InsomniaReview: I Am Legend

Before I get to the actual review, let me first say this: I'm pissed off at Will Smith. And not for any conventional reason, lots of people are mad at Will Smith, I'm sure. Being rich and handsome earns you a lot of enemies. But the reason I'm mad at the Fresh Prince is because I feel like he's betrayed me.
I typically don't pay any attention to celebrities. I make a conscious effort to NOT learn any more about them than I have to. This is not as easy as you might think. You see, I watch the news. I like to stay informed on what's going on in Iraq, or what dumbass, ineffectual move Congress is trying to pull now. But I defy you to turn on CNN or MSNBC, or even FoxPropoganda Department and watch it for an hour without hearing about how Brittany Spears is a terrible, drug addict of a mother, or how Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan are insanely rich whores.
I don't want to know any of this. I don't care who Anna Nicole's Baby Daddy is. So I try not to find out.
But as much as I try to stay outside of the celebrity obsessed culture that America has become, it's really not possible. See, I also love a good movie. And I've come to the realization that even I have movie stars that, sad to say, I LIKE. I shouldn't like these people. I have no idea what they're like in real life. I'll never meet them, and even if I do, I'll never have a real conversation with them. For all I know, Christian Bale beats his wife.
I came to this realization when watching a recent interview with Will Smith (supposedly held to promote I Am Legend). I saw a link to another video, in which his Jiggyness defends Tom Cruise, and Scientology. Here is that story.

So, when I saw that, I felt betrayed by Will Smith. Scientology? No, Will! Say it ain't so! But then I thought, "Why?" And I realize that, yes, even I have filed away Will Smith in some "nice guy" category. And now, it seems like he's insane. After digging a little deeper, no, Will is NOT a Scientologist. He's basically just saying "be nice, and accept people, no matter what their religion." Which, okay. I agree with you in theory.
And you know, if Tom Cruise and all the other Scientologists out there do genuinely believe in the whole aliens and thetans and volcanoes and nuclear bombs origin of man story, hey, fine. That's his faith, and I can't touch that. But I'm still going to put his file in the drawer with all the other crazy people, like the ones that believe and invisible man in the sky made us out of clay, and loves us all unconditionally, but will hate us forever and send us to a lake of eternal suffering if we have sex the wrong way (which is either before marriage, or with men, depending on who you talk to.)

Anyway, the movie.


InsomniaReview: I Am Legend
(no, really)
I Am Legend is based on the novel by Richard Matheson. You may recognize that name. He's the guy who wrote Duel (Steven King's first movie), Nightmare at Twenty Thousand Feet (the classic Twilight Zone story), Stir of Echoes, The Incredible Shrinking Man, What Dreams May Come, Hell House, and a whole mess of other stories. He's easily the most influential fiction writer of the mid 1900s, and he's inspired such authors as Steven King, Dean Koontz, and, well, pretty much everyone else worth reading in the horror or science fiction genre.

I Am Legend is, in my opinion, his finest work. It follows the story of Robert Neville, possibly the last man on earth. A deadly bacteria has wiped out almost the entire human population of earth. Those who did not die exhibit vampire like symptoms. By day, Neville leaves the safety of his home to gather supplies and exterminate nests of the creatures. At night, he seals himself up inside his home turned fortress, and fights off the attacks of the infected.

The movie differs from the source material in premise very little. Rather than being an everyman, Neville is military scientist, and the mysterious bacteria is changed into a cancer curing virus gone wrong, giving us a nice 'folly of man' twinge to the story. In the movie, Neville lives in New York city, which gives us some amazing scenery to look at. Nature has been hard at work over the last two years, reclaiming what man no longer maintains, and the effect is impressive. In the novel, the infected were vampires of a more traditional sense, shouting insults and Neville and trying to kill him. In the movie, they're mindless brutes, and Neville seems to pity them more than anything. But while these changes are relatively small, and in fact enhance the storyline, there are major problems in the final act.

Initially, both the novel and the movie spend a decent amount of time playing up Neville's isolation, and his desperation for human contact. The fact that he can't even trade insults with his nemeses in the film version seems to add to the sense that he's all alone. But there are hints of a building intelligence in the vampires. In one particularly interesting sequence, Neville captures one of the vampires for study. Shortly after this event, another one of the infected walks out into full daylight, and roars at Neville, glaring at him angrily. Despite the fact that it's fairly obvious Neville has just captured it's mate, the scientist later dismisses this evidence of higher brain function, explaining it away as further brain deterioration, or starvation from lack of food. It seemed to me as if the writers were trying to convey that Neville was in denial about the intelligence level of the infected, and it worked well.

Later that same vampire makes himself into Neville's new nemesis. He leads him into a trap (by moving one of Neville's mannequin 'neighbors' out of his usual place), and sicks a pair of infected dogs on him. That same night, Neville goes out for revenge, and nearly loses his life to a coordinated attack by the infected. He is saved by two other survivors... and this is where the movie goes to hell. While entertaining up until this point, the final act just leaves me disappointed. The original ending was completely ignored, in favor of a happier, much more ambiguous one.

You see, in the original story, Neville came to find out that while most of the 'vampires' were mindless monsters, some of them had retained their humanity. They still had to stay away from the sunlight, were still comatose while they slept, but at night, they were very much human. And these survivors has begun to congregate and build a new society. These 'still living' vampires captured Neville, and put him on trial. You see, Neville had been going around staking people while they were asleep in their beds. Through this revelation, Neville realized that he had become the thing that goes bump in the night (or day, as the case may be.) He has become anathema to society, the monster in the castle that brave men had to face. In the novel, vampire and man had their roles reversed. Neville had become Human, the monster of Legend.

Every other change to the storyline up until this point would have actually enhanced the original ending. Neville had been kidnapping the infected, performing experiments on them in search of a cure. These experiments lead to their deaths, and there had been a lot of them. Honest, up to the final ten minutes or so of the movie, it really did look like the original ending was going to make it. But, instead, the movie threw that version of ending out the window. Kind of like a baby. In some bathwater. I've read that a lot of re-shooting was done for the ending towards the end of production. I can't help but wonder if the 'real' ending got left on the cutting room floor for some insane reason.

Still hanging plot threads about the growing intellect of the infected, or Neville's possible inhuman experiments, or the blind eye he turned to the infected's remaining humanity, are left to swing in the breeze. Instead we get a final shootout with the mindless horde. Neville comes face to face with his nemesis, a slab of plexiglass between. Neville and the nemesis' paramour on one side, the vampire thralls on the other. But rather than have any sort of revaluation here, the nemesis just smashes his skull against the glass until it breaks. Neville sacrifices himself to save the two other survivors we met ten goddamn minutes ago, and sends them off to the promised land with a cure for the vampire infection. Also, believe in God.

THAT'S the new ending. You can't even explain the title of the damn movie with that ending! I was really hoping for a movie true to the original story, with a thought provoking morality tale masquerading as a horror novel, but instead, I got this. The ending RUINED what could have been a great movie. I Am Legend is still entertaining, but it's nowhere near as profound as it could have been, and that lost potential really saddens me.

I Am Legend scores an 9 out of 10 for most of it's runtime, but the last 20 minutes are only worth a 4 out of 10. We'll call it a 7.

InsomniaReview Score: 7/10.
Enjoyable, but with a shallow ending. See it in theaters if you like horror movies that explore human nature, rather than human anatomy.