Can he find a reason to continue?

Rating: 8/10 (18 January 2008)

I watched this movie twice and grew tired of seemingly no-one appreciating it like I do. It's not the FX or the action (or non-action, as some would put it) that make it a good movie, but Will Smith's performance as Robert Neville, a man who has brought about the responsibility of saving the human race upon himself, while all the time trying to cling to his sanity in a situation that seems overwhelmingly hopeless. As he wanders the streets of New york reliving what happened when the virus broke out (for the benefit of the audience), he bears the mark of a man who will stop at nothing to get things fixed even though he suffers daily by his failure, loneliness and odds, and nightly by the anguishing cries of the Dark Seekers and his own troubled memories, barely holding on in his determined effort to save those who mercilessly hunt him. Pay close attention to the background as well as the foreground from start to finish, and also to the emotions portrayed by Will Smith, and don't sit hoping for a movie better than his last or for something exactly to the book that came before it.
"A week into filming, Francis Lawrence felt the Infected, who were being portrayed by actors wearing prosthetics, were not convincing. His decision to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) meant post-production had to be extended and the budget increased. Lawrence explained, "They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can't get out of people in the middle of the night when they're barefoot. And their metabolisms are really spiked, so they're constantly hyperventilating, which you can't really get actors to do for a long time or they pass out." While the infected become vampires in the novel, the film script avoids such a direct reference; even though the character Anna calls them "dark seekers", and they consume living flesh, their design is inspired more by the concept of their adrenal glands being open all the time than by conventional vampire imagery. The actors remained on set to provide motion capture." (Quoted from Wikipedia page, "I Am Legend")
I saw the previews and knew nothing further of it, thinking only "What is he (Will Smith) up to now?" after seeing a picture of him carrying a massive gun. I went, I saw, I enjoyed. So I went again.