I Am Legend (2007) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Come on, big guy. Sun’s getting real low.

I Am Legend is the third filmed adaptation of a popular Richard Matheson story that deals with the last man on Earth. It creates some impressive imagery of a post-apocalyptic New York City but fails in the final act to live up to the original ideas of Mattheson’s story.

First Impressions

According to this trailer, Will Smith is the last human in New York City. He spends his day exercising, hunting, gathering, and playing with his dog. But when the sun sets he hides in his bathtub because something comes out in the dark. What cause has he to say I Am Legend?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In 2009, an interview with Dr. Alice Krippin (Emma Thompson) on television reveals that she has found the cure to cancer by re-engineering the measles virus. Three years later, in September 2012, Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) drives a red Camaro through the ghost town of New York City. Weeds grow from the asphalt, deer run wild in the streets, and abandoned vehicles are everywhere. He is hunting deer with his German Shepherd Samantha (Abbey/Kona) but loses out to a pair of lions (presumably having escaped from the derelict Central Park Zoo). He notices that it is about sundown, so he heads home, eats, bathes Sam, and closes heavy metal shutters on each of his windows and doors.

A flashback, one of Neville’s dreams, has him dressed in military fatigues in a convoy with his wife, Zoe (Salli Richardson), and daughter, Marley (Willow Smith), as they attempt to get off Manhattan. The disease has become airborne, with the President signing an executive order to quarantine New York City. Neville claims he can fix it. Back in the present, Neville is working in a laboratory under his Washington Square rowhome to find a cure using rats. They are rabid, albino creatures that are very violent. One of his serums shows some improvement. Later he visits a video store he has set up with mannequins as customers so he can feel some level of interaction. He ransacks an apartment looking for supplies and then visits the South Street Seaport at Noon to wait for anyone who may respond to his radio message.

Returning from the seaport, Robert and Sam hunt deer–as they do every afternoon–chasing a lone buck into a deserted building. Sam runs into the pitch-black entrance much to Neville’s horror. Going in after her he finds the dead deer and a group of infected humans. They are pale and frenetic, feasting on the deer. Neville grabs Sam and they escape back into the sunlight outside where the infected won’t tread. He returns later with a trap to snare one of the “dark seekers” to use for a clinical trial of his serum. He tells Sam not to do something stupid like running into a dark building again. He is immune to the virus somehow, but Sam can still get infected if bit. Using a vial of his blood, Neville sets a deadfall trap that snags a female dark seeker (Joanna Numata). Her mate (Dash Mihok) steps into the doorway, exposing himself to sunlight to scream at Neville as he drives away.

Using six times the sedative required for a human, Neville knocks out the female dark seeker and administers his serum. The creature freaks out, convulses, and then collapses, still chained to the table. He makes an entry into a video log. A second flashback shows Neville clearing a quarantine checkpoint at the South Street Seaport as he puts his family on a helicopter. Marley gives her father her puppy, Sam. The next morning Neville is exploring the derelict city and finds “Fred,” one of his video store mannequins outside Grand Central Terminal. When he investigates the dummy he is caught in a deadfall trap and knocked unconscious. He awakens later as the sun is setting. Using his knife he cuts himself free but stabs his thigh when he falls. He crawls back to his vehicle as a trio of infected dogs come for him avoiding the final rays of the sun. Sam fights the dogs but is bitten in the process. Back at his lab, Sam begins to turn, and Neville is forced to put her down.

The next day he returns to the video store, distraught–crying as he talks to a female mannequin. He takes his car out that night, recklessly driving around town. Seeing a group of dark seekers at the port, he slams his car into them, killing several. They manage to overturn his vehicle with their increased strength. Just before they can kill him, a woman arrives and scares them off with a bright UV light, which burns their skin. Anna (Alice Braga) takes Neville back to his house and stitches him up. Neville dreams of the final moment for his wife and daughter, as military missiles take out the Brooklyn Bridge and an out-of-control helicopter crashes into the one carrying his family, killing everyone. Awakening back at home, Alice introduces Neville to Ethan (Charlie Tahan), a young boy. They are immune survivors driving to a colony in Vermont.

