I AM LEGEND [PG-13]

“It was different from the book. The book was better.”

Forgive us if we don’t trip over the Ottoman while rushing to congratulate you for pointing out the obvious by telling us that a movie is not a book. I suppose you walk around the house all day, pointing out that a dog is not a cat, a chair is not a stove and a decorative beverage decanter is not a Thighmaster (endorsed by Suzanne Somers). Thank you also for being up front with us and letting us know that you’re a Book Snob with a veiled hostility to us Movie Folk. It spares us from having to take any more time to get to know you further.

Sure, Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi novel, the genre classic I Am Legend, was a good book. It has been adapted twice already – as the cheapie The Last Man On Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price and as The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston. It even served as inspiration to George Romero’s 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead. Even though this latest version, which stars Will Smith and is directed by Constantine helmer Francis Lawrence, is a slightly uneven Frankensteining of both previous versions, it is still a good movie.

Future Oscar winner Smith plays Dr. Robert Neville, a former military virologist who appears to be the lone survivor of a global plague that killed 90% of the world’s population straightaway and turned the rest into “Darkseekers,” a race of nocturnal flesh-eating automatons. Neville, with his loyal German Shepard Samantha in tow, spends his waking hours foraging for supplies in a desolate New York, which, after nearly three years of inattention, is starting to be reclaimed by nature. At night, he barricades himself inside his fortified apartment and searches for a cure (and fortunately for us, he regularly flashes back to the events leading up to the plague.)

Lawrence and screenwriters Mark Protosevich (Poseidon) and Akiva Goldsman (The Davinci Code) do two notable things in telling the story. First, they (and the SFX team) do a brilliant job in creating New York, post-viral apocalypse (and yes, Poindexter, we know it was L.A. in the book.) From the grass growing through pavement cracks to gas prices at nearly $7.00 a gallon to the former zoo animals hunting deer in the streets, they create a haunting vision of a possible future. In this world, their main character ekes out an existence, populating his regular haunts (like the video store) with department store mannequins he addresses by name (a touch that Kiwi director Geoff Murphy employed in the overlooked and slightly similar sci-fi treat, The Quiet Earth.) Through these vestiges of civilization and connections to his previous life, we realize how fragile his mental state is.

It is when Neville snaps that things derail. Okay, maybe not derail, but get slightly off-track like in a Herbie movie when the car drives on its two side wheels for a while. The action-packed rush to a conclusion feels like a compromise, and the inevitable other survivors feel dropped-in. A chance to explore Neville’s pining for his lost wife and child is missed here. Seriously, if a 24-year-old Brazilian sweetie like Alice Braga (Lower City) showed up after three years of talking to the dog, humanizing shop window dummies and watching the same stale porn, the search for a cure could wait, at least for as long as it takes to make small talk in Portuguese and smoke a cigarette afterward.

Something else that is unexplored here is the nature of monstrosity. We only see Neville’s ugly side once, when he mows down a horde of Darkseekers while unsuccessfully engineering his own suicide. The title, I Am Legend, refers to how as a man who can walk around in the daytime and kill Darkseekers as they sleep, Neville is legendary, the horrific Grendel to these no-longer-human beings. It was this kind of post-War irony that fueled writers like Rod Serling to create “The Twilight Zone.” In this context, though, Smith’s squeaky-clean image prevents this kind of deep darkness from rearing, and the title is instead re-worked in a too-neat, too-upbeat coda that smacks of the titanic turd, The Postman.

Overall, however, it is a fun ride, made even more enjoyable and immersive in “large format” IMAX (presentations of which exclusively include the first six minutes of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, coming in July.) And even if the book may be more thoughtful and engaging, getting 20 million people to sit down and read is about as easy as fighting a city full of vampires and saving the world. –Robert Newton

AN APOCALYPTIC PLAGIARISM?:
AN UNAUTHORIZED VERSION OF ‘I AM LEGEND’ HITS DVD
Officially, there are only three movie versions of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend: the 1964 spaghetti horror flick The Last Man On Earth starring Vincent Price, the Charlton Heston oddity The Omega Man (1971) and now, I Am Legend starring Will Smith (see review, above.) Unofficially, however, there is a fourth – this one, just released from the folks at The Global Aslyum, called I Am Omega. The Asylum is best known for its knockoffs like The Transmorphers, The Davinci Treasure and Alien v. Hunter, and this one continues in that dubious tradition. Stuntman-turned-actor Mark Dacascos, who bears so much of a resemblance to the late Brandon Lee that he was cast in the Lee role in the series “The Crow: Stairway To Heaven” (the TV version of Lee’s morbidly popular 1994 swan song), plays the seemingly lone survivor of a worldwide plague. And he knows kung-fu, which he uses it on the zombies. And he wants to blow up Oxnard, California for some reason. Maybe Richard Matheson’s lawyers live there.