Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/15/07
If you have a festering feeling
that things aren't going so well in the world, Hollywood agrees with you.
Over the last year, we've witnessed some of the most harrowing apocalyptic
visions ever committed to film, led by Children
of Men and The Mist. Add to that list
the opening hour of I Am Legend, the third filming of Richard Matheson's
1954 novel (but the first to go by its' name: the 1964 version was
called The Last Man on Earth, followed in 1971 by The Omega Man).
What follows cannot live up to the sensational cloak of despair that opening
throws over its' future world, but it, and another top-shelf performance
by Will Smith, are more than reason enough to see this flawed but gripping
thriller.
The film opens with a morning
news show interviewing Dr. Krippen (an uncredited Emma Thompson, setting
just the right tone of well-meaning, self-assured naiveté), whose
team has engineered a measles virus to instead attack cancer. The
result: an honest-to-God, 100% effective cure for The Big C.
Flash forward three years to a deserted New York City being reclaimed by
plants and wild animals. Entire buildings are wrapped in plastic
as part of a failed quarantine, and a lone human being, Dr. Robert Neville
(Will Smith) prowls the streets with his dog, Sam. Neville sticks
to a relentless daily routine: hunting and gathering, “social” interaction
with a video store full of mannequins he's set up to talk to, a daily visit
to the pier an endlessly repeating radio transmission encourages any other
survivor to meet him at, and experiments to cure The Krippen Virus in his
basement lab. You see, as flashbacks, random newspaper clippings
and old newscasts gradually reveal, the wonderful cancer-curing virus soon
began to mutate and then became airborne, killing 90% of the world's population
and turning all but a few of the survivors into vicious, rabid zombies.
These creatures cannot endure sunlight, and Dr. Neville locks down his
apartment each night to ensure they cannot find or attack him. But
the creatures are getting smarter, and one in particular (Dash Milhok)
has taken special notice of him. Is Neville truly the Last Man on
Earth? And can he find a way to reverse the greatest medical advance
in history before its' victims make him its' final casualty?
For that one precious hour,
I Am Legend writes the book on apocalyptic despair: Neville
hasn't seen another person in a thousand days, and the weight of his loneliness,
the relentless struggle to survive and the futility of his experiments
has begun to make him quite mad. Sure, he talks to his dog like a
person, but plenty of people do that: it's the setup at the video
store that's really telling. Should he say “Hi” to that cute mannequin
in the black coat? What would they talk about? It's a thrilling
one-man show and one of Smith's best performances, using his trademark
self-deprecating confidence as a cover for heartbreaking loneliness.
Watch him in the movie's first big action sequence, wandering through a
dark building into which Sam has run off. It's a sensationally scary
sequence, but no one in the audience could be more frightened than Neville
himself: Smith scrunches himself up, whispers in a shaking voice
and holds his head tight to his shoulders like a fearful child, but he
soldiers on because he NEEDS that dog. Without his great work, the
movie would surely descend into tedious boredom, and it's hard to believe
Arnold Schwarzenegger could have pulled it off had an earlier attempt to
film a version of this script occurred as scheduled in 1998.
We've seen a lot of abandoned
New York Cities over the years in the movies, but there's never been a
better one than I Am Legend's. There is, of course, an inherent
fascination to the notion of our most bustling metropolis abandoned and
dead, and the filmmakers have done a remarkable job of allowing the empty
city to go to seed. It's the little details that count, like the
skyscrapers covered in plastic, the Quarantine billboards mixed in with
the ones advertising Broadway shows, and the discarded newspaper clippings
we see in the street and the abandoned homes where Neville forages for
supplies. I loved those clippings, so randomly scattered in the periphery
of shots yet chock-full of important information. I suspect the movie's
fans will be freeze-framing the hell out of them when the DVD comes out.
The whole Krippen Virus scenario is endlessly creepy: had the plague
been the result of bio-weapons or some other nastiness, it would have been
bad, but not unexpected. The fact that it was born of an honest desire
to save millions of lives makes it scary as hell. Less successful
at establishing the sense of apocalyptic doom are flashback sequences to
the evacuation of NYC: while they're certainly full of sound and
fury, a little Neville family melodrama seems pretty insignificant in the
face of the death of the entire human race.
Another thing I thought was
really interesting is the role movies, TV and music play in Neville's struggle
to remain sane. Let's face it, we spend an awful lot of time alone
at home, in cars, in office cubicles, and we've become more and more reliant
on the media to keep us company in those moments. It's pretty unique
to see a movie that understands the role of all that artistic noise in
keeping silence at bay, particularly since most of Hollywood insists they
don't even own a TV set.
Alas, the good bad times
don't last forever. You may have noticed that there are actors other
than Will Smith on that credit list, and I shouldn't really say any more
without a big ol'
*************************SPOILER
WARNING************************
Because at about the 2/3
mark, two more survivors emerge; saintly Anna (Alice Braga) and her mostly
silent son Ethan (Charlie Tahan). It's here that the intense, heartbreaking
energy of the movie begins to dissipate, because while Neville is an awesome,
deeply human character rendered in a great performance, Anna is the unholy
Hollywood trinity of A Woman, A Mother, and Hispanic, which seems to mean
she cannot be allowed to be the least bit interesting. While the
plague and its' consequences have driven Neville to the brink of madness,
they haven't even inconvenienced Anna. Instead, she seems to have
wandered in from the Forrest Whittaker “Please Silence Your Cell Phones”
ad that drove me crazy this summer, complete with her belief that if we
just listen closely, we'll hear God telling us His plan. Now, I've
got no problem with introducing religion and predestination into this sort
of apocalyptic sci-fi: look how brilliantly M. Night Shayamalan did
it in Signs. But it had the courage of its' convictions from
beginning to end, while those elements in I Am Legend seem to have
wandered in late in a movie that simply does not occupy that sort of metaphysical
universe. Doesn't Neville have to reject, or at least acknowledge
God at some time in the first hour if He's to play such an important role
in the finale? That finale, while certainly exciting, isn't paced
quite right: Neville seems to decide on his ultimate fate a bit hastily,
albeit under some pretty heavy duress. And I didn't like the closing
moments at all, shot in an entirely different style and ridiculously upbeat,
they seem to demand a 20-year campaign for their removal just like the
similar closing moments of the original Blade
Runner cut.
***********************END
OF SPOILERS************************
But even though the wheels
wobble, they don't entirely come off, and what has come before is simply
too good to allow the ending to spoil it. This is the second feature
for director Francis Lawrence, and the first (Constantine) took
a very similar path from promising, dark start and great performances to
disappointing climactic implosion. It's hard to say who to praise
and who to damn for the screenplay's strengths and weaknesses because it's
got an awful lot of fathers: Matheson's novel, the 1971 Omega
Man screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce Hopper Corrington,
the 1998 screenplay by Mark Protosevich, and finally this film's shooting
script by Akiva Goldsman. For whatever it's worth, the film contains
many of the best and worst traits of Goldsman's other work (intense psychological
depth and lazy, cut-to-the-chase plotting), and fails to contain The
Omega Man's greatest contribution to the English language (Matthias:
“Now we must build.” Neville: “Build coffins, that's all you'll
need.”).
When it works, I Am Legend
is a brilliant meditation on isolation, our endless need for structure
and purpose, and the dangers of Playing God (this could, in its' own quiet
way, be the most anti-science movie I've ever seen). When it doesn't
work, well, you can always think back on the times when it was working.
And how you might want to invest in one of those SARS masks... |