Neville doesn’t believe that there are more survivors and counsels them not to go. Anna claims that God told her to turn on the radio which helped her find Neville, and that He has a plan. Neville disagrees with anything related to God or coincidence, blaming humans–and himself– for the state of the world. That night the dark seekers find Neville’s house and break in. Neville, Anna, and Ethan hide in the basement lab, where Neville realizes that the ice he packed around the female’s body has allowed the serum to work and she is returning to normal. Suddenly believing in divine intervention, Neville gives Anna samples of the serum and sends her and Ethan through a coal chute so they can take the cure to the colony in Vermont. Neville pulls out a hand grenade as the male dark seeker screams at him through the plexiglass window. Pulling the pin, Neville blows up the lab, and the creatures. Anna and Ethan drive to Vermont and find the colony, handing over the serum. Her final voice-over reveals that this is his Legend.

“If there’s anybody out there, anybody–please. You are not alone.” – Robert Neville

History in the Making

I Am Legend marks the third film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi novel of the same name. It continues the look at horror/sci-fi hybrids that were examined during October’s 31 Days of Horror articles, being the scariest of all the adaptations. The first film version was the 1964 adaptation with Vincent Price called plaintively The Last Man on Earth. This may still be the closest adaptation to Matheson’s original story with Price living out a lonely existence and confronting vampiric zombies. Seven years later the story was retold with Charlton Heston as The Omega Man. This version had Heston as the last human in Los Angeles, fighting against the mutated members of The Family, with his tale becoming an overt metaphor for Jesus Christ–shunned and oppressed by the ruling mutants. This most recent version, the first to use the actual title from the novel, created a believably desolate and apocalyptic New York City. Will Smith, as an action-oriented virologist, comes off a little better than Charlton Heston does, though he does go a little over-the-top in his performance. The most egregious sin is the ending of the film, which forgoes the original ending where Neville is seen as a monster in the eyes of the new race of creatures on the planet. Instead, Will Smith gets to play the hero and destroy the monsters, sending Anna and Ethan with a cure to the survivor’s colony, and thus fulfilling his saving of the world.

The film was directed by Francis Lawrence, and was his second directorial effort after adapting Constantine, the DC Comics demon hunter. His goal was to make the film as believable as possible in a post-apocalyptic New York City, which he certainly accomplished. He would go on to direct every Hunger Games film after the original, starting with 2013s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Adapting the Matheson story were screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman. Protosevich had a couple of credits under his belt with The Cell and Poseidon, joining Goldsman who had been adapting works from the 90s including two films based on John Grisham novels (The Client and A Time To Kill), two Batman films (Batman Forever and Batman and Robin), a film version of Lost in Space, and an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot also starring Will Smith. The original Protosevich script was intended to be directed by Ridley Scott in the late 90s potentially to feature Arnold Schwarzenegger as the protagonist. Work on the production stalled, and in the early 2000s Michael Bay was then set to take over direction with Will Smith to star. Goldsman was then brought in to produce and write a new version yielding most of what is seen in the finished film.

Genre-fication

To date, I Am Legend probably has the best apocalyptic landscape for any film. Films set in the future that are dystopian apocalypses often film in deserted locations, like The Road Warrior or Six-String Samurai, or dirty-up modern locations to show them rundown, as with Escape from New York and The Running Man. Most films show overcrowding in major cities. Very few show a complete lack of humans. The Last Man on Earth did it by filming in Rome, using non-recognizable areas as a stand-in for an American city of the future, while The Omega Man filmed in Los Angeles on the weekends and used backlots to depict an empty urban metropolis. Creating a New York City empty, absent of human life is a considerable accomplishment and one that upset a number of residents. While visual effects were utilized to enhance certain areas of the city, other streets were actually shut down for extended periods and dressed to look like no one had lived there for three years. This setting went a long way to help add believability to the film.

This version of the film also ramps up the horror elements. The creatures are scarier than previous versions, with sequences that provide tremendous tension where audiences know something is going to jump out and attack Neville. These dark seekers are a big improvement from the albino characters of The Family from The Omega Man. Improving on the adaptation in comparison to that film seems like an important aspect of the story, but Goldsman and Lawrence still allowed for some homages to The Omega Man, considered a 70s classic by many. The opening of both films begins with Neville racing a red car around deserted streets. Both films also have the character populate their living spaces with mannequins to preserve some sense of people still being around. But neither film can replicate the ending of the novel as Matheson intended. Both The Omega Man and I Am Legend play more towards Heston and Smith’s star power as tough action heroes rather than the more contemplative ending. Even with these deviations, I Am Legend still stands tall as the best version of this story. But it does beg the question, what exactly is he the legend of?

