Reel Politique: Movie Review, I Am Legend
I Am Legend is a bifurcated film. The first half is moderately interesting; the second half deadly dull. The first half follows one Robert Neville (Will Smith), a military scientist alone in Manhattan after it has been abandoned to a rampaging virus; Neville is immune. He believes he may be the last man on earth (the title of a better adaptation of the 1954 Richard Matheson novel), but sends out radio transmissions to whomever can hear. By day the city is “normal.” It is isolated, overgrown, and former zoo animals and invading deer roam. Neville spends his days amusing himself with his German Shepherd Samantha (if you have pet issues, don’t see this film). At night, vampiric zombies, the resultant effects of the infection (which was caused by a vaccine intended to cure cancer), come out in search of whatever remaining human beings are up for grabs.
For a smart guy Neville occasionally acts dumb, though for the benefit of advancing the plot — or rather filling it with narrative. He keeps getting nearly caught by the vampires who lay traps during the day, or into whose lair he wanders, like a teenage girl in a Scream sequel.
Eventually a woman and child appear; he takes them in; Neville discovers a cure for the disease; the vampires (apparently) figure out where Neville lives and mount a full-on attack one night (easily breaching his barricades) and in the last minutes Neville makes a grand sacrifice, after which the woman finds an enclave of human survivors, within whose community Neville becomes “legend.”
The first half of the film lacks tension or creepiness; the second simply lacks unpredictable incident. Hardly anything happens there, really. But just as predictable as the second half of the film is, so is the complaint that the film is rashly inferior to its source novel. The Vincent Price thriller, The Last Man on Earth, which was shot in Italy, released in 1964 (in black and white), and was a tremendous influence on Night of the Living Dead, is the most accurate adaptation of the novel, which has interesting nuances and cultural criticism (Matheson wrote the adaptation but later had his name removed). For example, in the book there are vampires but also later hybrid vampires that are more human-like. To them, Neville is a villain, because when he goes out by day to stake and behead vampires he doesn’t distinguish — he doesn’t know to distinguish — between the living dead and the living near-dead. Thus Neville becomes to the hybrids what legendary monsters and ghouls are to us.
The Last Man on Earth is in the public domain and easily downloadable. I strongly recommend that potential viewers of the tedious I Am Legend do that instead.