It's a film, it's NOT the book

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2015)

Outstanding film with Will Smith giving a tour-de-force performance seldom seen in modern film-making: it's no spoiler to say that he IS the movie for about 97% of screen time and he never disappoints. THAT'S an actor at the top of his form. Sadly the combination of a Science Fiction theme & the word 'God' immediately disqualified him from a well-deserved Oscar Best Actor nomination owing to the minutiae various self-styled intelligentsia dredged up to justify slamming the film.
After reading 'I Am Legend' & seeing 'Omega Man' both when released and more recently, Smith's 'Legend' makes a statement all its own & it's a statement that some worked to dismiss out-of-hand (such as those who nominate for Academy Awards & Popular Mechanics(!), the latter not exactly a Top Ten arbiter for excellence in film).
The biggest complaints are absurd: "this isn't the book". Of course not, it's a film *based* on the book. The "retrovirus is impossible". Not a retrovirus, pay attention: it's mutated Paramyxovirus & could indeed spread just that quickly (Ebola, anyone?). Last, someone claimed 'God' spoke to them bringing the three letter word into an *SF film* - heresy!! - even though Neville's response is an interesting comment about Science & 'God'.
Smith's performance elevates this film to a Must See - I *believed* it from the start. Neville is a man who makes mistakes, who by this point is hanging on to his sanity & his will to persist by his fingernails: far more than a science fiction action flick this is a film about humanity & a man driven to not give up on it.
How odd that some SF fans want to trash this film because it mentions the God word. Einstein be damned, film S/F has turned into the art form where science *must* ignore any aspect of faith, unless to it is stand in arrogant denial of any philosophical statement that doesn't have a formula for proof even if those disdaining such have only a Discovery Channel appreciation for any of the sciences. Film S/F seems to have turned itself into Science Fundamentalism, an equally narrow-minded approach to the massiveness of the universe.