Movie Review: I Am Legend

Zombies in the movies generally come in three varieties: they can be zombies from outer space (of the alien or alien-human hybrid varieties); they can be undead zombies (either with or without a supernatural master); or they can be the horrible, unintended results of Scientists Tinkering With Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know. All three varieties must, of necessity, feed upon living human flesh; often when they do that, their victims become zombies themselves (alternatively, they might just become Zombie Chow, and only the wounded victims who survive the attack become zombies).

But the essence of good zombies in movies is not where they come from, it’s their mindless relentlessness combined with their utterly overwhelming numbers. The hero can kill a few here, a few there — but there are always more, and they never, ever stop coming. That’s why zombies are scary movie monsters; it’s all about quantity.

As we learn in the first sixty seconds of the movie, I Am Legend’s zombies have their origin in the third school of Zombie Genesis — a benign attempt to genetically modify the measles virus, which in the short run seems to cure cancer, goes terribly wrong. Since the audience learns this almost immediately, I’m not counting this as a spoiler. Part zombies, part vampires, these monsters are scary, mostly believable, and sadly, not terribly original-looking. (One very moderate spoiler — there are zombie dogs, too; unfortunately, they all look more like zombie wolves, and I think it would have been creepier if they had been drawn to resemble more familiar and benign breeds of what were formerly house pets.) On the plus side, it’s simply not possible in most scenes to tell when they are CGI and when they are stuntmen in makeup. That sort of thing does cost quite a bit of money.

So, we’ve got ourselves a big-budget zombie movie here. It isn’t trying to be original; you could pretty much call it 2.8 Years Later. It’s just trying to give you a good ride. And you can’t do a big-budget movie without a big-name movie star to draw in the crowds. (Can you? We’ll see in January with Cloverfield.) And the really good news here is that Will Smith is a Top-Flight Movie Star. The camera loves him. Just like it loves Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks, and Angelina Jolie. He’s a damn good-looking man, and he always finds a way to be the center of gravity no matter where he is in the shot. It’s hard to believe he used to be the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

So it’s perfect to cast him as, literally, the last man on earth.

Somehow, he’s one of a tiny percentage of people who are somehow immune to the zombie-virus. At night, the zombies rule the streets and he locks himself in his fortress house on Washington Square to watch movies and television news broadcasts from just before the death of humanity. By day, when the zombies can’t be out on the prowl, he roams the eerily empty streets of New York, breaks in to houses and apartments to raid them for supplies and their old DVD’s, and talks to mannequins and his dog as a way of keeping himself sane. This provides a handy device for exposition, as it turns out. Between his narrating his activities for a video diary he keeps, his conversations with his dog, and a couple of extended flashback sequences, the movie does a good job of providing a back story and the Rules Of Survival In A Ruined City Of Millions Of Flesh-Eating Zombies.

One of those rules, apparently, is to stay in really good shape. Which makes sense, but which also gives Smith an opportunity to show off an astonishingly well-sculpted body, one which earned whistles of admiration from the (shockingly ill-behaved) opening night audience. I mentioned before that he’s a damn good-looking man. I’m not gay, but if I were, I’d totally go for Will Smith. (What? I’m just saying…)

Smith is clever and resourceful, but it’s been three years since he’s seen another living human being, and he’s at the end of his rope. His loneliness and his fortitude are at odds with one another, as he continues to try to not only survive but to turn things around and bring humanity back. When he struggles with these competing impulses — the seeming hopelessness and futility of his struggle, the memories that haunt his nightmares, the horrors that confront his new existence — Smith shows some decent acting chops. I don’t think he’s as good an actor as Denzel Washington, but he’s more than capable of handling a role like this. And since he is, for the better part of an hour, the only person on camera, he’s got to deliver the goods.

New York, denuded of all humanity, is as much a star of the movie as Will Smith. The writers have set many of the outdoor scenes in the movie in readily-recognizable areas of the city, like Grand Central Station and Times Square. The Brooklyn Bridge, shot in half by a missile in an apparently futile attempt to prevent zombies from escaping, is the repeated icon of the movie. The artists did a good job of portraying what New York would look like once all of its human inhabitants have died and been eaten. Grass and weeds grow through the streets, some of which are still gridlocked.

Central Park’s deer roam freely through the streets, and they make prey for animals escaped from the zoo — as well as the zombies. (Will Smith also hunts them with a shotgun, while driving at breakneck speeds down the Avenue of the Americas and 42nd Street.) There is surprisingly little broken glass for a city that surely did not go down without a fight. Between the deer, his Central Park vegetable garden, and the scavenged canned, bottled and preserved food of seven million New Yorkers (you know, that stuff does go bad eventually), Smith can eke out an existence — grim but not without its luxuries like hot running water and high-end exercise equipment. He even still has electricity — at least, he’s got some gasoline generators and that’s apparently enough to keep a bank of computers and televisions and other electronic devices running so he can seem to live like an upper-middle class Manhattanite when he’s in his fortress of a residence.

Oh, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. Hey, if six million zombies all wanted to eat you for fourthmeal, you’d get some weapons, too.

Several scenes are obviously done with mattes, but many more look exactly as if the shots had taken place at the real, iconic locations in the real city, as if somehow the producers had been able to wall off traffic in front of Grand Central Station for eight blocks in either direction for an entire day of filming. (As if.)

I mentioned before that the movie isn’t trying to be original. It could hardly be original; this is the third time the novel of the same name has been made into a movie. In 1964, the novelist adapted his story to a screenplay that became the Vincent Price movie The Last Man On Earth, originally released in Italy; in 1971, the same basic story, again scripted by the novelist, was turned into the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man.

Bear in mind, this movie is quite violent and there are scenes of violence on children (not shown directly) and dogs, both of which could be particularly disturbing for some people. It is also fairly short at just over an hour and a half; but it’s a pretty intense movie so I don’t think the audience could handle much more than that anyway. (It may not surprise you that there is a video game to go with the movie.) The script will not be described as subtle, gentle or elegant. It rather clumsily divides the movie into two recognizable acts, with a denouement at the end of appropriate brevity. But it has some good moments, too, and Smith has sufficient acting skill to pull the audience in to the more emotional parts of the story even if they have all been projected well in advance of their punch.

Fact is, there’s really only so much you can do with a zombie movie — you can, however, do it very well. For the most part, that’s what this movie does. It may not be High Art, but it is well-made, scary, tension-filled fun.