In I Am Legend (2007) New York City is once again the place where the world — at least the human world — comes to an end. Three years after a man-made virus wipes out most of the human race, and turns a few million into flesh-eating zombies, the only man left is Robert Neville (played by Will Smith), a scientist from the research group that developed the virus, intended to cure cancer before it began mutating. (The film never acknowledges the statistical near impossibility that the man immune to the virus is one of the scientists who developed it).

Although the trailers for I Am Legend focused on Smith’s efforts to evacuate his family out of New York City while the virus is in its early stages, the film itself begins three years after the virus has wiped everyone out. The back-story (everything in the trailers) is revealed through a series of flashbacks.

I Am Legend is based on the 1954 cult classic of the same title by Richard Matheson. Two previous films, The Last Man on Earth (1964) and Omega Man (1971), were also based on the novel.

Neville is the only man left in New York. His companion is a German shepherd named Sam. He spends his days hunting for food, foraging, sending out radio messages that ask survivors to contact him, and working in a lab in the basement of his apartment building, looking for a cure to the virus. At night he closes all the windows of his apartment and hides. The zombies come out at night — they survived the initial onslaught of the plague but changed into hyper-aggressive human mutants, always on the prowl for flesh.

The film is sad and wonderfully poignant in its first half. Neville drives at breakneck speed up and down the streets of New York in whatever car he chooses for that day. He enters a video rental store and selects DVDs to rent, returning the ones he has previously borrowed. He flirts with manikins he has apparently placed in the store. He hunts deer in the streets of the city, chasing them down in his truck. He grows corn in Central Park. He has decorated his apartment with famous paintings taken from well known New York museums. There is not much whimsy or irony in this film, which finds little to laugh at in the empty world. Rare moments of humor include one scene in which Neville recites the lines from Shrek aloud as the DVD of the film plays on his television — he has watched it often enough that he has memorized the screenplay. But there are moments of sad desperation as well, including one scene in which he begs a manikin to speak to him, and another when he realizes his dog Sam has contracted the virus.