I’ve never been prouder of Hollywood. They’ve taken a dark, eerie, and emotionally shattering post-apocalyptic script and turned it into a big budget blockbuster starring Will Smith, without compromising any of the challenging, gut-wrenching content that made the whole thing so tragically beautifully haunting in the first place.
I Am Legend is an absolutely uncompromising film, the solitary and hopeless story of one man, staying alive and refusing to surrender even when there’s no longer any reason to continue. It sticks with that too, not as a setup to some big action set piece, but as a genuinely moving, horrifying, and thrilling journey into one man’s lonely, desperate hell.
That man, the last man, is Will Smith as military scientist Robert Neville. I guess he’s also technically speaking, mayor of New York and president of the United States, since there’s no one else left to fill the jobs.Three years ago, the population of planet Earth was wiped out by a plague, and as far as Robert can tell he’s all that’s left.
Except that is, for the mindless, vicious, vampire-like, sunlight allergic creatures which scream, hunt, and bloodlust just outside his front door each and every night.Robert has survived for two reasons, and neither of them have anything to do with his natural immunity to a world-killing disease.
That only helped him survive the first wave of dying. He’s lived this long because he’s smart and because he’s utterly focused, unwavering in his determination, no matter how ludicrous or far-fetched, to “fix this”.
Each day he follows the same, specific, carefully thought out routine. He gets up, he eats, he hunts, he looks futilely for other survivors, and he looks for a cure. When the sun goes down, he bars the windows and hides in his bathtub with his only companion, a German Shepherd named Sam, praying that tonight won’t be the night that his carefully planned precautions fail, and the monsters find him.
Read the full review – I Am Legend
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