I Am Legend

"I'm not gonna let this happen. I can still fix this."

***Some Spoilers***

I Am Legend is a dispiriting combination of the eerie and the ham-fisted, good enough that the mistakes it makes are genuinely frustrating rather than feeling par for the course. It builds nicely, but heads for an abrupt, unsatisfying conclusion, getting more and more confused along the way. More than anything else this year, the film gives the impression that at some point, someone simply gave up.

There is still plenty here for admirers of mainstream filmmaking craft. Director Francis Lawrence, whose Constantine was a visionary achievement of a sort, knows that the way to make this kind of sci-fi horror legitimately creepy is to integrate the realistic into the fantastical. For example, I am hard-pressed to think of a recent blockbuster with an opening gambit as effective as I Am Legend‘s: a chillingly authentic news report, with Emma Thompson putting in a brilliant cameo as a doctor whose new viral treatment has resulted in 10,000 cancer-free patients in 10,000 human trials (“So you have actually cured cancer.” “Yes. Yes. Yes, we have.”), followed by the title card “Three Years Later” and an astonishing shot of a completely empty, weed-infested Manhattan. By letting us imagine what’s elided, rather than walloping us with a voiceover or a title scroll, the film does a few things: it engages us, frightens us, gets our imaginations firing; most importantly, it gives itself the opportunity to play us like a piano by filling in the details later, at its own pace.

Many of those details come via flashback once the Last Man on Earth story gets going. The Last Man on Earth is Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville (Will Smith), the only person in New York with an immunity to the virus that ravaged the world, and he is another reason why I Am Legend is interesting beyond what one might expect from a December tentpole. When things began looking grim, Neville — also a virologist — was put in charge of the desperate efforts to reverse the spread of the disease, and he stayed in Manhattan despite the quarantine, leaving his wife and young daughter to an uncertain fate. Now all alone except his dog, he spends his days gathering the left-overs of civilization, making vain attempts to find other survivors, and running experiments in his basement lab. When his wristwatch beeps around sunset, he tightly shutters the windows and doors of his house and sleeps, trying to ignore the sounds of the things that come out at night.

What makes Neville so ambiguous, so intriguing, is the way the screenplay continually toys with the notion that he may have gone mad. Surviving an apocalypse and, for all you know, being left alone on the planet is no cakewalk, and we are never sure whether to treat Neville’s eccentricities — if that word means anything after a virus wipes out the human population — as merely coping mechanisms or as signs of a mind that has become unhinged. He talks to mannequins and tries to negotiate with his dog (“Eat your vegetables”), which seems harmless, even funny, except when juxtaposed against his rage late in the film, and his dangerously obsessive sense of responsibility for what happened. He is dead set on finding a cure — “I can fix this” and “I’m not gonna let this happen” are his chilling, incongruous mantras — even as he angrily denies the possibility that there may be a colony of survivors huddled somewhere in Vermont.

The ending curiously suggests that Neville might symbolize the collective atheist mindset, accepting all the responsibility for humanity’s fate without acknowledging a glimmer of hope. The dumb, formulaic ending is neither here nor there on this score, and the question doesn’t get resolved. But the fact that it is even raised shows how serious the screenplay is about its protagonist. Will Smith is serious about him too, turning in the latest in a series of remarkable performances; he isn’t merely the biggest movie star in the world, he’s the guy you go to when you want to give your quarter-billion-dollar movie some charm and humanity. He holds the screen alone for nearly an hour, interacting only with a dog and some special effects. His $25 million salary is a bargain.

The last fifteen minutes must represent some sort of weird compromise. Talky, with awkward bursts of action, they lead to an unpersuasive, out-of-the-blue resolution, and a final note that’s all wrong. (There’s an 11th hour resort to voiceover, after all.) But they follow a thoughtful, even quiet (though still ostentatiously expensive) film. The problems are more evident because so much of the movie is so strong; I liked it a lot. It almost finds greatness.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2007
Starring:	Will Smith, Salli Richardson, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan
Directed by:	Francis Lawrence
Rated:	PG-13