Review of I Am Legend (2007) by Colr. — 07 Jan 2008

I Am Legend is a decent movie. Will Smith gives an excellent performance as Robert Neville in keeping with the theme of the original novel. The final scene in the video store where he begs the manequin to speak to him is brilliant.

The story differs quite significantly from Matheson's novel, but this is acceptable due to the fact that much of the original story takes place within the feelings of the central character and wouldn't have translated well to a movie.

The regime of excersize, hunting and isolation in the over-grown NYC is very nice indeed - probably the nicest treatment of this subject matter produced to date - even better than 28 days later. Unfortunately, that's where the praise for the film ends, as it comes with two significant problems.

The first is "The Infected". In Matheson's novel, even though the vampires (as they are in the original book) are monsters, motivated by killing the uninfected, they can still reason and eventually develop into a society.

In the film, they're nothing more than emaciated humans, similar to the creature from "The Mummy", which neatly dove-tails into the second, and biggest thing going against this movie - the CGI.

This is supposed to be a very creepy, unnerving story about a man surrounded by enemies with no way to escape. Blood thirsty monsters who show the ability to reason and to solve problems. Due to the "Mummy-esque" CG, this illusion is totally shattered.

The monsters look like something from a second-rate video game and aren't scary, ever. This is a waste of potential on every level - every time the monsters turned their heads around and did their completely inhuman, unbelievable "roar", my heart sunk.

CG can be much better than this, Golem from LOTR being a prime example. If only they'd spent the money they should on making the effects work within the movie, this would have been a 9/10. Note should have been taken from Robert Carlyle's stunning performance in 28 weeks later to show how these monsters should have acted (and they *are* different stories using similar worlds, so comparisons would have been fine here) instead of the low budget, hammy, unscary puppets that were used instead.

The central enemy (perhaps a tribute to Ben Cortman from the novel) was particularly bad, attempting to create personality from something which was just laughable. A dreadful shame considering how good the rest of the film was - even the performance of Samantha the dog was outstanding.