bleak, but it is what it is. The message of the whole piece, though, is completely twisted from that originally meant, and it's hard to let go of that, for me. In the book, the title 'I Am Legend' has quite the opposite meaning to the one presented here. Mankind has gone; the dominant species on Earth is the new vampire/zombie/creature/whatever. What then does that say about the singular creature hunting the masses? The fiend that stalks through the... day... slaughtering the sleeping? In the original version, Neville proclaims himself 'legend' precisely because he realises that it is he who has become the monster.
A very very little of that survives the movie adaptation: Neville is so adamant about the plague being the work of man. Neither God nor nature has had a hand in wiping out the human race - we've done that for ourselves. In that, he partially reflects that sentiment of man becoming the monster. Aside from that moment, however, the 'flaw' with the film's message for me is that we are never allowed to forget our humanity. From Neville's recorded news videos tying us back to normality, to the importance placed by both the character and storytelling on the 'cure' - man remains central. Any glimpse of the evolution of Earth's new masters is too late, too inconsequential, to really carry forward the original theme - leaving me disappointed that the film makers weren't brave enough to risk the full implication of the tale.* boring details Rating: 15 Running time: 101 minutes full cast details can be found on http://imdb.co.uk
More details
Soundtrack
Unmemorable
How does it compare to others by the same director?
Satisfactory
Value for Money
Satisfactory
What format are you reviewing?
Film only
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I Am Legend
It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium's "SF Masterworks" classic
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reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presen...
reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presen...
reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presen...
reprints series.I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it present...
very helpful
very helpful
