I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)
Many people have seen this film before me. They have also read Richard Matheson's source and seen
The Last Man on Earth and
The Omega Man. Many have also made a few comments about this specific movie, and I want to try to respond to these to the best of my ability.
The two original film versions of Matheson's
I Am Legend suffered from extreme low-budgets. That's what killed both of them for me. Even though I have read plenty of Matheson, I somehow missed this story, and the main reason is that I saw those crapola movies first. Now, maybe I'm wrong, and if I had read the story first, I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. I don't have to read something to know that what I saw was substandard.
Fast forward to 2007. Well, I ignored 2007, but in 2008,
I Am Legend is released on DVD. To me, it's obviously the best film based on the source. Maybe it has nothing to do with the source, but I'm reviewing movies, not literature. The first thing which stands out about this movie is that Will Smith probably gives the best performance of his career. Straight on throughout, he is totally captivating. Yoda liked the first third, and I agree with him, but the scenes where Smith shines are those in the middle section, involving his dog and his "girlfriend" in the video store. Maybe, just maybe, Will Smith used some glycerine in those scenes, but my personal opinion is that was acting, and damn fine acting at that.
I will try to address a few points made earlier in this thread. As far as the religious/spiritual imagery, to me, they all made sense. The use of the Christian motifs is straight out of Shyamalan, and thus, I'm especially confused why members of this site would think that it's somehow misplaced or unexplained. Neville tries to save his family, but one of the last things his daughter says to him is to look at her butterfly. This means nothing to him at the time, but later, when he's saved by a woman, driving a car with a cross swinging from her rear view mirror, he asks this woman why she came to him and how she knows there is a safe place (which she calls "Bethel", a safe place, which literally means "House of God" and represents a sacred town north of Jerusalem). The woman tells him that God told her, and that this Bethel is in Vermont. It's at this point that Neville says, "There is no God! All the people we have ever known arer dead,
dead, DEAD!!. It's only in the film's finale where Neville sees another butterfly and recalls what it is that God is expecting from him. God doesn't need him to save mankind, even though that is obviously Neville's desire. He only needs him to get the message AND the cure OUT of Ground Zero. In case anyone doesn't understand, it's very easy to drive out of NYC (especially with NO traffic) in the morning and reach Vermont before the sun sets. I spent my honeymoon traveling around New England, from NYC to Niagara Falls to New England and back again.
My bottom line is that if you don't expect this movie to rock your socks or display Matheson's story, you should like it OK, or at least cut it some slack. Movies are movies. They are larger than life. That's why people's heads are 15 feet tall on the big screen. I can understand if you like your movies more realistic or "smaller", but that sort of defeats the purpose of the "Big Screen" in the first place. Happy Movie Watching, everybody!
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