I Am Legend (2007)

Back by popular demand!! Who would have thought people actually read and THINK about what I say about movies. Not bad for someone who has never taken a course in film appreciation.

Ok, so I just got back after watching I Am Legend, the latest Will Smith flick. So what's new about this movie? Well, let's just say I was pretty taken in by the opening scenes of the movie,  which showcase a world somewhat reminiscent of JG Ballard's "Low Flying Aircraft". For those of you who don't know who Ballard is, LOOK him UP and start reading!! In one of his stories Ballard describes a futuristic world where all fuel has run out and people live in isolated settlements and subsist on wind and solar energy. When one of the more enterprising young men manages to get to a dead city, he finds flowers, trees, grass growing all around the remnants of a metallic civilization. Junk yards coexist with poppy fields! 

The movie is based on the 1954 novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. 

Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the only survivor of a holocaust of sorts in I Am Legend. Well, the other living beings aren't exactly... living, in the strictest sense of the term. He lives in NYC with his dog Sam and together they survive and keep humanity alive - just man and his best friend. So what has gone wrong? Well, some cancer cure has gone horribly wrong and has infected all of humankind and turned everyone into a sub-human, blood-sucking creature. But some people are immune and Smith is one of them. 

I actually liked this movie for a number of reasons. First, for some reason I was totally convinced that everyone in the world HAD turned into a 'chomp, gulp, smack' creature. Second, there is Will Smith. This could easily be his best performance, except that he already gave one of those in The Pursuit of Happyness. He commands the screen, he appears cool-headed, neurotic and lost all at once. A man on the verge of losing his mind, but hanging on to sanity by one little thread.  Smith downplayed his emotional side and made up for it with a dry and dead sense of humor, which only highlighted his loneliness even more. 

Neville (Smith) is thrust into an imposed condition of solitude that he must break by reconstructing normalcy in his day to day routine. So everything from renting and returning movies from a DVD store, to bathing and feeding his dog and playing catch with her assumes a certain importance which only intensifies Neville's ironic life - he lives as if he is on an unprotected jungle safari in Africa, only he is in the heart of the civilized world, Manhattan. This dichotomy is drawn out very well in the film. The opposites - between rural life and the commanding heights of civilization, between junk and heaps of cars and the promise of new plant life, the almost magical nature of natural selection combined with the horror of regression into sub-humanity. 

The only problem is that this new sort of  "crunch-munch" or "chomp, gulp, smack" horror meets sci-fi genre is getting a bit tiresome. I have seen Planet Terror, Thirty Days of Night, Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil: Extinction, 28 Days/Weeks Later, etc  and they all tend to get a little repetitive - crunch-munch creatures attack, some people die, others hold on to humanity and as long as the good guys are around, humanity will bravely forge ahead. Yawn, give me something new to think about Hollywood!

This is where I Am Legend steps in. For one it doesn't end up being a brainless "crunch-munch" film like Thirty Days of Night (where these hapless people are trapped in some town in Alaska where the sun won't shine for thirty days and get eaten by these vampire-zombie creatures who just LOVE the darkness and think that's when they ought to feast). I Am Legend in fact goes beyond the usual genre and does adequately construct another apocalyptic vision of the future - a global pandemic which can wipe out just about everyone. As a thought experiment it does work pretty well. However, I do not think it would have worked this well if it weren't for the repetitive and striking images of a deserted Manhattan and of course, Smith's spot-on acting. In this genre you usually don't get any better than this. There isn't that much blood and gore in the movie at all, but the few times you do get to see it (like on the staircase, or dripping off a piece of glass) the emphasis is more on Neville's reaction to the blood, than the blood itself. 

Interestingly, we don't get to see too much of the creatures. Most of the movie dwells on Neville. This is about him dealing with an unhappy and most unfortunate situation of being the last human (supposedly) and losing faith. He says, conclusively, "there is no God, for  humanity just got wiped out- 6 billion people dead". Now this whole crisis of faith issue is thrust upon the audience rather suddenly - and much to my annoyance. It leads Neville to do the 'right thing' and keep hope alive for humanity. But at least it's not as ridiculous as the finale of Thirty Days of Night where the Sheriff played by Josh Hartnett injects creature blood into himself in order to be as strong as the zombie-vampires and defeat them before being 'dusted' by the first rays of dawn. 

Final Verdict: Fang-tastic!!

My Rating: 3 and a half noddies!