Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend has been seen as the inspiration for George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. Even though that inspiration spawned a successful career for Romero, Matheson felt that his take on it was too corny. Now I am a fan of Romero's first Dead movie, but I was a fan of it because of the strong characters – not the zombies themselves.
If you compare all of Romero's Dead films after Night, you can see the characters slowly slipping into the background in place of the zombies. This is largely due to the fact that George has an obsession with creepy creatures and isn't really interested in whether the characters are fully realized or not. I Am Legend steps to a different tune.
The film is essentially a big budget popcorn movie with a twist of character exploration that hasn't been seen in years in commercial Hollywood filmmaking.
Will Smith, who literally has the film to himself for the first half of the movie, must have read the story himself. The reason I state this is because most of the time when he is by himself, he is playing out the very traumatic situation of possibly being the only man alive and the only man who could save the world. As plots go, we've seen it all before, but not with the emotional depth that Smith brings to this version of I Am Legend.
There were so many scenes that almost always seemed to trump the actual plot itself. Some of my favorites include the scenes where Smith's character enters a store and actually talks to dummies (which you are led to believe he put there himself over the years) like they are real people. Yes, we've seen that before too. Watch however later in the movie when he comes back to that same store. You literally see his character unable to keep the fifth wall up and he really starts to come to earth about his plight.
When Smith's character encounters other survivors in the second half of the film, the usual “there are no others” speech ensues. It's filled with the usual emotional outbursts and the awkward pauses of realization. The twist here is that when that speech takes place, Smith throws his trademark humor into it. “I just wanted the bacon,” he says after he nearly scares the survivors from eating a meal at his formerly empty house in Washington Square. Yes he did that in I, Robot a lot, but this time there seems to be a balance to the way the screenwriters script the humor he is known for.
Article comments
1 - Chris Beaumont
Prepare to never bother watching the Oscars again. While the film is definitely entertaining and better than I had hoped it does not achieve excellence, IMHO of course.
2 - oma.name
Seems an intuitive effect on the horror plus science fiction genres combined together. Nice review!