I Am Legend (2007)

A couple of posts ago I had a mild, vaguely pissy attack where I wrote that respect for the Richard Matheson novel would bar me from catching the Will Smithing of I Am Legend. I wrote that there was no way that a 200 million dollar holiday movie would maintain the ending (which explains the title I might add) and that this is one Will Smith sci-fi de-balling that I could afford to miss.

So here we are. Now you know just how unwavering your principled, self-righteous writer can actually be. Cut to three or four days later and I’m writing a post of what appears to be an overwhelmingly popular film. And it’s going to be a fairly positive post at that.

Make no mistake. Director Francis Lawrence and writers Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich and whoever else worked on I Am Legend, have, as anyone could have predicted, chucked the majority of moral ambiguity that makes the novel stick, hurt and move. The novel is about the nature of evil being a matter of perception, being determined by the majority, and the lead character evolves into something that it would have been extremely disconcerting for fans to see Will Smith play. The protagonist, Robert Neville, became the menace, the elusive thing that now haunted a different world. He became something that would probably be used to scare children a couple of hundred years down the road. All from just a garden variety human.

Here’ the rub. Now having seen the film, I think Will Smith could have pulled it off. No, I don’t believe him as an average man (to be fair, the film doesn’t try, he’s some sort of huge military crusader scientist), and some of his emotional marks feel a little pat, but he’s immensely likable and that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Smith’s star wattage could have been used to add just another layer of subversiveness to the material that would have made the ending that much tougher to shake. Will Smith, one of America’s biggest stars, slowly evolving into the next society’s boogeyman. Could have been something.

But this thing is expensive, and it’s Christmas, and we have cookies and happy meals to sell. We want our evil to be rote and one sided and comfortably tucked under the carpet by the time we reach the end credits. Smith’s sanity here is never tested too hard. He’s a very decent, Good Guy, and he wants to cure the new society more than kill it to ensure his own survival. His growing resemblance to the enemy is never under examination and a pivotal betrayal at the end of the book has been excised. This is, basically, a more mature variation of the same cocksure Will Smith that kicked E.T’s ass about ten years ago.

All that said, Francis Lawrence has made a huge leap as a director from the fussy, labored Constantine. The future New York City of I Am Legend is a beautiful, haunting creation, and Lawrence seems to know what he has with it. Lawrence doesn’t cut away or play around or dress things up with a bunch of camera convolutions, he instead plays with US or, more precisely, plays the ironically open spaces of the film against our expectations of the more traditionally cramped horror picture. Lawrence drops us head first in the desolation of the environment, and we feel for the Smith character that much more. This is the happiest surprise of the new I Am Legend, it most assuredly does not back down from the melancholia of the material. With the exception of his family dog and a few dummies he converses with in a hopeful attempt to preserve his sanity, Will Smith is alone, alone, alone. There are no “Ahh, Hell No!” appeals to our comfort here.

The third act is a problem, and the portion of the film that’s most in line with the fears I had going in. It’s dull and conventional, and relies too heavily on some of the worst monsters to appear in a reputable horror movie in quite some time. They look a lot like the robots in I, Robot actually, but at least those things were supposed to look fake. I assume. I Am Legend is a Christmas apocalypse freak show that largely works though, and it captures, however fleetingly, a bit of the chill of the source material; the loneliness, the terror, of change.

★★★

Posted on December 18th, 2007 in 2007, Reviews, Horror |

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