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Then, somewhere in the '80s, the movie landscape shifted, and "action" became its own genre, regardless of whether it also included other genre elements. Die Hard was no longer a cop movie, it was an action film; even James Bond films became action movies, with less emphasis on Bond's cunning and skill, and more focus on...> ...explosions. Which leads us to this latest version of I Am Legend. Yeah, okay, Mike, I know that you think the first half is good, that it captures the novel's sense of quiet and desolation. Well, I'm going to argue you on that shortly, but for now let me just say this: Any genuine feeling or pace the first half builds up is shattered by a final act that not only betrays the title of the film and the source material, but ends in some of the most egregious explosions ever employed by any action film. Yep, I'm categorizing I Am Legend as an action film, not science fiction or horror. It has a few bits of science, which feel neither particularly real nor fantastic; and despite a few jolts, its primary concern doesn't seem to be to terrify its audience. What we are presented with up front is a car chase, no more than 15 minutes into the film. Robert Neville (Will Smith) and his trusty canine sidekick Sam are in high-speed pursuit of a herd of deer through a deserted and overgrown cityscape. Neville drives like a madman, careening his muscle car around corners, through construction zones and past obstructions as if he's barreling after bad guys. Shortly thereafter the muscle car (inexplicably) vanishes from the film, and the plot settles down into an exploration of what it would be like to be the last man in Manhattan. The screenwriting credits include an acknowledgement to the writers of the last attempt to film Richard Matheson's landmark novel, 1971's The Omega Man, and indeed this current version has borrowed a number of elements from that film: Neville's use of mannequins as stand-ins for real companions, his obsession with old films. Unfortunately, what it hasn't borrowed are the elements that gave The Omega Man any sense of tension: The nightly attacks on Neville's barricaded compound by the infected survivors of a virus, their creepy intelligence and sort of icky admiration of Neville. The new infected are CGI zombies ala 28 Days Later, fast-moving albinos who can unhinge their jaws to make their mouths flap around when they roar. They look as bad as that sounds, and their behavior is as poorly outlined as their visualizations. At one point, Neville tells us they've completely devolved beyond any human behavior, and yet they manage to lay a diabolically intelligent trap for Neville. Even though Neville hears them outside at night, they miraculously never attack his refuge until the end, at which point we learn that Neville—a doctor—has planted explosives in about a four-block radius around his house. Too bad Neville didn't stop to consider that blowing up this much of Manhattan might blow up part of his house, too. But then again, he's only a brilliant medical man; guess he slept through half of his pyrotechnics classes in medical school. Will Smith makes a likable Neville, but believable he ain't. He looks neither military nor medical (I'm still not sure just exactly what he was supposed to be, back before PCP-laced zombies showed up and he still had a day job), and it certainly doesn't help that we're told, at the film's conclusion, that he's 52 years old (!). No, the film's finest performance is, without question, offered up by his German shepherd sidekick Sam, who gives the story whatever pathos it has. One welcome trend on display in both I Am Legend and No Country for Old Men is the absence of a nonstop, pounding score. Legend is, for the most part, blissfully free of the throbbing synth beats that have characterized action films of the past, and listening only to Smith panting in fear adds far more dread to the film's few effective scenes (especially one in which he follows the dog into a dark building). Perhaps the most ironic element of a film that's based on a 1954 book and has been filmed twice previously (once in 1964 as the Vincent Price vehicle Last Man on Earth and again with 1971's The Omega Man) is that the original half-a-century old plot is far more thought-provoking and subversive than this new version. Matheson's novel not only offered a scientific explanation for vampires, it went so far as to suggest the evolution of human society into something new, something in which Neville—the last human being—is rightly regarded as a legendary creature; heck, even The Omega Man suggested the hippies had taken over. This new version, however, offers us not a climax featuring a new society, but rather one that's entirely old-fashioned—a colony of survivors somewhere in Vermont, complete with waving inhabitants and a cute little white-painted chapel; we're even told that our protagonists have been led to this place entirely by the voice of God. Remember what I said upfront about how this ain't science fiction? Like an episode of the recent televised mess Masters of Science Fiction ("The Awakening"), this is really just old-time religion dressed up in a shiny new scifi suit. I suppose it's naive of me to expect something more from Bush-age cinema than explosions and Christianity, but it still rankles to see just how far we haven't come in 50 years.
