I Am Legend - review
December 31st, 2007 by Frank
Dependably tense Horror/Drama with a great performance from Will Smith and a crap ending.
Review of I Am Legend
Rated as /5 on Dec 31 2007 by Frank
I Am Legend starts out well, showing great restraint by building tension gradually and knowing not to show it’s hand too soon. Will Smith brings a good blend of humour and pathos where many actors would have rolled out a tired old clichéd performance.
Smith manages to get us to actually care about a character in what is essentially a horror film, which I for one think is a great feat. Unfortunately the script lets him down as the dramatic elements of the film are eventually abandoned for more standard Hollywood fare.
Where the begining of the film showed restraint, the latter part of the film throws caution to the wind, as if they couldn’t figure out a fitting ending for the film they had begun.
The film’s premise is that a deadly virus has devastated earth, and Will Smith’s character Rovert Neville is a brilliant military scientist who is immune to the virus. Alone in New York city, apart from his canine companion Sam, he continues to research a cure for the virus while being careful not to fall prey to the victims of the virus who are now zombie like creatures.
During the first part of the film we see him review the results of his latest failed batch of tests for a cure, and we wait for the clever revelation which will lead to his discovery of a true cure. However, what we get instead is a flimsy and ridiculous plot device which one would expect from a lesser horror movie. This device is presumably meant to distract us from the original expectations such that we won’t notice the utterly crap ending to what began as a very promising horror drama.
Three stars for the entertainment given before the film degenerated into the worst kind of hollywood crap.
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December 31st, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I would have only given it 2 stars as the film overall is very disappointing. I too was impressed by the early restraint but since it never really built to anything it wasn’t so impressive. It seemed more like they only had half an hour of story and that restraint was really them stretching it out into 100 minutes.
I liked Will Smith’s performance too but it’s no more than I have come to expect from him after a string of fine performances in films like i Robot and The Pursuit of Happyness.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Yeah, I went with three because up until a certain key moment in the film I felt it was a four star… so I gave it three because I really did enjoy the most part of the film an awful lot.. but you’re right, at the end of the day it probably doesn’t deserve three… however, because there is no ‘no star’ rating on LouderVoice ‘We Own the Night’ got 1 star, so three stars is really two in a way…!!!
December 31st, 2007 at 6:50 pm
January 1st, 2008 at 8:40 am
Aw, that’s a shame. The trailer impressed me enough that I got the book out of the library. Unfortunately I was reading the last Gunslinger novel at the time and never read more than a dozen pages of it.
January 1st, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Ya it was a pity as the trailer looked good and I don’t think it would have been that difficult to turn it into a good movie.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 am
I still think I Am Legend was one of the better films of 2007. Seems like every one thinks that because I Am Legend more or less has a happy ending that it wasn’t the greatest movie. I am real tired of the movie snobs that keep such a negative attitude toward film to look at film in such a michosonictic and depressed view. I love it when the good guy wins and I love it when the superhero wins or the Jedi is victorius. Some of the best films of our time are so over looked. Oh well, what does my opinion matter. Go do something useful like check out this I Am Legend Fan Site and go see the movie and decide for yourself.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:23 am
Sorry my spell check was broke…
I’ll do better next time.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:33 am
[...] Smith manages to get us to actually care about a character in what is essentially a horror film, which I for one think is a great feat. Unfortunately the script lets him down as the dramatic elements of the film are eventually abandoned for more standard Hollywood fare. BifSniff I went to see I Am Legend today. It wasn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, but I did catch myself thinking it was a really long 1 hour 40 minutes! There were lots of great scenes of a completely deserted New York, but that was about the best of it. I think the most annoying thing about the film is it didn’t really go anywhere. It just sort-of meandered. I still think the trailer looks cool! TheOracle-BaseBlog I don’t think it’s an entertaining film where you leave your brain at the theatre doors; rather, it’s one that makes you think. However, the final act of the film is a letdown - yes there’s lots of Hollywood action schlock, yadda yadda plus a convenient ending that will no doubt appeal to the mainstream moviegoing audiences at large.. but the first two acts makes it worth watching, especially if you’re a sci-fi buff. GodChased The film held my wife and I in its grip until the very end (we sat, unmoving, even as the credits rolled) but we can see where the critics are coming from. There was, for example, a religious element introduced late in the movie that seemed a bit tacked on. [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
[...] Have you seen this: 11/13/2007: Cork Actress on TG4 « I Am Legend - review [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Just goes to show that the brits can still do things better than the yanks. I am legend was an extremely poor rip off of the 28 days/weeks later films. While the budget for 28 days later was a third of the size of Will Smiths Fee (Where his shining moment amounts to crucifying Bob Marley tunes), Hollywood managed to create, shit monsters, shit heroes and inject all of the cheesy populist moralism I could handle about tolerance and racism. Did anyone notice that all the good guys were either Black or Hispanic while ALL the monsters were white(ish)?
Call me paranoid but I think it’s worth taking a look at Hollywoods new P.C. race/class stereotyping. Or is that really nerdy?
Anyway 28 weeks later is far superior and if anyone wants to see genuinely scary zombie type infecto’s this is the best I have ever seen. I still get the shivers when I wake up in the middle of the night and find a zombie in my bed, until I realise it’s only my wife.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Er… all the monsters were white because the virus affected skin pigmentation…! Not sure there was any racial undertone myself… and given the lack of human characters in the film I think it’s a hard point to justify!
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 pm
White people are white because of an affected skin pigmentation. Undertones Frank, Undertones.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I hated the ending of this movie. The book’s ending was far better with Dr. Neville becoming a legend to the Night Seekers. I think if they would have stuck to the book a bit more, this movie would really be something. Oh, and the CGI was disgusting for it’s time.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:20 am
That’s an interesting argument you put forward about the race/class stereotyping. From a film student point of view like. I’ll be watching out for it in future.
I agree 28 Days Later was a better version of what I Am Legend was trying to be. Although I’m not a big fan of 28 Days Later either (while I do respect what they achieved). I was saying as much to my girlfriend but she hadn’t seen 28 Days Later so that was kind of the end of that conversation. ;P
January 4th, 2008 at 1:43 am
The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston was an earlier version based on the same book - it seems the ending was closer to the book. Unfortunately I got bored with it when I was watching it and never made it to the end. I’d be interested in watching it again now though - maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
If you can, watch a film called from London to Brighton, It’s a fantastic independent British film about sexual exploitation in the underbelly of the U.K. See if you spot the gender stereotyping Eoin and I’ll award you honorary film student of the year.
I recently met the producer of the film and when I asked him about it he said he hadn’t noticed, and no-one had ever mentioned it at all, but now that he thought about it he admitted that there was not one redeeming quality in any of the male characters in the film. This is strange, even if the subject matter is about sexual exploitation to portray ALL males as weak, perverted and cruel.
This may sound like nit picking, but in a world that has become completely obsessed about how women and minorities are portrayed in the media, the same standards don’t seem to apply to whites, especially males, double especially wasp males, triple especially Christian white males.
I find this interesting, not because I too was film student but because I like to think about modern society in general.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
True enough, there are a lot of cases these days on television and advertising which show treatment of men which would be completely unacceptable if the sexes of the characters was reversed. For example that woman who flashes the guy in the office to feel ‘naughty’ after having Malteasers or something. If an ad came out where a guy flashed a woman in the office would that be acceptable?
Still not sure the argument is applicable to I Am Legend of course.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
There’s an interesting series of YouTube videos in that Frank!
January 7th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Why is that Barack Obama is called ‘Americas first black presidential candidate’ when he is in fact half white.
Ever wondered why the media keep banging on about Obama being ‘black’ all the time, when he is about as ‘black’ as Hilary Clinton when you put him alongside the average American black living their lives as an atypical black american.
Barack aint black.
Barack has a black father and a white mother, therefore he is mixed race not black.
Nor is he ‘culturally black’ as he doesnt do bling, wanna be a rap star, run his own gang, play in the NFL, sell drugs and talk about his ho’s which are all features of the predominant black ‘ Bling Culture ‘ infecting the wider black community at this moment in history. Nor is he one of the afro-centric ‘Black Isis’ cultists nor is he a sports star nor a black radical.
He is simply a typical colourless liberal with a melatonin gene that gives him a dark skin.
He is neither black nor white, he is the pap of the future race - a misceginated, cultureless, consumer in the American consumer society.
He is the ultimate rootless consumer adrift in a flood of media created false needs whose existence and status is predicated solely on what brands he wears and not what he is or where comes from.
He aint black, he aint white - he’s Armani and GAP.
He represents nothing but the dead soul of the once great America, an empty void of endless desires, a landfill of discarded commodities, a lackey in a land of crack heads, fundamentalist christians, criminals and obese idiots that will eventually be ruled by an raceless elite bred simply to ensure the system continues to run.
So he is neither racially black, nor culturally black - but they still call him black.
Why ?
The reason is because the media and Hollywood in particular have been flooding society with the notion of a black president for decades. America has been conditioned to support Barack Obama as a Black president through their TV’s since the 1967 film The Heat of the Night which first featured the Black Hero as the archetype of the New Politics.
The New Politics is no longer about politics.
The New Politics is all about conditioning.
The New Politics is the use of the media, TV, Hollywood movies and all cultural transmitters to use the issue of race and anti-racism as the basis of individuals political choices.
The New Politics is about the media creating ‘false needs’ and then satisfying them -such as it has been doing with advertising for decades. In this case the false need that has been generated is within whites, who have been conditoned to believe that America ‘needs’ to ‘heal’ to ‘recover’ from the ‘racism’ of the past and to ‘unite’ under a ‘black man’ as a way to show their ‘guilt’ and ‘repentance’ for the crimes of the past - and the guilt they feel for being white, wealthy and not black.
Because Whites built America and made it rich and powerful, the media have made them feel guilty for this and blamed the whites and the white culture for black underachievement - instead of blacks being responsible for themselves whites have been made to feel guilty for their failures.
This is not only inherently racist in that it presupposes that ;
1) Blacks are incapable of standing on their own feet without whitey helping them
2) That blacks are somehow less responsible for their own actions and therefore that we should cut them some slack simply because they have black skins
3) That whites are somehow uniquely evil as it all whiteys fault for da state of da black community (and never the fault of the blacks themselves)
4) That whitey has a ‘racial obligation’ to help those racial groups who do not achieve whiteys level of culture
What Americans have been taught to feel is that they are all criminals simply because they are white, and that therefore they should atone for this by prostrating themselves at the feet of a ‘black president’ as a way of redeeming themselves from this racial inherited sin.
In every TV show or Hollywood film these days we have the same figures, the Black Hero fighting racism/social injustice against bigoted/priveliged whites.
From David and Wayne Palmer in the 24 series, Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty, Will Smith as the hero anti-racist / scientist who saves the world in I am Legend, the black Jesus in the Maddonna Like A Prayer video, the endless Black cop / fireman, rocket scientist etc in the US tv shows to the endless crap TV dramas about ‘racism’ on US tv.
The process of preparing the US public for voting for a ‘black president’ has been part of Hollywoods agenda for decades, filled as it with idiot white liberals, black radicals and Jewish activists.
The fact is that every American is born and raised sucking on the big TV tit.
They are stuck in front of the TV from babies and once hooked, are never weaned off it.
The TV tit is what controls America not the president.
Americans, and most Europeans and British people, are slaves to the media.
They never stop sucking at that tit. They crave it as the junkie craves the fix that he knows is slowly killing him.
As we live in atomised societies with no meaning anymore and with no central directing purpose, there is no meaning to existence anymore.
God is dead, the universe is infinite, Man is an ape, nationalism is a crime, moral and cultural relativism rule alongside mindless obedience to consumerism, ethnic loyalty is racism - there is no meaning anymore for the average Mass Animal that eats, sleeps, works, consumes, reproduces and then dies.
Therefore in the absence of meaning, the media is god.
As long as that TV tit keeps pumping out its poisonous milk, the more they will keep sucking on it.
And the older they get the more infantile they get. The longer they suck on the tit, the faster they replace their individuality with consumer obedience.
All that is left is for them to believe in is what they see on TV.
Note that you never see documentaries about The Zebra Killings, the Death Angels of the Nation of Islam, the mad black serial killers, the Beltway Snipers - instead you see films about black presidents and black gangsters.
The Black President saves the world, whilst the black gangster kills his black athlete cousin in a drug deal going down wrong but blames the white man and ‘racism’ for his crimes and then dies at the hand of the brutal white cop, coughing up blood and repenting his sins.
Its all total bollocks.
Its all so boring.
Its why all the bad guys are only allowed to be white in films these days and usually blonde, English or Russian and a racist.
The black guy is always the president, cop or detective that saves the day.
This is not an election, this is a media coup d’etat.
This election is not about politics, but about conditioning.
Every time some journalist talks about a ‘black president’ then analyse the image that comes in your head.
If you have the vision of morgan freeman or David Palmer in 24 then you are a victim of conditioning.
If you vote because of that image - then you are nothing but a brainwashed slave.
If you vote Obama simply because he is black, then you are the sort of person that would vote for Shrek if told too.
That means you are not an individual, that simply means you are a slave.
January 7th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
How are you getting on with that new telly of yours Ed?
January 7th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Ha ha! all 46 inches of it.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Nearly as wide as your second last post was long!!
January 7th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Not having any young daughters I was quite unaware of the “wildly successful” Bratz dolls or the recent movie featuring them. The dolls are aimed at 4-8-year-old girls, with “dewy lips, fishnet stockings and barely-there miniskirts.
Earlier this year, a report from the American Psychological Assn. even mentioned the Bratz dolls by name and said ‘it is worrisome when dolls designed specifically for 4- to 8-year-olds are associated with an objectified adult sexuality.’ ” So we have the cultural subversion theme going on: “ten-inch tall hoochie mamas” for little girls to play with. Director Sean McNamara’s first reaction to the dolls is revealing: “These aren’t cute dolls — they look like sluts.”
But for the movie, they probably figured that the teenage girls as sluts theme would mean that the girls would actually have to act slutty rather than just look slutty. That would bring about an R-rating or worse, and therefore cut down on the profits. So the hoochie mama theme was downplayed in favor of a strong multicultural conflict between multi-race good guys versus “country club white” bad guys. The bad guys are led by “student-body president Meredith, who is platinum blond, affluent, haughty and in possession of both nefarious plans to rule the school and a pampered pooch named (ahem) Paris.”
On the other hand, the Bratz “are the urban poly-hues of a Benetton ad”: one “lily-white,” one African-American, one Asian, and one Latino (played by the daughter of an Australian Jew and a Spanish Catholic). So there is a Jewish theme as well: “The loopy vision of a Jewish grandmother who, with no explanation, has a mariachi band strumming away and munching on bagels in her kitchen.”
All of the non-white characters look about as white as possible while nevertheless retaining distinctive racial characteristics. This doubtless makes the characters more attractive to white girls who constitute the core audience for the movie. After all, it’s natural to be attracted to those like yourself (part of the deep structure of Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory)— even when the ingroup crosses racial lines. Having a dark-skinned Muslim character dressed in a Burkha would definitely ruin the aura.
The driving force behind Bratz is Avi Arad, an Israeli-American who is very big on diversity, at least for America: “The first thing I saw in them was diversity.” … “I really liked the idea that they had a Latino girl, an Asian girl, an African American girl and a lily-white kid. They show that your color is not going to set up your path in life. And I think that works because, among kids, it’s becoming more and more of ‘one world for a change.’”
The dolls and the movie are just the beginning. A Broadway musical and sequels to the movie will in due time be coming to theaters near you. Perhaps in the sequels they can continue with the “diversity is good — white without diversity is bad” theme, but maybe spice it up with some slutty behavior more in line with what the Bratz dolls are all about.
Hey Avi, how about a movie aimed at Israeli kids? I’ve got the perfect plot. A Jewish girl from Israel, an Israeli Arab, a Palestinian Muslim from the West Bank, and an Arab Christian do battle against a stereotypically evil Jewish-Israeli girl. A religiously fundamentalist West Bank settler who wants all Arabs removed from Israel and the occupied territories would be perfect. Or we could play it safe and have the bad guy be a Jewish girl who simply wants Israel to remain a Jewish state. Since you’re into physical stereotypes, the evil Jewish girl could have all the stereotypical Jewish physical features—something right out of Der Sturmer, and we could even do an Israeli version of the “Jewish American Princess” bit. I’m telling you, Avi, this idea has legs. Have your people call me. We’ll do lunch.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 am
Entertaining movie but not a believable story. I recommend reading All of Yesterdays Tomorrows. Better ending and more believable story.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:14 am
[...] When I reviewed I Am Legend here on BifSniff I said of the ending: what we get instead is a flimsy and ridiculous plot device which one would expect from a lesser horror movie. This device is presumably meant to distract us from the original expectations such that we won’t notice the utterly crap ending to what began as a very promising horror drama. [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:55 am
I LOVED the comment about the Bratz. Especially the part about the dog named (ahem) Paris.LOL!!
May 25th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
“…Nor is he ‘culturally black’ as he doesnt do bling, wanna be a rap star”
It is here that I realized that you were a retard.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:17 am
I’m quite surprised at any negative reactions to this thought provoking film. Seems that I AM LEGEND appeals more to the audience with an in-depth insight of what is being seen and what is not being said.
In this movie, Smith portrays a type of Christ who search for the answer to a new life (symbolized by butterflies) and also daily trying to rid himself of the guilt of playing a part in the entire fiasco. One has to appreciate his driven focus to accomplish a goal that will rectify all that is wrong in the world.
Regarding acting … simply supurb! How many people can carry a film, practically solo, and keep you on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen next - with such intensity? Smith’s acting was so natural that … many missed the point of this masterpiece. In my opinion, Smith was robbed on the Oscar in 2007. He was brilliant to say the least. Think of the emotions of loosing a family, best friend, colleagues, friends and the world yet maintaining his gut wrenching calling … EV-E-RY DAY. Makes me wonder could I carry out my own calling to that degree. Could you carry out yours ?? http://itsourrealitymagazine.com/legend.htm
June 27th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hi itsourrealitymagazine,
I haven’t seen the movie, but after your thought provoking review I must give it a chance. I looked at your magazine website and was totally blown away. I would love to be a part of what you are doing. I’ll be in contact. Thanks Vicky