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I Am Legend
Beware Emma Thompson bearing gifts. In the opening minutes of I Am Legend our uncredited Em is interviewed on a US TV news show (you would think her news would merit a press conference). She can barely suppress a smug delight. You see, she has reversed the effects of the common measles virus and transformed it into a cure for cancer. Cut to three years later. New York City is a wasteland. Cancer may be over, but the human race has gone right along with it. End of story, right? Well, not quite. Fortunately the legendary Will Smith is still alive and kicking, speeding down Fifth Avenue in a red and white GTO, his trusty German Shepherd Sam riding shotgun. Smith, aka Robert Neville, has the run of the city: he can practice his golf swing from the wing of a jetfighter on an aircraft carrier in the bay. He can borrow any DVD he chooses, and never return it. He's evidently raided the Museum of Modern Art to decorate his Washington Square townhouse. Things are not so rosy come nightfall. The shutters come down, the doors are bolted, and the shrieking starts. Seems that while Neville was among the tiny minority immune to the virus when it went airborne, but many others survived, after a fashion, mutating into rabid, light-sensitive flesh eaters with no discernible table manners. This is more or less how The Omega Man began, 35 years ago. (Both are based on Richard Matheson's novel.) Back then it was Charlton Heston, who made a habit of being the last man standing in films like this and Planet of the Apes. Heston hung out in Los Angeles, not the Big Apple, ran Woodstock in an abandoned cinema (Smith knows the DVD of Shrek by heart) and had an amusing penchant for slipping on a smoking jacket to drink brandy and play chess against a bust. Both men are scientists, but only Heston makes the effort to don his white coat to conduct experiments.
There are more significant differences. Heston was engaged in a physical and philosophical war with the contaminated - he called them "Krugs" - who weren't just after his flesh, they reviled the technological world he represented. These Luddites (led by Anthony Zerbe) were albinos who wore the hooded cowls of medieval monks - or the KKK. Intriguingly, many of them are (or were) black. When Heston meets another survivor like himself, she's also African-American. Unlike him, she's not immune, which leads to further disaster. That racial subtext is reversed here, but Smith's Neville is also a different kind of man, more interested in finding a cure to reverse the process ("I can fix this"), whereas trigger-happy Chuck is obsessed with finding the Krugs' lair to exterminate them. But Smith's faith in science is not enough to sustain him. When Sam gets bit, his best friend loses it. Although Warner Bros has been talking about this remake at least since the early 90s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to do it, it's also been reported that it went into production without a finished script. The delay has cost the film some of its thunder: the "dark seekers" are not much different from Danny Boyle's rabid zombies. In fact, if they called it "2.8 Years Later" this could pass as the third installment in that series with very little tweaking. Which is not to undersell the special frisson of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge ripped in half, or a lion stalking deer in the savannah formerly known as Times Square.
Constantine director Francis Lawrence mostly makes a virtue of the lean script, getting in and out quick, suppressing those inevitable nagging questions (are cockroaches immune?). The first hour is tense and scary. It's only late in the day - after the movie gets religion - that things fall apart. The denouement is rushed and underwritten, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In any case this movie was not shaping up to be a classic. All the same, it does represent a significant improvement on The Omega Man. I liked the way the film uses light as a central element in the story, and DP Andrew Lesnie (The Lord Of The Rings) gives the movie a natural, realistic feel. So often sci-fi is over-produced, but I Am Legend doesn't look like a CGI extravaganza, it looks like edgy suspense movie shot on the fly in New York City after the fall. Tom Charity 
More information about I Am Legend » Critics' Reviews
Throwing Will Smiths star power and shed loads of CGI at a remake of the 1971 sci-fi movie The Omega Man makes... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
Nigel Floyd, Time Out