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Genre
End-of-the-World
Length
101 minutes
Director
Francis Lawrence
Major Stars
Will Smith
Alice Braga
Charlie Tahan
MPAA Rating
PG-13
Year Released
2007
Review Posted on
11/4/2008
Rating
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Review by Troy Larson
Any movie where New York City is one huge ghost town is alright with me. However, I Am Legend feels like a re-write too many on a concept that’s nearly overdone at present–the concept that thinking, feeling humans have disappeared and the world is populated by mindless, blood-thirsty beasts, devoid of emotion and feeling.
Will Smith stars as Robert Neville, the last known survivor of a plague that began as a viral cure for cancer. In 2009, the plague nearly wipes out the human race. Neville is left as the lone remaining human in New York City, the rest of the inhabitants having been transformed into ‘zompires’ by the virus. OK, they’re not really called ‘zompires’ but they might as well be. I Am Legend’s screenplay was co-written by co-producer Akiva Goldsman–producer of such winners as Deep Blue Sea, Starsky and Hutch, and Poseidon. Goldsman’s screenplay was in turn based on a screenplay by John William Corrington for 1971’s Omega Man starring Charleton Heston, which was in turn based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Why the studio would decide to bring a classic science fiction novel to the big screen by borrowing from a badly-done version of the story from the seventies is beyond me. Perhaps it’s Goldsman’s penchant for lame remakes. Note to Goldsman: you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and ruining what they’ve achieved.
Couple the remake-prone producer Goldsman with a director [Francis Lawrence] whose only credits are music videos, and you’ve invited disaster. I look forward to the day when movie studios understand that classic science fiction stories need to be produced and directed by auteurs with singular uncompromised vision, not thrown together from fragments of screenplays and helmed by whomever happens to be free to direct/produce at the moment that fits the studio’s schedule. It’s about more than money.
Robert Neville spends his days in New York City hunting for food and having conversation with his only friend… his dog. He maintains a sense of normalcy by watching DVDs–one at a time–which he faithfully retrieves from a video store each day, talking to the mannequins he’s arranged in the store as if they were real humans. He has recorded a message which is repeatedly broadcast on the radio–a plea for anyone who hears it to meet him on the pier at midday. His wait for a response stretches into its third year, and Neville keeps busy by continuing his work as a biologist in his basement lab, working on a cure for the virus which has turned nearly six billion people into “darkseekers”–blood thirsty mutants with compulsively violent urges. They are powerfully allergic to light and stay inside in the day, coming out at night to feed on blood.
The problem with movies like I Am Legend is, there is only one reasonable outcome… the lone survivor of the apocalypse will eventually discover he’s not alone. Knowing that in advance, it can get pretty frustrating waiting for the other humans to show up when the story moves at a snail’s pace like this one does.
There are lots of great special effects, and the city of New York makes a great character, even when it’s empty, but the story just didn’t hook me. The computer-animated nature of the “darkseekers” gives a sense of artificiality to villains who would have been far scarier had they been more human. Neville’s flashbacks to his prior life are annoying as well. The whole movie I kept thinking they would have been better-served to have just told the flashback part of the story first, then progress to the post-apocalypse part of the story in linear fashion instead of flashing back and forth the whole time.
In the end, making this bad adaptation of Richard Matheson’s story only ensured one thing–that this story will eventually be adapted again. Let’s hope they get it right next time.
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