'I am Legend'
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont

If you’ve turned to this review in the hope of working out whether Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend is worth a look then let me give you your answer now so that you can move on with your life: no. I am Legend is clearly the result of a series of late-in-the-day re-writes and re-shoots that transformed a tale of alienation and despair into a muddled and confused religious allegory that makes The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe look like Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, such is the smug simple-mindedness of its spirituality.

I am Legend is the story of someone who is supposedly the last man left alive on Earth after a cure for cancer goes wrong, killing off most of the population and turning some into vampires or, Dark Seekers as the film calls them (because obviously now we’ve all seen Interview with the Vampire and Buffy we can’t possibly accept the idea that vampires are slavering predators rather than achingly beautiful metrosexual types who enjoy a rare steak from time to time). With only his dog for company, Robert Neville is working on a cure for this disease and eking out an existence from the ruins of New York. However, one day he abducts a female vampire and attracts the attention of a particularly intelligent male vampire who then lays traps and ambushes for Neville and nearly kills him. Out of the blue, some other survivors turn up and rescue Neville but they allow the vamps to track them to his house. Walled up in the cellar after a vampire attack overcomes all of his defences, Neville pleads with the vampires that he can cure them, but sensing that the vampires aren’t interested in being saved, he has a religious epiphany and sacrifices himself so that the other survivors can escape to the hills and live in what looks a lot like the kind of compound favoured by lunatic cults; huge walls, men with guns and sinister looming churches.

Richard Matheson’s original book is, like most of Matheson’s works, all about alienation and despair and the film is undeniably at its best when it stays within the confines of Matheson’s original story. For example, the opening half hour boasts striking and memorable scenes of Will Smith hunting deer through the abandoned streets of Manhattan, creating a fantastic sense of isolation. The film also deals with the central character’s fraying sanity by showing him conversing with his dog and a number of mannequins he has set up in a DVD shop in order to feel less alone. Additionally, the film’s climax reprises Matheson’s idea of the vampires not being “Sick” or in need of “Saving” but rather being a different species, just as horrified by us as we are by them. Unfortunately, the film-makers lack the stomach for making a film as down-beat as Matheson’s original story and they feel the need to start messing.

Neither of Matheson’s central themes were ever going to play well in Jesusland, USA. The first theme riffs on the idea of us being all alone in the universe while the second rejects the presumed need for moral leadership and salvation that is catered to by the Campbellian Christ/Hero myth. Unfortunately, if you are going to make a film about the last man on Earth battling vampires, you’re kind of stuck with both of these ideas. This forces the film-makers to spend the last ten minutes of the film rushing the central character through a short plot arc that effectively moves him from the belief that life is meaningless and devoid of any hope of salvation to the more box office-friendly idea that everything is going to be okay in the end because we are all God’s children. How do you do that? Easy... have God turn up in the shape of a giant glass butterfly. The thematic gearshift is hilariously sudden, as within a space of 10 minutes we go from Will Smith angrily declaring that there is no God to the suggestion that Will Smith might well be Jesus (well, either him or Bob Marley but then if you smoke as much weed as Marley did, you’d think you were Jesus too).

There are few things so dull as a genre critic harrumphing about a film’s failure to stick to the source material so let me make it clear that my problem with I am Legend is not that God turns up. It’s that God turns up in such a way that he sweeps all doubt under the rug thereby undermining the darker themes that give the story much of its impact. Had the film-makers had the courage to make speculation about the meaning of life a part of the film then I would have at least respected the film’s ideas. But to shift the film’s world from a bleak and meaningless hell to one full of fluffy bunnies and benevolent bearded deities in only 10 minutes suggests that it is obvious that God exists and that he loves us. This is not only fiercely anti-intellectual, it is also shows a cravenly commercial lack of respect for the rules of basic story-telling and exposition. What destroys I am Legend is not its conclusion but the arrogantly hollow-skulled manner in which it reaches said conclusion.