“I Am Legend” is a remake of “The Last Man on Earth” with dunno who and “The Omega Man”, with Charlton Heston (“Guns don’t kill people… Apes with guns kill people”). It is also based on the book “I Am Legend”, but according to what I’ve read, it’s very loosely based.
The story begins in 2009 when a virus outbreak wipes out all of humanity, except for Will Smith and a dog named Samantha. Smith is Robert Neville (not a name for a black man), a military scientist who is the perfect guy for the job, since he’s got some kick-ass training in his sleeve and a PhD to boot. Neville spends his days gathering food, getting crazy in loneliness and looking for other survivors, something that has yielded no results in the last three years. At night he hides out from the Dark Seekers, other survivors of the outbreak who are now mutated into crappy CG vampire-like monsters, and tries to find a cure for these mutations by researching with his own blood (he IS immune).
What starts out as the coolest story EVER soon turns into rubbish when you clearly see how hard it is to maintain this story interesting. 80% of the script is awesome, with Neville trying to keep it cool in his shitty situation and finding something interesting every ten minutes or so to do. The problem is when the director likes this story too much and starts extending it to the point where there just isn’t anything interesting to show anymore. How many times do we have to see the guy waking up and listening to Bob Marley over, and over, and over, and over again before they realize that WE JUST DON’T CARE, GIVE US SOME FUCKING MONSTERS! And when they do, it gets worse, because the monsters just plain suck. What probably brought this film down for me (aside from Alice Braga’s acting in it) was the fact that the CGI monsters are so clearly fake that they don’t scare a 12 year old girl. Not only that, they try to make you identify an Alpha Male monster, but they all look alike, so you don’t care.
The depiction of a post-apocalyptic New York, completely empty, is just amazing, which then makes me wonder: By demonstrating such high production values and completely cleaning up the Big Apple’s streets, couldn’t they have worked on cooler, scarier, more disgusting monsters? What happened to make-up? George Romero’s monsters creep me out more that those things.
Now, try to understand this: “I Am Legend” isn’t all bad. For one thing, the WHAT IF factor of our fooling around with genetic science made me scratch my head after the movie for awhile. The coolness of New York being wiped out by a plague ups the COOL FACTOR by a few marks. The photography is brilliant, allowing for us to check out every detail of the city, now being taken back by nature. The problem (and this is something that just pisses me off) is when a guy like Francis Lawrence (he made “Constantine”, for God’s sakes… THAT was cool) is left with such an awesome premise to deal with and turns it into something less than satisfactory. This movie had potential, and it just didn’t deliver. THAT’S why it deserves a 5.
If someone disagrees, stop being a bitch and COMMENT.
[starreviewmulti id=1]
Popularity: 3%
