I Am Legend

I Am Legend

Director: Francis Lawrence

Actors:

Will Smith
Alice Braga
Charlie Tahan


Synopsis:

A cure for cancer causes most of the US population to become zombies. One scientist Dr. Robert Neveill (Will Smith), a military doctor stays behind in New York city which is riddled with zombies, to discover the cure and save the world. Robert himself is immune to the air borne and blood contact form of the virus. He also sends out a message on the AM radio waves looking for survivors but he doesn't really hope to find any. He surprised to find out there are survivors and possibly more but being on his own for so long has him skeptical. He feels doomed to his fate of staying behind because he feels partly responsible for the death of his family and the spread of the virus.


Review:

When I first heard of this movie two others came to mind. Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth. I Am Legend is a remake of Omega Man and is based on the book "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. The CGI is pretty good and Will Smith does a good job of carrying the movie. Since the viewer only sees one human, Robert Neveill, for over half the film it is easy to say this role is a make or break commodity for a movie, put the wrong actor in this role and the film would be buried.

I'm not saying Will Smith does a spectacular performance but he carries the movie just fine. It is also nice to see a post apocalyptic movie with zombies portray them as more than just slow moving, mindless, want to eat your brains, zombies. For Example, when Robert captured a female zombie and took her back to his lab for testing, her mate mimicked Robert's trap and effectively used it against him.

The movie toward the end showed the parallel between Robert and the male lead zombie. The leader of the zombies showed tactical thinking with creating traps and having trained zombie dogs. Robert had a military background and a trained dog. The lead zombie also showed he in a sense cared about his mate and though animal like showed emotion toward being picked on by a human.

It's a good movie but I would not call it a blockbuster. If you can catch it on a matinee cool, but if you really don't want to spend the money you can always wait for DVD which will probably have extras, alternate endings and maybe a blooper reel.