Emma Thompson destroys the world!

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2008)

In the near future, a self-effacing Dr Emma Thompson discovers a cure for cancer that also has the unfortunate side effect of causing the end of the world. Clearly someone didn't carry out their clinical trials as thoroughly as they should Fast-forward three years and we're introduced to Will Smith's Robert Neville, a former military scientist, hunting wild deer from his sports car in central New York. The once vibrant city is now an eerie wasteland, bereft of all human life (or bodies, come to that) through which Neville trawls with military planning in search of human life. Ironically, once he eventually finds it, his relatively secure - if lonely - existence quickly begins to fall apart.
The overall impression I got after watching I Am Legend was that of an opportunity wasted. It's been a long time since I watched The Omega Man, but I recall that that film was also fairly disappointing once the curiosity value of a lone man speeding through lifeless city streets had worn off. Heston's version ill-advisedly strayed into vampire territory, with the viruses victims turning into albino-like creatures unable to come out into the sun but capable of logical thought and communication. Here, the afflicted are little more than feral animals, and in this respect at least, the later version is more believable. But where are the charred and ruined buildings, the car smashes, the looted stores, the putrefying bodies, the rats? Post-apocalyptic NY simply looks like a place from which people have been plucked and some undergrowth added. I only saw this on the small screen, but the vision of this NY didn't really convince, and any attempt at verisimilitude is minimal.
Smith is on the screen alone for much of the film with only his faithful German Shepherd for company, and he does quite well. His Robert Neville continues to search for an antidote to the virus, even as its victims try to kill him. Sam, his dog, is his last link with the old world and his family, and the scene in which Neville must kill her to prevent her from becoming completely infected from the virus is strangely affecting. Neville's coping mechanisms are also explored, if only cursorily, but they add some depth to a character that otherwise has very little. He sets up mannequins in the DVD store he regularly frequents (modern technology means the scene in which Heston repeats the words of an interviewee from Woodstock in a deserted auditorium can't be replicated here - the best the writers can come up with is Smith quoting the lines from Shrek as it plays on his DVD ('I like Shrek' he asserts helpfully)) and talks to them as if they're real people, and it these kind of small acts of madness that keep him sane.
As others have commented, things fall apart fairly badly in the final third of the picture, when it abandons its study of Neville's trauma in favour of both a more conventional action genre conflict and a quite frankly ludicrous diversion into fellow survivor Anna's (Alice Braga) crackpot belief that god has determined that Neville and she should have met. The film's overblown conclusion even goes pretty much all the way towards confirming her theory with a badly misjudged happy ending that simply refuses to be believable.