SCI FI PI

Released Jan 3
Starring Will Smith, a German shepherd, Alice Braga
Director Francis Laurence
Rating M



The end of the world was nigh - for three years now. Will Smith must cope with a world filled with no one but himself, his dog - oh, and an army of ‘darkseekers’.

This is the kind of movie that you really should see on the big screen – in fact the bigger, the better. The images of an overgrown and empty New York have startling power, even as the keen-eyed viewer pics up the CG constructions and additions. It is this CG use, in fact, that is the film’s Achilles heel, and the one weakness in a Sci Fi film that approaches classic status.

What makes I Am Legend compelling viewing is its opening hour. The set up, the daily routine of Will Smith’s Robert Neville, the quotidian impossibility that is greeted with both rigid discipline and understandable humanity is successfully drawn with a minimum of dialogue and flashback.



A tremendous amount of information is revealed in just the sets, in cupboards, on walls, in the distance. If you blink, you’ll miss it. If you’re quick, you’ll be impressed. It is this idea – you, audience, are intelligent, you audience, can create an entire story out of this one moment, that sets this apart from a great deal of big budget Sci Fi.

Smith’s physicality works well for his role. He is obviously a survivor who has seen the world fall down around him. His dogged persistence in keeping a daily regime of fitness, forage, experimenting to find a cure for the virus that wiped out humanity and a midday vigil to wait for someone to answer his constant radio message is one born of necessity – not so much to survive, but to stay sane.

Half way through the film, it’s pretty obvious the sane part hasn’t quite worked out for him. Doesn’t help when you have terrifyingly fast and strong flesh-hungry ex-humans hiding in every dark place and bursting forth into the empty canyons of New York at night.

There are a couple of scenes of almost unbearable tension when Neville has to go into the darkness. If you’re not one who appreciates a good gut-churn, you could be in trouble. Unfortunately, as the film progresses, there is a wee bit of a problem with ‘the infected’. They’re just not real enough for the modern audience, and so they suspension of disbelief really only works when they’re in the dark and it is their implied presence or threat that is successful.



It’s an horrific shame. A subtle and fascinating sub-plot seems to have been curtailed by the decision to use CG – what may have been human behaviour in ferocious zombie-like creatures is left as a tantalising dangling thread, fascinating in its presence but irritating in its lack of resolution. Human actors (on which the CG characters were based) may have proven much more effective. Anyone who saw 28 Days Later will tell you that actors make fine ‘fast’ zombies.

The interaction with the pixels is the problem in a third act that doesn’t quite resolve itself, introducing new characters (not unbelievably), but also introducing an entire new strain of thought to a film which was far cleaner and purer without introducing a theology to the piece. Irritating and wasteful.
However, not unexpected from a Hollywood system that promotes multiple writers on single scripts and a society that is still, in the main, highly superstitious.

We can forgive the error and return our minds to the first half of a movie that is epic in its size and scope, though peopled with just a single actor. Images and moments will stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema. Whilst flawed, this is still a film of rare quality.