Alden Bates' Weblog
Feigning normality since 1973
Friday Night Movie: I Am Legend
Filed in: TV & Movies.
As something I'm thinking of making a bit of a regular thing, I went to see I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as Robert Neville, the last man alive after a virus wipes out 90% of Earth's population and turns the rest into zombie-vampires.
This movie is fantastic, and you should go and see it for Will Smith's incredible acting alone. Be warned though that the film makers take every opportunity to try and make you jump out of your seat, which is a pity because a) the film really didn't need that sort of thing, and b) I'm too young to have a heart attack. Robert Neville's slow descent into madness is beautifully done, as he attempts to cure as the virus, despite the fact it's been three years since the initial outbreak.
IMDB's trivia section for this movie mentions that at one point Michael Bay was going to direct. The mind boggles.
Edit: Now with spoilery rant (under the cut)
CGI zombie-vampires. What? Why did they need to be CGI, other than so they could scurry up walls in defiance of the law of gravity, which brings me to my rant:
Alien 3, which featured a CGI critter running along walls and ceilings, came out in 1992, so this is stuff from 16 years ago! And it didn't make any sense! Why would being undead suddenly give you Spider-man's wall-crawling ability? Was there radioactive spider venom in the formula for the virus?
Answers on a postcard.
Posted January 11, 2008 9:06 PM
To be fair, the wall-crawling ability of the dog-Alien in Alien 3 was way cool. The camera work for those sequences has yet to be topped in any motion picture I've ever seen. As for IAL, well, nothing could have lived up to my hopes for that movie - I'm just glad that hack Bay didnb't get his claws on it. The ending makes no bloody sense, and I agree 100% with Alden's crits re: the pointless CG, but on the whole IAL is that rare thing - an artistic A-film. Will Smith's superb performance was no shock to me...I knew he could handle drama, as he did in Six Degrees Of Separation and Ali...and just underlines how the razzing this casting choice got from online pundits was based purely on racism. Can you imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger as Neville? God, that woulda been terrible.
Posted by: Jeff Stone | January 15, 2008 9:37 PM