“I Am Legend” is (loosely?) based on a book written by Richard Matheson in 1954. According to the Wikipedia article, the book is essentially written about the daily life of Robert Neville (in the year 1976) as he deals with his daily activities, which consist of “mak[ing] repairs to his house, boarding up windows, stringing and hanging garlic, disposing of vampires’ corpses on his lawn and going out to gather any additional supplies needed for hunting and killing more vampires.”
In the book, a bacterial strain unleashed a pandemic on the world population, leaving Neville alone as the apparent “last man on Earth.” The bacteria induced vampire-like symptoms, and it were these effects that Neville sought to understand (i.e. why don’t they like garlic or sunlight?) and hopefully cure.
You can read through the Wikipedia article if you want, but the book, apparently, is pretty dissimilar from the 2007 movie (there are other movies based on the book, including 1964’s “The Last Man on Earth” and 1971’s “Omega Man“). Apparently, none of the movies have really hit the points that Matheson did in his book, but oh well…
In this version, Will Smith plays Dr. Robert Neville, a military scientist that stayed behind in New York City, “ground zero” for a newly airborne virus that was originally designed to cure cancer. After the virus spreads, it has a 90% kill rate: 1% are immune (including Smith) and the other 9% take on vampire-like symptoms…that then go on to eat the other 1%… He’s working to cure the disease, while at the same time trying to find out if he is really the last human alive. He spends his days hunting deer in New York City (and driving around a nice Shelby Mustang GT500…) and capturing vampires to test his treatments on, frequently with little success.
The movie itself is pretty good, I thought. It was an hour and forty minutes long, which was perfect…didn’t drag on too long (kinda like “Cast Away” seemed to, sometimes? Will Smith doesn’t have many people to talk to in this movie…) and had some truly suspenseful moments throughout. His performance was rather stellar, and he kinda carries the movie in that regard. The effects were interesting as well… The animals (e.g. deer, lions, vampire dogs…) were all CGI…and you could tell…but, they filmed parts of the movie in New York City with no people around. How exactly they faked grass growing in the cracks of concrete along the streets (CGI or plastic?), I’ll never know…but it looked really good…
My one complaint goes with the story, though… I read the Wikipedia article before seeing the movie, which perhaps was a mistake. There are certain plot elements in the book with regards to the vampires and how similar they are to humans that are pretty integral to the story, yet the movie touches on them briefly…and so briefly as to make me think they shouldn’t have been brought up at all. They mention these aspects fleetingly and you kinda wish that they’d develop them a little further…or not even mention it… One or the other…
Anyway, I thought it was pretty good. I won’t be buying the DVD, as I’m not sure it has much replay value, but it’s very much worth seeing. If you’re looking for a decent movie to see in the theaters this Winter Break, I’d consider checking it out…
I think I read that the “landscape” special effects were all CGI, the director is big into it (his other movie was Constantine).
Well, so far as I know, they did have to close down parts of NYC to get a few shots in. Not _all_ of them, but at least some of them. There were a few blurbs on SciFi.com about it over the last few weeks saying that they “were the most unpopular people in NYC” for a few days… But either way, some of those cityscapes were CGI-ed in…
We went and saw it on Saturday, and my conclusions were fairly similar. It was an excellent movie, I thought.
*SPOILER*
I hated that the dog got killed, though. Kill people all you like, but dogs are more important (apparently. I’ve never claimed to be rational.).
*END SPOILER*
But yeah, I thought it spoke volumes about Will Smith’s acting that he could carry pretty much the entire movie by himself, and the few parts where he interacted with other people were appropriately awkward for someone who’d been living without human contact for 3 years. I suppose I would have liked a little more back story, like more stuff about the disease spreading, but the things they left out didn’t detract at all from the movie. It just left me a little curious.