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I Am Legend
Love God, help children…
2007
Review: December 29, 2007
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Dash Mihok
If you want. Yes, definitely if you live in Manhattan.
THE SETUP:
Guy is last living survivor of viral apocalypse. Deals with vampire-zombies.
DISCUSSION:
Hey, I want to see a destroyed and deserted Manhattan as much as anyone else. So me and my friend eschewed some of the quality movies that are out there to take this in.
We open with Emma Thompson as a doctor who has invented a viral cure for cancer. It seems to work, but after a while it killed everyone and turned them into zombie-things. They killed the remaining survivors, except for Will Smith as Robert Neville and his trusty German shepherd sidekick. We go straight from Emma saying they’ve cured cancer to a shot of the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel all covered in water. Now, all mainstream New York movies must have a sequence that takes place in Times Square, so the people in the heartland can have something they recognize, so it’s not a surprise to find Neville there within three minutes of the movie’s opening. Where did all the antelope and lions come from, you might wonder? Did they escape from the zoo? Regardless, it was kind of fun to see the new TKTS booth, which is not there yet but scheduled to be completed in the next few years. Too bad they didn’t also think to fill in the High Line with a park, as should also be finished by the time the movie takes place.
Anyway, Neville goes out gathering supplies and hunting big game in the streets of Manhattan by day, and barricades himself in his apartment at night, when the zombies rampage. We hear them screaming outside, although we later find out that they don’t know where Neville lives. This is a big departure from the novel, in which the zombies spend every night trying to get in, with one major zombie taunting Neville throughout the night.
Anyway, so one day Neville’s dog chases an antelope into a dark warehouse, which is bad, because that’s where the zombies hang out during the day, working on their stamp collections and doing needlework. This whole introduction to the zombies is good and creepy, with Neville and his pooch barely escaping. One major zombie, speechless here, gets a good look at him and seems pretty peeved. Spread out are various flashbacks of Neville and his wife and child trying to flee Manhattan before it is cut off.
SPOILERS > > >
One day Neville sees that one of the mannequins he has arranged down in Tower Records on lower Broadway is now by Grand Central, and he wigs. He steps in a puddle and finds himself hanging upside-down in a trap! This is good, because it’s the same kind of trap Neville uses to capture zombies for his research [he’s conducting experiments to find a cure in his spare time—good thing he just HAPPENS to be a molecular biologist instead of a busboy or marketing consultant! He hangs there until it’s almost sundown, at which point the zombies will be able to come out and munch him [or whatever they want to do, we’re never quite sure] to their heart’s content. He cuts himself down—and I appreciated that he couldn’t walk after getting a knife through the leg, rather than treating it as a minor scratch—and the zombie dogs are released after him. They are held briefly at bay by a narrow sliver of sunlight, which is a nice touch. Eventually Neville gets free, but his sweet little doggie gets bitten. I was bummed we didn’t get to see him rushing home in his car as zombies start streaming out of the buildings, as happened in the novel, but alas. Anyway, the dog doesn’t make it.
Neville goes to the South Street Seaport [tourist destination #2—why didn’t he tour Rockefeller Center?] for a revenge killing against the vampire hordes, but they get the better of him. It looks like curtains for our trusty hero, but no! He is suddenly rescued by a mysterious stranger! And if you think that one shot of the crucifix hanging from her rear-view mirror signifies something, you’d be right!
She is Anna and her little son Ethan. They want to go to a colony of survivors in, of course, Vermont, but Neville doesn’t believe it exists. Apparently I was lucky enough to time my bathroom break to miss the discussion about how music can cure racism, although I did catch the tail end of the seemingly-mandatory theological argument.
Blah, blah, so the zombies have followed Neville and company home and, after a number of explosions, get into his house and trap them all in the lab. Miracle of miracles, his latest serum somehow worked! Neville sees that the zombie is cracking the glass partition in a butterfly pattern, then sees the butterfly tattoo on Anna’s neck and suddenly he knows—it IS all God’s plan! So he gives Anna a vial of the cure as a parting gift for being such a great contestant, locks them in a compartment [no word on how they’ll be able to get out] and blows up the lab and himself. We are meant not to reflect on how the superheated environment would cook them in their hiding place while also sucking all of the oxygen out of the chamber. No problem!
Anna and her son make it to the Vermont compound in their sparkling-clean SUV, and it’s all better again! Yay!
< < < SPOILERS END
Once it’s over, it just seems like there was almost nothing to it. It develops a bunch of interesting situations in the first half—I was especially intrigued by the idea of the zombies getting smart and setting traps for him—but this is all abandoned for the rather perfunctory and resonance-free conclusion. The ending also suffers from the “glimmer of hope” syndrome in movies, where you feel like “Well it all worked out okay, so what was the big deal?” Sure 99.95% percent of humanity was wiped out, but you have to take the bitter with the sweet and you know, things were getting a little crowded around here anyway.
The first half of the film is packed with product placements. Ford IS the official auto manufacturer of the death of humanity, by the way. It’s a little odd to think that companies would want to position their products as awesome luxury items, even in event of major population loss. Before the movie we saw a trailer by the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, two movies in which Manhattan was destroyed, and Cloverfield, promising us additional Manhattan-is-destroyed sweet-ass fun. I couldn’t help but imagine the last surviving humans, 100 years from now, after global warming and any number of other impending catastrophes have reduced humanity to a few hordes of survivors, finding all these DVDs and wondering about how, as we neared catastrophe, we created all these vivid, realistic entertainments about how very awesome that catastrophe might be.
So ultimately I can’t help but be disappointed that this movie is so completely inconsequential. It just evaporates in your head the second the credits roll, leaving not a single idea. Think how resonant the view of the bleak future world of Children of Men or even Idiotocracy was. The plot left your mind, but the haunting vision of how society had broken down didn’t. Some of the images in the first half here are compelling, but we spend little time reflecting on what it all means and soon turn to zombie-escape action. It’s another one of those “I can’t believe so many resources were devoted to creating something so inconsequential” moments. When I mentioned this to my movie companion he said “Yeah, I don’t think they want ideas in a Will Smith movie. Other than ‘love God’ or ‘help children,’ ideas would only distract.”
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you have time to kill.
