What if you were the last person left alive, surrounded by monsters

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2012)

While this is a very good movie it is also quite slow in parts, but unfortunately it needs to be. The film is set in 2012 after a virus has pretty much wiped out most of the population of the earth, and those that were not killed outright by the virus were either turned into mutant monsters or killed by the mutant monsters. As far as we know at the beginning of the film, the only true human left alive is Robert Neville (Will Smith) and his faithful dog Sam. Neville is a military scientist who, when the disease first struck, was tasked with finding a cure, and this was back in 2009 (where we have a number of flashbacks to see what happened to Neville's family). It is unclear what happened in the intervening years, but it appears that Neville has managed to survive.
The first part of the film simply shows us the normal daily life the Neville lives: he drives around empty New York Streets hunting deer (though staying out of the dark places since that is where the infected live during the day – they have an aversion to sunlight, to the extent that ultraviolet light will kill them), visiting the local DVD rental store, where he has conversations with dummies, visiting a pier where he hopes somebody will pick up his radio message, and also occasionally playing golf. When he returns home we discover that he has a lab beneath his house where he is tirelessly working to attempt to find a cure. I will not go any further than this because I really do not want to spoil the movie.
However, at the beginning of the movie we are privy to a television interview where a scientists says that through genetic engineering, they have discovered a cure to cancer. However, we suddenly jump to a dead and deserted New York City. It is obvious what has happened, this new cure has mutated into a very dangerous virus which has pretty much decimated the population of the city. Thus I would suggest that the major theme of this film would be the arrogance of human development. He we have a life saving drug that clearly wasn't properly tested before it was released into production. Unfortunately we see this time and time again, where companies will attempt to produce a wonder drug, release it onto the market with out proper testing, and result in people suffering significant side effects. Many writers have suggested that the regulator is pretty much a toothless tiger that is staffed by corporate hacks.
The movie is based on a book of the same name, written back in 1954, and since then there have been two movie adaptations (one of them being 'The Omega Man') in addition to this one. The original story was set in Los Angeles and it was clear that the infected were actually vampires. The idea was to try and introduce vampirism into a science-fiction setting as opposed to the supernatural setting that they are used to. The original book attempts to explain their fear for crosses and of garlic, however since them most authors simply modify the vampires' weaknesses, usually dropping the cross fetish. However, this movie does not really suggest that they are vampires, and it is only the aversion to sunlight (and maybe the fact that they pass the disease on by biting people, but then again there are a number of references to the disease also being airborne).
This film does tend to leave us very alone, and also tries to grapple with that idea of loneliness. All Neville has for company is his dog Sam, and Sam does show to be a loyal companion. We also see a general aversion to him killing the infected. While it seems that they have degenerated to a base animal level, it seems that some do show cunning an intelligence. Neville at one time suggests that they have devolved further to the point where they are ambivalent to risk, but I do not think this is the case. When the Alpha-male comes partly out of the door and burns himself, in one sense I believe it is designed to create an identifier to this particular infected, and also to warn Neville that this infected knows him, and will be out to get him (as we see later in the film).