"I Am Legend" is a B-minus movie wearing A-plus clothing, as it takes
a story that has been presented three times before and tries to give it
added weight with slightly less than the framework it would require to
make it more potent. However, it does it with affecting style that makes
it quite creditable within its limitations. As an action/fantasy
offering, its low-key, yet has a respectable amount of class on tap.
Where author Richard Matheson first presented a vampire story in which
Robert Neville is the outcast intruder and the afflicted are the normal
community, the other versions sculpt him as a man striving to be the
savior of a distorted group which has lost its footing due to a man-made
biological disaster.
Where Vincent Price's classic take, "The Last Man On Earth," focuses
on the cost to the family unit, Charlton Heston's "The Omega Man," the
least effective variant, shifts it to an overall societal treatment and
makes a more prominent issue of the military's culpability in creating
the situation. The former essentially presents itself as stagecraft,
without a great deal of purely visual momentum; the latter features a
much larger action-movie component, with violence overshadowing the
story a bit, rather than enhancing it appreciably. (In this new version,
the connection between the virus's creator and the military is hazy. The
doctor thought she had cured cancer; the resulting mutation was far
worse. You only see Neville as a military scientist who falls into his
role. Thus, any condemnation of the armed services is sidestepped,
perhaps due to subtle respect for our current overseas entanglements.)
"I Am Legend" brings it closer to the focus of its namesake, as
Neville struggles to find a cure for the disease while trying to retain
his sanity under grinding circumstances. It respects the original
Neville's campaign to kill all the vampires he can reach, retreating to
his mirror-and-garlic-clove-draped fortress every night, sawing away at
new stakes. Smith does much the same, capturing infected people one by
one as he tests each new version of what he hopes will be a cure,
drawing metal shutters across all doors and windows at dusk. Great use
is made of dark and light, both visually and in the narrative itself. He
has to watch the clock, tracking down food and playing golf by day, then
retreating at dusk. His lab follows the same pattern, such that you get
a subtle feel for the march of time that is gradually causing him to
become tattered around the edges after three fruitless years. His
radical isolation is interesting when viewed from our own crowded
worlds, especially due to being well-juxtaposed with flashbacks, which
are filled with panicked masses you already know will end up dead or
zombified by the created plague. You are quite aware that the mad
evacuation of New York City is hopeless. Its a traditional device, but a
good one and well-applied here.
In Price's version, the afflicted retain some humanity until the
end-stage of the infection; in Heston's, they have gone mad as a group
and revel in their clanship, opposing the remnants of the system that
created them in a quasi-religious manner, their intellects distorted but
intact; in Smith's, they are unfortunately unaffecting as formerly
normal people. The use of computer rendering instead of live actors
gives the horde an unsympathetic feel, which is effective in keeping the
focus on Neville's plight, but which dampens the pathos one could
otherwise feel in total. However, if the victims had any traditional
sentience left, it would have slowed the narrative down and ill-served
the directorial tone. It weakens the story, but it makes technical
sense. Its not a bad choice as such, but it leaves a certain hole where
you might prefer better clarity and connection.
Will Smith is a prime example of the adage about a comic actor finding
it far easier to make the leap to drama than a dramatic actor would find
it to locate an inner clown. The scene in which he cradles his dying
family dog in his arms, the last surviving member of his immediate clan,
is possibly the best of the work. Smith manages to impart the layered
anguish of familial loss, extreme isolation and debilitating frustration
at the failure of the science to which he has devoted himself. When he
turns his eyes toward the ceiling, you can see part of him come
unraveled. Only the best actors can take you on that particular ride.
Though simple, that moment brings the rest of the story to a higher level.
A similar scene revolves around the sudden appearance of a woman and
her young son who were also immune to the virus. You can see Smith's
Neville trying to recover his social skills, inch by inch, suddenly no
longer alone. It is dramatically painful to watch, as he comes back to
himself under the wary eyes of the two refugees, but he carries the
process well, making you wince in sympathy.
The alternate ending where he survives is a reasonable offering, but
the theatrical version in which he does not has more resonance, even
though both could be seen as traditional in such fantasy fare, rather
than revelatory.
The story fails to engage the viewer as fully as it might have if given
more breadth, but it is also a success in delivering a good narrative
that allows you to ride along with the main character in a consistent
manner. One can feel what he feels and give a damn, which is always a
gold star in a film. Its a bit ironic to see that each film version
magnifies different aspects of the horrific premise without completely
ringing the bell, yet each makes those aspects work reasonably well.
Price's version ends on a sad note; the other two end with the promise
of redemption. It makes for an interesting cinematic triptych.
The added DVD features include four shorts spearheaded by Will's wife
Jada Pinkett-Smith and produced by DC Comics & their Vertigo imprint
staff. They are each done in a painted style that is not traditionally
animated frame by frame, but instead uses a beautiful multi-plane
shifting of set pieces with little inherent movement. Imagine the old
"Clutch Cargo" series made far more adult. That imposes a stylized
technique which lets each segment be lingered over visually. Think anime
filtered through a starker, more sweeping take on a Gaugin/Seurat-like
pointillism and you have a good image of the effect. They cover widely
varied locations such as Colorado and India, showing how the plague
affects the population, including a slight foray into the Indian caste
system. They make for an original addition far superior to the usual
fare and expand the range of the movie itself.
In the end, this version of "I Am Legend" isn't about manufactured
disease or monsters. Its about a man who chooses to put himself on the
line for Family, both intimate and societal; about sacrificing himself
for people who will never know that he did so; and about trying to make
the most of what he can do right in a bid to offset a catastrophic
miscalculation. On that level, as both a film and an understated morals
play about how to live decently within one's self while standing against
a wave of hard events, its a success.
For more, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/plotsummary
--
HellPope Huey
Pat Robertson should be made to wear
living wolverines as leg warmers.
"Oh Pryor, Pryor... Are you so warped, so blind
that you can't recognize a decent thing
when it happens to you?"
~ Sidney Greenstreet, "Between Two Worlds"
"Her husband was a crackhead
and her boyfriend's a serial killer.
Kinda hard not to take that personally."
~ "Dexter"
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