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I Am Legend
USA 2007
produced by
Akiva Goldsman, David Heyman, James Lassiter, Neal H. Moritz, Bruce Berman (executive), Dana Goldberg (executive), Erwin Stoff (executive), Michael Tadross (executive) for Weed Road Pictures, Overbrook Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment, Heyday Films, Original Film, Village Roadshow/Warner Brothers
directed by Francis Lawrence
starring Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Willow Smith, Darrell Foster, April Grace, Dash Mihok, Joanna Numata, Samuel Glen, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Mark Protosevich, Akiva Goldsman, based on the screenplay The Omega Man by John William Corrington, Joyce Hooper Corrington, based on the novel by Richard Matheson, music by James Newton Howard
I Am Legend
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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Scientists have developed a new vaccine to cure all cancer - which it
did, but it also killed most of humankind, and turned most it didn't kill
into vampire like creatures. All but Robert Neville (Will Smith) it seems,
a super-scientist with his own state of the art lab in his basement, where
he's busy developing a cure for vampirism. And when he doesn't do that, he
roams Manhattan, talking to shopwindow mannequins and looking for DVDs to
watch, food to eat, his trusted dog Sam always by his side. But he always
has to be basck to his heavily bolted home well before sunset, as that's
when the vampires come out. Eventually, Neville thinks he has found a
cure ... and this is where it gets complicated, as now Neville needs a
test subject, in other words, a vampire. So he goes to find a vampire
hive, sets up a booby trap ... and ends up with a female vampire (Joanna
Nimata), nicely wrapped up. Unfortunately, this also brings him to the
attention of the vampire leader (Dash Mihok), who's not very fond of one
of his tribe being nicked - but as long as Neville doesn't come out at
night and the vampires don't know where he lives, Neville is rather safe.
Unfortunately, the tests on the female vampire don't bring the desired
results though ... One day, while roaming the city again, Neville walks
into a booby trap just like the one he has set up for the vampire woman,
and even if he can free himself before the vampires manage to make an
attack, Sam, trying to defend him from a pack of vampire dogs, finds her
death doing so. The next night, in a desparate attempt to avenge Sam,
Neville takes a spin in his car, luring out the vampire and trying to kill
as many as possible - but the sheer numbers of the vampires are too much
for just one man, and he's quickly overpowered - when saved by a woman,
Anna (Alice Braga), and her son Ethan (Charlie Tahan), who were just
passing through NYC to a human retreat in the mountains and caught his
distress call. With Anna and Ethan, Neville, who has lost his own wife
(Salli Richardson-Whitfield) and daughter (Willow Smith) in the early days
of the epidemic, finds hope again ... but then the vampires attack and
pretty much destroy his house, so that Neville, Anna and Ethan have to
retreat to the basement lab - where Neville finds out his anti-vampirism
vaccine has worked after all, and he hands the vaccine to Anna and Ethan
to bring it to the retreat while he dies a hero's death securing their
escape. Now taken by its own merits, I Am Legend is ok,
a rather run-of-the-mill Hollywood blockbuster that lacks depth or
hindsight but has Will Smith as a flawless hero. And apart from a few
confusing action sequences, the whole thing actually looks pretty good,
with Smith giving a strong central performance. What's annoying though
is how little trust the film has into its source material, which is pretty
much already made crystal clear in the first scene, a car chase, with
Smith hunting deer through NYC in a muscle car. The scene really has no
narrative value other than adding a bit of unneeded gloss to the story.
Also, it's really disappointing that all the subtleties of Richard
Matheson's novel, widely regarded as a masterpiece of dystopian
literature, have been taken out, as well as its moral implications: In the
book, the lead character was an everyman who kills vampires to survive,
and is seen as a mass murderer by those he preys on, the vampires, clearly
the majorityof the population - thus he has become a legend, in the
negative sense of the word. In the film, the lead is a notorious
do-gooder, a scientist with an incredibly toned body who hasn't given up
on humankind and tries to find a cure at any cost, even his life, while
the vampires are presented as featureless monsters, more beast than man,
whose deaths hardly register in the film, and yet Neville doesn't go on
missions to kill them for his own survival, just to get specimens to
experiment on for the good of all. Now granted, I'm a big fan of the book,
maybe if I hadn't read it, I would have liked the movie more, it's just
baffling how someone can make something this shallow out of something that
good ...
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