Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I Am Legend (2007)



Or “I Am Mildly Amused but Not Blown Away”

Granted, I knew the premise of I Am Legend before watching it, having seen the 1964 version called The Last Man On Earth, starring Vincent Price, so, some could argue that , with that foreknowledge, I couldn’t expect to be surprised by much. And I’ll give you that much. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that I am the type of person who you can lay out the entire plot of a movie to & (with some exceptions) I can still thoroughly enjoy the movie. (This is in large part due to the fact that I’ll probably not see the movie for another year or two, but still…) Keeping that in mind, the movie still only managed to merely leave me with a “Meh.”

*OBLIGATORY SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE FEW PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO HAVEN’T SEEN THIS OR THE MOVIE IT MOST CLOSELY RESEMBLES YET*

The good about the movie? Well, Will Smith was completely adequate as the lead (& primary, for most of the film’s running time) character, Robert Neville, a military scientist trying to find a cure for a virus that turned most of the planet’s populace into raging, cannibalistic albinos (as opposed to straight up, garlic fearin’ vampires in The Last Man On Earth). Neville holds out some hope that there may be someone else out there, broadcasting a radio message calling on anyone out there to contact him. He’s pretty persistent, too, as it’s established that it’s been about three years since the outbreak.

Interspersed throughout are flashbacks to the evacuation of Manhattan, with Neville trying to get his family out to safety. This is done to provide us with a bit of pathos, eventually showing us how Neville lost his wife & daughter, but, more importantly, to show us how he acquired Samantha, his dog & the only other entity he’s had contact with for the past three years that hasn’t tried to eat him. That is, at least, until she’s infected & he’s forced to put her down (hey, I warned you about spoilers).

Later, while attempting suicide via cannibal albino, Neville is rescued by another woman who, like he, is immune to the virus. She takes him back to his place, but, in doing so, inadvertently leaves a trail for the albinos to follow. This leads to the climactic showdown between Neville & the “alpha male” cannibal & ends with the release of a nuclear grenade. Of course, not before Neville finally finds the right vaccination that’ll turn the albinos back into normal people & handing it off to Anna, the woman who saved him the night before & thus saving the world. Convenient timing, no?

Credit where credit’s due: at least the movie didn’t end with Neville making his way out with Anna, off to greener pastures & happy sunsets.

All in all, not a bad movie. Certainly not The Ninth Gate bad.

So, why the “meh,” you ask?

I think a lot of my indifference toward the movie stems from the differences between this & Last Man. I’ve never read the original source material, so I can’t make any comparisons in that respect. The differences between the two movies though (there’s a third, for those who don’t know - The Omega Man - that I’d seen years ago & can’t remember a lot about), while not real big deals, were enough to be a bit of a distraction for me. First of all, in the first movie, the virus isn’t some cure for cancer. In fact, I don’t remember there being much background to it, other than that it originated in Europe & then made its way across the pond.

Second, Neville I was a scientist (& his name was Robert Morgan, but "Neville I" will suffice for this review), not the military scientist that Neville II is, so it makes his survival more of a “learned along the way” kind of thing, as opposed to Neville II’s assumed military training. (In fact, one of the thoughts that kept running through my head was where Neville II found, & how did he install, all of the sliding armored doors & window shutters. In one scene, you can tell that the door is one of those steel storefront doors, but, as for the rest, I just had to wonder.)

Thirdly, the Anna analogue (Anna-logue?) from Last Man was actually one of the vampires who lived in a colony where they’d found a treatment, though not a cure, for the virus. It turns out that Neville I had been going about killing off these semi-cured people, not knowing that they were semi-cured, thus making him a “Legend,” a man both feared & hated. In the current movie, Anna (&, I neglected, a young boy named Ethan, whom I neglected to mention, not as an omission, but, rather, because he plays no part other than to have a cute little kid to put in danger & to give Neville II a chance recite some loosely related lines from Shrek; Samantha the dog had more lines & screen presence than this kid) is a Red Cross worker who escaped a medical ship & followed Neville II’s radio signal in an effort to find him. She & Ethan prove to also be immune to the virus.

This leads us to my fourth point, that of the mutants. In Last Man, they were, for all intents & purposes, vampires: they shunned sunlight, severe garlic allergies & didn’t like mirrors (not really a vampire thing, but we’ll just go along with it). They also retained some intelligence & memories, as the main ghoul is Neville I’s former lab partner & remembers Neville I, goading him to open the door & let them in. The mutants in Legend have the sunlight shunning bit, but that’s it. They’re more like the rage zombies is 28 Days Later than vampires. They have no memory of who they were, don’t talk, but, rather, scream & are superpowered. They do, we find out, have the capacity to learn, but it’s mainly just a plot contrivance. Also, with the exception of a couple jumper scenes, they weren’t all that scary; maybe it’s exposure to too many poorly realized CGI monsters in Sci-Fi Channel movies, but, the CGI in this movie just wasn’t all that convincing. I know they were supposed to be mutated, but they just never seemed to move or react to their surroundings naturally, a problem all too common with CGI creatures.

Those are just the big points. There are other little ones (like Neville II’s family dying in a retarded helicopter accident as opposed to Neville I’s family contracting the virus, which, to me, would make things much more personal; I guess they didn’t want us to think about how Neville II’s wife & daughter would’ve been dispatched once the craving for human flesh kicked in), but, nothing too major.

“So,” you may be asking (or maybe not), “was there anything that you liked about the movie?” To which I answer, “Yes, it had a few redeeming qualities.” One is Will Smith. I’ll admit, that, while I do like him enough, his swaggering and “Bad Boys” jibba jabba wears a little thin after awhile. In Legend, though, it was kept to a very bare minimum. While I didn’t buy for a moment that he was a Colonel in the Army (I’ve never seen a Colonel under fifty), the parts showing him just trying to survive from day to day were quite good. The scene after he has to put Samantha down, where he begs a mannequin to simply say hello to him was actually a bit moving. Even the “Shrek” scene was good, as was his reaction to being around people again after Anna & Ethan move into his home were well done.

While the movie ended on a much more hopeful note than Last Man or the source book (I do know how that ends), it was still a better ending than I anticipated, thankfully, nuclear grenade notwithstanding. Would I recommend renting it? Yeah, I would. I can think of far worse ways to kill a hundred minutes.

I Am Legend:

3 out of 5 Screaming Albino Cannibals

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