Irregular with a dumb finale

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2017)

Before Will Smith came out with I Am the Legend, two great actors of the past, Vincent Price and Charlton Heston, were linked to Richard Matheson's novel of the 1950s. The first appeared in Die Dead (1964) while the latter was hero in The Last Hope of the Earth (1971). As I have not watched these versions, I will leave any comparison aside, however, considering the interpreter, the new drapery of the book brings someone much more convincing than updated special effects. Still, he sins by distancing himself a lot from his origin and transforms a great idea into yet another product of man's belief.
The kick that throws modern society to collapse lies in a remedy against cancer. Tested on thousands of people and advertised on TV as a great discovery, the product ends up having the opposite effect some time later. In a matter of a few months, civilization is attacked by zombies of great strength and agility, in addition to being quite bloodthirsty. Immune to the effects of the drug and working for years to find a cure, military man Robert Neville (Smith) lives on the abandoned island of Manhattan in New York accompanied by his dog Sam waiting for someday to meet other humans like him.
Although lonely in relation to his peers, Neville communicates constantly not to become an autistic. His voice is punctual, for it creates artifice to be spontaneous. He still makes up for his sadness with Sam's friendship, not just because he's a family pet, but for companionship at all times. The animal keeps him mentally healthy in the face of the insanity that has taken over the environment. She is unable to respond to Neville's longings, but it gives her emotional comfort. In this sense, the viewer can understand certain explosive attitudes of the character when the situation is out of control.
For two-thirds of the film talking little, Neville seeks to keep himself occupied with scientific experiments, golf games, food hunting, and hunting. Many of the wide-angle plans value both the character's solitude and the size of the holocaust that hit Ground Zero (used in the film as the place where the disease began, not the 9/11 actual terrorist attacks). In one of the hunting moments, the man discovers a lair stuffed with zombies and, when he can capture one of them as a guinea pig, the scale of the problems increases. And when they reach their apex, the script loses its impact.
On the one hand writers Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman offered an effective dramatic charge to the protagonist and, in a fair way, added a greater responsibility to this one giving large space to the companion, something that occurs in the book in a different way. In addition, both took from the writer the same composition of scenes between past and present events so that the spectator understands the parallel anxieties of Neville. However, the writer insists on glorifying the characters in order to target their actions to something superior and, through them, to exalt symbols and Christianity that insure as the beginning of the future. He still composes the third act with some mean dialogues, among them about Bob Marley.
In another case, director Francis Lawrence is able to take measures that raise tension at the most dynamic moments of the narrative, but makes the film false by demonstrating once again the desire to let the special effects fill the screen as it did in Constantine. Of course, it's all a fantasy, but do we have to see something bad? Zombies are more deformed by their digital composition than by the ugliness provided by their disease. Beyond them, animals, vegetation and abandoned buildings as scenery also artificially appear in several scenes.
I Am Legend has become the biggest box office hit based on a zombie story, even though the patients presented are less realistic than the horror films of George Romero, Zack Snyder and Danny Boyle. It is clear that Will Smith was instrumental in the success of the project and the subliminal message has had an effect. Unfortunately, the film will pass on the history of cinema as another adaptation of Matheson's work without the main aspect of that plot: its ending. Hollywood studios have lots of creative people who could film the last pages of the book; they lack courage