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How does that work? How is that possible? Richard Matheson's cult novel I Am Legend has been filmed twice before. Once as The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, which, for all its myriad boring-as-watching-shellac-harden faults, at least got a couple of Matheson’s more abstract themes correct. And it was filmed a second time as the hysterical Barry Goldwater fever dream The Omega Man starring the NRA's most famous spokes-sniper, Charlton Heston. The Omega Man is truly one of the most Republican horror movies ever made, featuring dirty hippies as the heirs of western culture and a bad guy in the form of Anthony Zerbe who is both a Charles Manson-like cult leader and a member of the evil Liberal Media. There’s a beauty to the Orange County paranoia that it embodies. I Am Legend, the version of Matheson’s novel that should, by all rights, have been the biggest, dumbest and loudest—directed by a guy who makes Britney Spears videos!—feels the most restrained and intelligent version of the story. Now, I’m perfectly willing to put forward the idea that that assessment is knocking around my brain because for years, this project was cooked as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, a prospect that seems much more terrifying than a killer virus decimating six billion and turning the survivors into emaciated, cannibalistic, bald Ian Curtis impersonators. Sure, I Am Legend has its share of action and scares. But what director Francis Lawrence has best captured is the creeping terror of a guy all by himself slowing unraveling as he drowns in loneliness. Up until the utterly appalling third act that hangs like a stubborn log of shit from the buttocks of Apollo, there’s a great balance between the pulp thrills and the introspective, existentialism-lite aspects of the flick. Example? Without giving away too much, after we’ve seen a really, terrifyingly plausible depiction of a gutted New York, there’s the scene that Lisa mentions featuring Will Smith as Robert Neville hunting deer from his mega-macho-bitchin’ muscle car. That scene, just before the credits roll, leads to one of the best “pat the puppy” scenes I’ve ever seen. (A “pat the puppy” scene is one in which the audience is manipulated into liking a character because as soon as we meet him or her, he or she does something nice that reveals a noble aspect of his or her character.) Now, I want to let you guys know that the screenwriters of I Am Legend, Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, are two writers I abhor. I have literally sat in dentists’ chairs with less apprehension than I have felt while parking my ass in theater seats to screen movies written by these two primates too talentless to get that infinite-monkeys-writing-Hamlet gig. (Think I’m exaggerating? What would you rather endure, a really vigorous teeth cleaning and check up, or a double bill of The Da Vinci Code and Poseidon? No? OK, make it a triple bill and finish with Batman & Robin.) When I say this is one of the best “pat the puppy” scenes ever written, you gotta dig just how high a mark of praise that is. Think about it. How would you establish the character of Fredrick Brown’s proverbial Last Man on Earth? With whom would you have him interact? And then you gotta find a way to integrate that establishment of character into action scenes that’ll grab the attention of the mouth-breathers? It’s quite a feat. Now, once you’ve established the character of the Last Man on Earth, how do you reveal more about the guy? I Am Legend goes further with the “pat the puppy” motif via an actual puppy, Abby the German Shepherd in the role of Sam the German Shepherd. Sam functions in the same way that the daemons of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass do. Sam is a furry creature who is the venue through which our hero/heroine’s internal thoughts are externalized. Sam’s what Bandit would be if Johnny Quest had never met Hadji. The aspects of Neville’s character revealed by Sam show a guy slowly unraveling, as would any person in Neville’s situation, and at the same time, they provide exposition. It’s pretty good writing, dammit. Also, the flashbacks establishing just what the hell happened to the world are much more than expositional pyrotechnics; they reveal a lot about Neville the person, and have the feel of introspection even while they lay out background. This introspection, this unraveling of Neville, in terms of impact and tone, owes less to The Omega Man than it does