Could have been legendary!

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2007)

Lots of folks been complaining about the CG monsters in this movie and how poorly they've been created. Well, don't let that crap keep you away from the movie. Yes, it is clear that the vampiric ghouls created by a worldwide spread of a man-made virus are computer generated, but that doesn't make them less scary and here's why: when we see the hero of the movie, a trained soldier and scientist, venture inside a dark building where the ghouls reside, he gets scared. So scared he almost abandons his only friend, his dog Sam, to the infected monsters within. Heroes don't typically act this way. They're normally a little too calm and collected in situations like this. So when Will Smith shows genuine fear of going inside that building, we fear for him. The CG is used only to make the creatures something inhuman, which is what the virus made them. Dudes running around with plastic teeth and shaved heads wouldn't have the same effect.
Smith plays Neville, an Army scientist who was in charge of the virology team on Manhattan when the virus, which was originally made to cure diseases, went bad and started turning people into super vampires. The movie opens several years after the outbreak and Neville is still on Manhattan, still researching a way to reverse the virus's effects. I Am Legend uses the "Lost" method of employing flashbacks. We jump back and forth between past and present, the scenes giving each other more depth the more we learn about Neville's predicament. He has become an urban survivalist, living off of canned food and whatever animals he can hunt with his 2010 model Mustang. At night, when the extremely UV-sensitive creatures come out to feed, Neville's house becomes a steel-encased fortress and he sometimes sleeps in the tub with a rifle in hand - I guess when hundreds of growling beasts lurk outside your house, the bed just feels a little too open. The first hour is all about how he survives from day to day, how he is trying to cure the disease in a high tech lab in the basement, and how he's beginning to totally crack up from the isolation. This first hour is great.
Every day he exercises to keep himself in top physical form, pampers and scolds his dog like a child, goes down to the video store to "rent" a movie from the mannequin he's placed behind the counter, and at midday he goes to a certain pier and waits for someone to answer his constantly broadcasting radio message. The routine is probably what has kept him from going insane up to this point, but he's still slowly slipping away. He tiptoes around a particular female mannequin at the video store, afraid to speak to her like I am to a real live girl. He invents whole conversations with the silent figures out on the street. And when one of his "friends" turns up in a place he's not supposed to be, we can't be sure if he's finally going nuts or if someone is playing a trick on him. But he's supposed to be all alone Eventually, the screenwriters do the lame thing and bring a plot into the mix. But not just a plot - a message as well. In the last 10 minutes of the picture, Neville appears to have a crisis of faith which undermines his ability to save the human race. That's all well and good, but up to this point, spirituality has practically no role in the movie at all aside from a short prayer in one of the flashback scenes. I didn't have a problem with that plot point itself, I just wish that point had been inevitably reached like it should be in a well told story. Instead it just pops up suddenly for no other reason than the end of the movie was approaching. Still, that first hour Hot diggity. Now I have to give up my own dreams of making a post-apocalyptic adventure movie because the first two-thirds of this one do it so well.
http://www.movieswithmark.com