I love a good zombie movie. George Romero’s Dead series, 28 Weeks Later, Robert Rodriguez’ From Dusk Till Dawn, and a few others. Cousin to the vampire, “Aliens take over humans” (e.g., Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and apocalyptic plague genres, zombie stories come in two flavors: arch and knowing, and sombre, end-of-the-world horror flicks. Done well, they are gripping, engrossing, and thought provoking. Done poorly, they are worse than trash. Oddly, I Am Legend manages to end up somewhere in between.
I Am Legend, starring Will Smith and a horde of hairless, hyperkinetic amped up plague victims, is a crisp (90 minutes running time) clean (these zombies neither explode nor bleed, it seems) take off from Richard Matheson’s seminal 1954 novel. While retaining the Last Man on Earth scenario from the book, along with that last man’s attempts to find a cure for the afflicted, Smith’s Robert Neville is portrayed as a hero to the end, rather than a resigned victim of accidental evolution.
A noted virologist claims a cure for cancer. But her virus mutates rapidly, and turns humans (and dogs, but not deer or lions, apparently) into UV light-fearing thin-skinned creatures with insect-like agility and strength. Neville spends his days scavenging an abandoned Manhattan, ground zero for the plague, while he uses his own biological weapons lab (he was a colonel in the medical corps when the plague hit) to test rats and sometime humans with endless iterations of vaccines which don’t cure. A fastidious and organized man, he keeps his home a secret from the nightly marauders, but prepares for their eventual attack by fortifying his windows with very precisely machined steel shutters, and hidden explosives in the cars and park benches surrounding the arch in Washington Square.
Every day at noon, he waits at the dock where he saw his wife and daughter off the island just before it was quarantined in a vain attempt to halt the spread of disease. Hoping other immune survivors be out there, attracted by the constant radio message he broadcasts on “all AM frequencies”.
This movie IS engrossing, and scary. It had the double effect on me of keeping my interest going to view it all in one sitting, but to stop it for a bit during the tensest moments. However, on closer reflection, my scientific mind could not quite accept many of the seeming inconsistencies on display.
Did the government REALLY think that blowing up the bridges and blocking the tunnels would keep people on the island? As a triathlete, I know the swim across the Hudson, much less the East or Harlem Rivers, is no challenge. If the zombies were seething balls of rage, mindlessly rampaging, how could they organize an attack, especially one in which many would clearly be killed for the benefit of others? Or are they more ant-like than human-like now; Neville does call their grouping a “hive”. How was Neville able to produce the easily moved, yet impenetrable steel plates with which he covers his windows? If the zombies can easily climb Neville’s three story townhouse walls, how do the other sequestered humans hope to keep them out with stone works less than half that height? And if there are immune survivors out there, why bother with “saving” the zombies at all? Why not just wipe them out, and use any cure vaccine to prevent a new eruption?
Alas, while the film makers have taken full advantage of Smith’s extraordinary star power to evoke Neville’s inner thoughts and plans, they could not find a way to probe the deeper questions that a zombie/plague movie raises. What does it mean to be human; how would we fare if we had to re-organize ourselves from a smaller, threatened base; what is trust based on, when everything seems stacked against you?
This movie asks to be taken seriously. But while it provides a taut narrative flow, it failed to turn this viewer’s captured interest into any useful insights.
Summary: Worth watching, but don’t get fooled by the pompous tone. Will Smith is immersive, but he gets no help from anyone else, not even his dog.