I Just Saw I AM LEGEND (Spoilers Inside)

[THUNDER HANDS]

What a big letdown.

I don't mean overall. For the first 90% of the movie, it's a great setup, with an eerie deserted Manhattan island and Will Smith and his dog taking on vampires and hunting deer and fighting off lions and stuff.

really cool.

Having read the book, and not particularly liking the ending of the book, I was hopeful for a better ending in the movie.

No luck. I think they actually made it worse.

In the book Robert Neville gets tricked by a half-human half-vampire woman and gets killed (we presume) by the leader of the vampires while an angry mob of vampires cheers it on.

In the movie, Neville gets trapped ... okay, hold on ...


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SPOILERS AHEAD
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Where was I?

Oh yeah, Neville gets trapped in his basement lab where he's experimenting on infected humans and right before they're about to break in and kill him, he discovers his cure works, takes a blood sample, hands it to a mexican woman and a kid (don't ask) and hides them in a furnace thingy before taking a grenade (?) and blowing up his lab, and the invading horde of vampires.

Then the last scene in the movie is the mexican woman and the kid driving to Vermont where other immune humans have set up a camp. Her voiceover says Robert Neville became a legend because he saved humanity.

Oy. Where to begin?

First, the best aspect of the book was that it was called "I AM LEGEND" because the vampires considered him a legend because he was, literally, the last man on earth and was able to hunt them down during the day and kill him. They were just as afraid of him as he was of them.

In this, the vampires don't act like humans at all, they certainly don't speak. Even though, apparently, they're able to raise vampire dogs and sic them on Neville and his dog in an elaborate trap.

The next problem with the movie is the dog itself. A good part of the book, and one of the best aspects of it, is Neville discovering the dog and trying to make it comfortable enough around him to become friends with it. In the movie, he already had the dog before the outbreak of the virus.

And the last problem is the woman and the kid. They served no purpose. They came into the movie at tne end, and when they did the whole film just fell off a cliff.

Robert Neville went from being a pretty cool, survivalist/crazy person to a guy who was playing Bob Marley albums for this chick who's trying to convince him to leave his home and research and come with her to Vermont because "God told me" there was a settlement there.

They didn't need to be in the movie. The film would have worked much better if the vampires just attacked Neville's house on their own instead of having had to "follow" them back from when Neville decided to "kill himself" after his dog died, which is the point in the movie when the woman and the kid showed up.

There's something nice and unique about a movie with one character, and one character only. The film was working great before they showed up. The completely tailed off and became a lame copy of 28 Days Later.

Meh.

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. The Quiet Earth.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0089869/?fr=c2M9MXxsbT01MDB8ZmI9dXx4PTB8dHQ9MXxteD0yMHx5PTB8aHRtbD0xfGNoPTF8Y289MXxwbj0wfGZ0PTF8a3c9MXxzaXRlPWRmfHE9dGhlIHF1aWV0IGVhcnRofG5tPTE_;fc=1;ft=20#comment

[quip]

2. Even though there were plenty of characters in Castaway, I felt sense of isolation

much stronger in that movie than in IAL. I blame Sam. Sam offered too much companionship for me to buy that Robert was going mad. Too much soundtrack, too. I know it helps with the marketing aspect, but it totally ruined the atmosphere of the movie for me.