The good and the bad

Rating: 5/10 (20 January 2008)

Comparisons with this movie to Omega Man are inevitable considering the drastic similarities in plot, even though the plots of all post-apocalyptic films are quite similar. I very much enjoyed this film, but considering it was a remake my thoughts kept turning to whether this film was necessary.
Firstly, the best thing about this film is the acting. Will Smith does a fantastic job, showing a wide range of emotions. Much more so than the original movie, we feel his isolation, particularly in his insanity in risking his life for his only companion, and the heartbreak in their eventual parting. Unfortunately the other character, the mother-son duo and even the main enemy zombie, had potential to be more fleshed out characters, but this ultimately failed to eventuate. What I enjoyed particularly, though, was how human Will Smith was. Even though he was a Colonel, he is scared in legitimately scary occasions, and he isn't an unstoppable hero. Unlike in recent action films, like Die Hard 4, he can't take a serious beating for two hours (a day in their time). A simple knock on the head almost kills him.
The action scenes were very well done, and the CG was very good in portraying the city and the explosions. I felt that they were not quite up to standard in the scene with the lions, and I felt the total CG effect of the vampires detracted from how scary they were; I think actors + makeup with CG editing would have been much more effective. But it was very well paced, and incredibly gripping at most points. What I enjoyed was the move away from jump cuts to scary images accompanied with loud noise which is so common in modern cinema. Such cheap tricks make you jump, but that's different to being nervous and scared, which this film makes you feel.
What I most disliked about this film was the anti-humanist religious "sub-text". I use scare marks because it was hardly sub. It was done in a very hack-kneed way, with obvious lines such as "We didn't do this, God did", with the very conservative moralistic view that people shouldn't tamper with genes, even to do something as benevolant as to cure cancer. The ending of Omega Man also has obvious religious imagery. Charleton Heston suspended, Christ-like, in the fountain of his life-giving blood is one of the most powerful images in all of cinema because of its subtlety. The end of I am Legend, with the continuous references to "listening to God', and particularly the final panning shot above the village whose only large structure is a church unnecessarily promotes quite unwelcome ideas about the ultimate moral triumph of parochialism, Christian virtue, and the evils of science (I don't even remember seeing street lights or telegraph poles).
Ultimately though, if people love a good (ultimately) horror film, that is well-acted, clever, and with an excellent script, and also one that makes you think (whether you agree with the writers or not), then this movie is definitely a must-see.