Feeling stupid and contagious

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2008)

I Am Legend is basically Richard Matheson's unrelentingly bleak novel of loneliness moved to New York and turned into a Rastafarian propaganda vehicle, but still pretty watchable. I mean it definitely has its moments. It has its anti-moments too, though, and the ending sucks like the proverbial vacuum cleaner, but what can you do? Nihilism is dead, I guess, and we've just got to live with that.
The story of the plague is well told. In fact I liked the flashback scenes more than the main story, perhaps because the meta-narrative is so familiar from so many other movies, several of which also starred Will Smith. The daily life stuff is okay as well. The humdrum activities of a man and his dog with nothing much else to do except watch Shrek and find a cure for the cancer cure reminds me of my own life in many ways, although I'm a bit fatter and a lot less pro-active. And of course I don't own a dog. In fact I'd probably just sit around watching TV and eating biscuits until they came for me. In movie terms, I'd be dead or infected halfway through the opening credits, end of story, so it's good that Smith's nameless hero, Lt. Col. Robert Neville M.D., has a bit more get up and go. I thoroughly enjoyed watching him boodle around in the excellent deserted city (they used the set from 12 Monkeys) pursuing deer and other digital effects.
In dramatic terms, the trajectory of the film was the traditional post-Dawn of the Dead mixture of comfortably flat and sickeningly tense. Very up and down. Sort of like the readout on a vital functions monitor. I liked that. I was even getting ready to have watched a really good film by about the one hour mark. But then all indicators flatlined big time with Alice Braga's miraculous appearance, which was a shock I'm not sure I recovered from, and certainly the movie didn't.
That feeling that everyone lost interest half way through the initial story conference. That tacked on sense of pointless hope. The God stuff. Yikes! The kid was good though. Apart from the brilliant dog, he was the most convincingly human character in the movie and the only one who seemed authentically disoriented by the apocalypse, if only because he was so awed by being near Will Smith.
But I'm getting snide, and that's not fair. I mostly enjoyed I Am Legend. It's not perfect by any means, but it's an okay film, looked great, and the first half was really promising. If they'd trusted the novel more (and why on earth wouldn't you trust a story conceived by Richard Matheson?) it might have been wonderful.