I can't believe I got excited about seeing this film when I heard it was being made. That will teach me to get excited about yet another butchered Hollywood adaptation of a classic novel. *sigh*
Based on the book by Richard Matheson (who also gave us The Incredible Shrinking Man and numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the classic Nightmare at 20,000 Feet; as well as writing several classic screenplays for British horror studio, Hammer), I Am Legend stars Will Smith as Robert Neville, a military scientist searching for a cure for the mutated cancer cure that has swept the earth like a plague, transforming those it infects into daylight-shunning vampires (although they're never named as such in the film).
Neville spends his days in an underground lab using captured vampires as lab-rats, driving around the deserted streets with his faithful canine companion hunting deer for food, and working his way through DVDs at his local video store. Several years after the end of the world as he's only up to G. Guess he doesn't really like movies all that much, huh?
Oh yeah, he also spends his time going mad from loneliness and solitude, expressed somewhat unconvincingly in his holding rather one-sided conversations with shop dummies.
It's all going swimmingly - interspersed with some flashbacks of the end of the world as we know it, and the death of his wife and child - until A) the vampires start fighting back, and proving that they're not the mindless monsters he thought they were; and B) another survivor just happens to show up at an extremely convenient moment. At which point the film turns to shit, abandons the original, magnificent ending of the book, and left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
To be fair, the scenes of dead New York are evocatively captured on screen (keep your eyes peeled for a Batman vs Superman poster in one scene, fanboys) and there's a couple of scenes, including one involving a diminishing band of sunlight and a couple of hellhounds, that are both tense and memorable. But when the monsters show up, they're basically just CGI cannon-fodder with little to distinguish them; and a couple of interesting subplots contrasting their growing intelligence with Neville's apparent ease in experimenting on his fellow human beings, are completely abandoned.
And God. GOD! Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to take our nice, rational story and let it be hijacked by the religious right? 'Cause that's what happens in the final scenes of the film. The pace and tension of the film completely collapses in the final act, supplanted by some tedious religious bullshit, while the ending feels like it belongs to another film altogether.
There's a great review analysing this particular aspect of the film over here, at Canada.com (and thanks to Jeremy Aarons to pointing towards it). Be warned though, it contains spoilers.
Basically, worth seeing for its first hour, but once the other survivors appear on the scene, time to abandon the cinema. But if you do want to see it, catch it at IMAX: that way you at least get to see the special preview of the opening six minutes of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight...
Two bloodcurdling screams out of five
11 comments:
Worst film of the year in my books. Atrocious. F*** God! Half a star for the dog who died way too early!
yep....started with the promise of lonely introspection.. failed to deliver.... then ended.
walked away with a WTF ?!?!
Cardiewardiewoo! It was fun tho
yes, i heard that the right-wing fuckos who rate movies for their compatibility with "christian values" got a big hard-on for this one. after they trashed the golden compass, of course [which i thought was pretty good, but then i'm a dirty heathen].
Excellent review Richard.
I totally agree. It started with such promise. I so wish they had combined the intense, realistic, (and, to me at least, F@#$ing scary!) zombie action from "28 Days Later" with the production values they could afford, instead we got of all that CGI bollocks.
Ah well...
And don't get me started on the "God" crap...ughh.
Wasn’t planning on seeing this one since I suspected it would be a crappy remake, but now I think I’ll have to see it when it reaches ‘weekly’ status at the vid store.
Yeah, it was a dud. Still, the dog was cool - and there were some nice ideas before it turned into another vampire flick - and I kind of like Will Smith as a leading actor, with his way of looking sad and anxious and doing the action-hero thing all at the same time.
I don't mind so much the religious sub-plot, as (I think was pointed out elsewhere), it's part of an ongoing argument - Will Smith kind of represents the rational man-of-science, as opposed to the faith-driven woman who arrives on the scene in the last third of the film. Anyway, the religious parts of our nature come out during times of catastrophe - that's partly why the Bible focuses on catastrophes and disasters, and conversely, why post-apocalyptic films always have a mythic element to them. ('Children of Men' did the same thing, but more subtly.)
And the other interesting thing about the film was the imagining of a post-man New York. There's been a lot of this lately. In the New Yorker recently, for instance, you can find several articles on New York before it was settled by the Dutch, and on New York when it was still an agrarian area.
A dud, but still interesting.
have a whinge why dont ya! gawd
Well I saw this movie this evening and I gotta tell ya that I nearly crapped my pants. I didn't think it was that bad. Any movie that keeps my palms sweaty for 90% of the movie gets two thumbs up from me.
IT started well - though got worse from the middle on.. Would have been best to keep the zombie guys in the dark. The best scene was when the zombie dudes were standing in the dark when he lost his dog.. The religious bullshit was...well bullshit - and destroyed the film totally. I did see it at IMAX so I got to see the first 6 min of Batman - so that was worth it:)
Post a Comment