Will Smith does a great job as Lt. Col. Robert Neville M.D., "the Last Man on Earth" after a manmade, zombie-making virus goes awry. I like Will Smith and have loosely followed him from his early career as part of the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince through his six years on the sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel Air and up through his role in the screen adaptation of the Issac Asimov novel, I Robot. He has more than proven his abilities in several areas of the performing arts.
I want to start this by talking about the star of the movie because I want to separate him and his performance from the rest of the film. In I Am Legend, Will very convincingly portrays a man who has been alone for three years in the virtual prison of a dead New York City. He is accompanied by his only living friend, a German shepherd, and surrounded by other "friends" whom he has manufactured for himself out of the many mannequins available in department stores. He has even set some of them up as if they were shopping in his favorite video store.
His portrayal of a person in this situation is right on the mark and sufficiently nuanced in a psychological sense to make it really thought provoking. He is in solitary confinement without any bars or walls to hold him in. The world is his prison.
The thing that keeps him going is his continuing effort to find a cure for the zombie virus. This goal seems somewhat pointless in one sense because he is, as far as he knows, the only surviving person on the planet who is not infected. On the other hand it gives him something to do, and is perhaps his own personal penance for not being able to stop the virus before it took away from him the things he loved most.
I found it refreshing that the zombies in the film are taken one step beyond the mindless, flesh-eating corpses they are usually portrayed as in movies of this genera, but I was disappointed that the writers or the director of the film didn't follow that beginning into any kind of real story line as far as the zombies were concerned. The 1954 Richard Matheson book on which this film is (loosely) based did a much better job in making the zombies into actual sentient beings with a mission. In this film there are brief flashes of insight into that situation, but the viewer has to infer too much from too few clues and so the moment is lost.
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