to Roman Polanksi's The Tenant. Now, I Am Legend has its problems. The CGI mutants are absurd-looking Stretch Armstrongs pulled a little too far in the vertical with the body/fat ratio of Iggy Pop. Lisa brought up their distending jaws, which are really stupid. There are logic problems, which I won’t detail for the sake of avoiding spoilers. And... there’s that last fucking act. The last act is defined by some thematic baggage that comes out of left field, and that doesn't mesh with the rest of the movie. The shift in dramatic and thematic gears feels like a cheat, something the screenwriters slapped together when they realized they had to wrap up this movie in a hurry before the strike hit. Picture, if you will, Jaws without Robert Shaw giving the Indianapolis speech, but a theological discourse more suited for the last act of The Exorcist, and that discourse defining the rest of the confrontation with the shark. The use of this discourse, this rhetoric and its attendant iconography, is worse than your standard “and with a single bound Jack was free” writing. Given the post-9/11 buttons that I Am Legend tries to push (New York is referred to as “Ground Zero” throughout the movie), relying on this bullshit is an abdication of moral obligation and any sense of responsible or reasonable storytelling. This isn’t deus ex machina. It’s kitsch ex machina. A representation of normalcy (in the Warren G. Harding sense) with white picket fences, a Protestant chapel, and an American Flag when the whole fucking premise of the movie has rested on the notion of all that being destroyed. It’s like Lot looking back at Sodom and seeing a shiny new strip mall with a Starbucks through the fire and smoke. It’s an insult. You don’t destroy the world of normalcy (in the Harding sense), throw up some bullshit Red State jerk off fantasy of a Potemkin Village and say, “Hey! Here’s a happy ending, kiddies! Merry Christmas!” You gotta fucking earn a happy ending in this context, you pussies. Anything else is just what SF writer and critic Brian Aldiss calls a “cozy catastrophe,” in which billions of people die just so a narrow, bourgeois sense of propriety and entitlement can be the last ideology standing... atop a mountain of skulls. The good parts of I Am Legend are very good. I’m willing to forgive the movie its rotten last act, but that has more to do with the fact that I’ve edited that last act from my memories of the rest of the movie. It is worth seeing. Just be ready for a cheat.
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SPECIAL NOTE FROM GAUNTLET PUBLISHER BARRY HOFFMAN: Dear Lisa Morton, I just read your review of the latest incarnation of I AM LEGEND. As publisher of Gauntlet Press who has published more than a dozen Matheson books there is one point I have to comment upon. Matheson wrote the original (censored and never produced) script for I AM LEGEND which pretty much sticks to the main story line of the novel (he admits he made some concessions; one at the end, but it's certainly not a "Hollywood" ending. Far from it—it is a more depressing ending than the novel—but GOOD. We've published his script and anyone who sees the Smith vehicle should read Matheson's script. In his script there are no holes and there is far more logic. It is just as terrifying and Neville's loss of his daughter and wife is handled far more effectively. As I said above, Matheson's script was censored. Both the British Censor Board and the MPAA had problems with the film Matheson sold to Hammer Films. To their credit, neither Matheson nor Hammer made changes in the original script (too much "gruesome" stuff, too many "damns" and the like and, heaven forbid, an illicit relationship between Neville and Ruth, as if there were a priest to bless their union) and somehow Warner Bros. purchased rights to the book and Matheson was NEVER consulted on any of the films that were produced. Matheson himself liked Will Smith's portrayal of Neville, but was upset with how Ruth and Neville met (in his script and in the book, their meeting is handled far more effectively). And, he wasn't happy with the ending. The shame of it is that (1) Matheson doesn't receive a penny for this blockbuster, and (2) because of its success, his script will probably never be produced. THAT is the definitive I AM LEGEND.
Best, (NOTE: Matheson's screenplay is included in the Gauntlet title BLOODLINES: DRACULA, I AM LEGEND AND OTHER VAMPIRE STORIES.) |
Click below to read Lisa's and Mike's (and before that Mike's and Gemma Files') other throw-downs:
