Apocalypse Nah

[December 12th, 2007]

Dr. Robert Neville, the hero of Richard Matheson’s 1954 pulp novel I Am Legend , has had quite the schizophrenic run on screen. Sure, the basic premise of Matheson’s existential survival story has remained intact—a brilliant doctor is, as far as he knows, the last man on Earth, and he futilely strives for a cure to the plague that wiped out the majority of the human population, leaving all survivors bloodthirsty monsters with an aversion to sunlight.

The difference is in the execution. In the first adaptation of the book, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth , Vincent Price spoke mostly in voice-over, battling his insanity and a horde of zombie-like monsters. Neville (well, Morgan in the film) was a thinking man’s hero in a B-movie environment, a hero at much at battle with his psyche as his enemies. In 1971, that thinking man went out the window with The Omega Man , as Charlton Heston cruised around a devastated New York, firing a machine gun and letting his metaphoric cock swing. Neville was still brilliant, but now he was a scientist parading around in a one-piece military suit like one of Charlie’s hairier Angels. Chuck’s adversaries were mutants, cultish politicos and pus-covered, jive-talking Black Panther albinos. It was loud, stupid, campy and awesome.

Now comes Will Smith in I Am Legend , the most expensive—and faithful—adaptation of Matheson’s text. Here, Smith’s ingenious Neville is deteriorating from within and fighting hordes of vampiric humanoids. Neville’s a badass to be sure, but Smith plays him as a man in constant fear, with only his trusty dog to confide in (hey, it’s a hell of a lot better than Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball). His Freshness holds the screen where most—paging Mr. Heston—would resort to ham and cheese. Smith’s portrayal is simplistic and primal. His struggle is one of constant fear, and the film often oozes with tension.

But not often enough.

The real problem with I Am Legend is that the apocalypse is never palpable. Neville talks of billions of lives lost, yet there are no corpses, no traces of death, save the seas of abandoned cars. As with the superior 28 Days Later , shots of the big city as a ghost town are inherently eerie. In flashbacks, we see the fall of civilization playing out like the last 30 minutes of Children of Men . Neville’s haunted by these nightmares, which are shot with razor precision and overwhelming dread. Yet these moments of tension are few and far between, and their strength simply exposes the weakness of the main plot line.

It doesn’t help that New York is populated by herds of computer-generated animals that look like refugees from Evan Almighty . In fact, all non-humans—including humanoids—are composed of bad CGI except Neville’s dog, and even she morphs into a cartoon when the action gets hot. Despite a soaring budget, the infected creatures stalking Neville look like something out of an Aphex Twin video, or organic counterparts to the cyborgs of I, Robot . If the low-budget horror flick The Descent proved anything, it’s that a guy in makeup still looks better than a CGI ghoul, especially when it’s dark.

Still, I Am Legend is an entertaining enough thriller. Director Francis Lawrence (Constantine ) peppers the film with spooky imagery and white-knuckle action. At just over 90 minutes, it’s a tidy little package, if a touch underwhelming. The biggest problem—the one that prevents I Am Legend from rising above mediocrity—is that it sometimes grabs you by the balls, yet it’s afraid to twist like an apocalypse should.