first half good, second half bad

Rating: 5/10 (14 December 2007)

The movie sets itself up to be high in concept, low in intelligence. You can't expect a film like this to be "great," so disregard such comments unless you're the type that takes Michael Bay's films seriously (unfortunately there are a lot of those people). For what it is--an event film--I Am Legend is above average. The first half is quite good, the second half quite bad. In the beginning we watch a man trying to live by himself in a city devoid of humans. He is lonely and it is this loneliness that he struggles with most. The dangerous "dark seekers" are actually secondary, that is, he has already learned to deal with them by the time the story begins. So then, what does the character need? This is something that never develops. We know he wants: to find a cure for the virus. But his personal need is quite different. He needs company. Once the opportunity arises he acts the fool. Consequently the protagonist has no satisfying arc. Consider a film with a comparable scenario, James Cameron's Aliens, in which the protagonist is likewise trapped in a space and surrounded by extremely deadly creatures. That film's protagonist not only escapes the alien creatures but saves the child Newt, with whom she had developed a mother-daughter connection. As a result she satisfies a personal need to redeem herself as a mother, a need established early in the film. That is her character arc. I Am Legend has no such character arc because the protagonist is alone throughout most of the film, has no opportunity to establish relationship dynamics with other characters because there are none. Cudos to the filmmakers for trying to pull off a flick that's mostly about a man and his dog, but in the end you see the limitations with such a concept. The teenies will get a kick out of seeing the monsters scream ad nauseum into the camera. But anyone with a soul and a brain will leave the theater feeling shortchanged and taking away nothing from this story.
And I thought the ending was both abrupt and weak.
A few comments on the technical aspects of this film. Nice shots of NYC empty and overrun with animals. The atmosphere is great. That atmosphere is frequently dissolved when the filmmakers resorted to excessive panning, zooming, shaking the camera around, and cutting every half-second. This makes audiences seasick. Take for example the scene on the pier in which the Robert Neville in his car is attacked by a mob of "dark seekers." You can hardly make out what's going on because, you know, the filmmakers thought it would be cool to zoom and jerk and cut-cut-cut. Seriously, I'd take just about any 80's action flick over I Am Legend for this reason alone. At least back then you could make out what's going on, even soak in the image. Not so with I Am Legend, which stylistically does nothing new and conforms to the rest of the nonsense cranked out of the studios these days. By the way, all the infected creatures were CGI, i.e, they looked cartoonish. With a budget this large, I Am Legend could have figured out a way to use real humans convincingly. Maybe they should have had Chris Cunningham direct this one (see "Come To Daddy" for how to make real actors look scarier than CGI).