Are filmmakers running out of ideas?

Rating: 6/10 (14 December 2007)

Can movie-making genres become stale? Are filmmakers running out of new methods to scare people, to thrill audiences? I Am Legend is a movie that prophesizes a grim future for two genres that are becoming defined by the enigmatic multiplicity of the Saw franchise.
I Am Legend should be called I Am a Really Desperate Lonely Dude Who Plays Golf On Airplanes and Likes Long Walks in Central Park Cornfields; My Ad is on EHarmony.com. The "legend" is Robert Neville, who is immune to a virus that has infested the entire human civilization with vampire-like symptoms. He is unable to make contact with anyone who has retained his humanity, so he assumes 99.9% of homo sapiens are dead. Despite the pain and mental duress these creatures have caused, apparently a Hippocratic oath taken by colonels prevents him from wanting to obliterate the entire vampiric race; instead he uses them for study because he believes his immunity means he is supposed to find a way to cure the vampires.
The vampires themselves...I won't spoil it. But you've seen creatures like them in about 500 other fantasy/horror/thriller movies that already exist. Makeup is becoming a dead art yet creates more realism than any CGI effect I've seen (except for maybe Transformers). It is the filmmakers' reliance on these artificial ways to scare audiences that make this movie--which is fueled by real feelings and real people and real terror--so...lacking.
The terror comes from amplified noises of objects and long, drawn out moments of hunting with Neville. This kind of scaring process has been experienced before in countless other films. Can't directors and writers find other ways to scare people besides this cycle: tense moment, scary monster crashes through something, monster chases hero, hero thankfully escapes and looks amazing while doing it, repeat? Why are scary movies scary when they're only showing human torture? Why are thrillers and horrors not as innovative as they used to be? Last comment: I read the novel, and was disappointed. The bastardization of books by filmmakers because they're too afraid to portray uncomfortable topics on screen has reached the point where they're ignoring a novel's most appealing aspects because they don't want to shatter the mental status quo of the movie-going public. Something was "too perfect" regarding the final moments of the film; and the tone of the movie (consistent throughout the entire novel) drastically changed. The last twenty minutes almost felt forced, as if Hollywood was looking for a way to compensate for making the first hour and a half more human than it should have been--but that was the most compelling part of the film.
P.S. The scene where Will Smith does his pullups is the high point of the movie.