What Methson’s original story does, and what the 1964 adaptation tries to get across, is that the result of the virus/plague has changed humanity into a new race of creatures. This new breed is akin to the vampires of human legend. Neville becomes the last man on Earth who goes around killing members of this new society, in essence becoming a legend in their eyes in the same way that vampires are legends to us. It’s a shocking realization as the character that audiences identify with becomes seen as a monster in the end–an ending that asks audiences to examine their own morality and humanity. I Am Legend seems as if it will be a more straightforward adaptation, given that it’s using the same title as the novel. Unfortunately, Will Smith’s Neville becomes a legend to the survivors, being the one scientist to understand the plague and engineer a serum to cure it, rather than a legendary monster in the eyes of the dark seekers. He stands tall in the face of oppression by these monstrous dark seekers and sacrifices himself (blowing up a good number of them) so that Anna and Ethan can escape. It’s not quite the same lesson, is it?

Societal Commentary

I Am Legend has two main themes: family and the search for faith. The flashbacks in the film show how important Neville’s wife and daughter are to him. He seems to be pulling a lot of strings in order to get them to safety, when unfortunately their helicopter is hit by another out-of-control copter. His basic instinct for survival is one of the things that keeps him going, along with the companionship of Marley’s dog Sam, who becomes his new family. They eat, work, play, hunt, and sleep together. Sam replaces his family but also still has a piece of his family in Sam–reminding him of them. When Sam gets attacked and Neville has to put her down, that last existing piece of his family is gone forever, and sends him into a depressive and suicidal place. He suddenly begins acting recklessly and would have succeeded if not for the intervention of Anna. It’s obvious that Anna and Ethan are surrogates for Neville’s lost family. Anna looks a bit like his wife, while Ethan is around the same age his daughter would have been. Finding these two people provides Neville with a perspective on his life and his mission of finding a cure. But more importantly, Anna brings the concept of God and faith to Neville.

As a scientist, Neville’s beliefs are much more about what he can see and experience. He methodically works through various vaccine cures using his immune blood as the basis. He uses the scientific method to create protocols to generate batches of serum that he can test against various subjects. If he had ever believed in the idea of God, the loss of his wife and child stripped that from him. Anna suddenly arrives in his life claiming that there’s a colony of survivors in Vermont, and wants to take him along. He is adamant that she is wrong. But her claims of a divine intervention guiding her begin to sway him. She says that something made her turn on the car radio to hear Neville’s broadcast, which took them to the South Side Seaport. When he didn’t show up as his broadcast mentioned he would, they stayed and were able to save him from his suicidal attempts. Anna opens herself to these coincidences and attributes them to God. She reminds him that you only have to listen to hear God’s plan. In the end, Neville does listen. He hands Anna the cure and sends her on her way, believing that this is the reason she is here–to transport his cure to the survivors. He then sacrifices himself for the two stand-ins for his family, completing the karmic circle begun by him surviving his family’s death.

The Science in The Fiction

Neville is shortsighted in his assessments of the dark seekers. He is so focused on his need to stop the creatures from attacking him and gathers numerous creatures to test his serums that he fails to see that he is taking loved ones from their families, in the same way his family was taken from him. After he captures the female dark seeker and runs his tests, he records a behavioral note in his logs. He mentions that the male dark seeker exposing himself to light is part of its “decreased brain function,” and that their “social de-evolution appears complete.” But the evidence points to a more cunning and wily adversary. Witnessing Neville’s creation of a dead drop trap, the dark seekers also fashion a similar device using one of Neville’s mannequins as bait. They keep pets (feral-infected dogs, but still pets) the way Neville has Sam. They track him back to his hideout and devise a way to attack and enter the home to get at this “creature” that attacks and steals their women. It’s engaging ideas like this that reflect negatively on the poor choice of changing the film’s ending.

Neville presents an interesting anecdote to Anna about the life of Bob Marley, who Neville is infatuated with. The soundtrack includes several instances of Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” as well as “Stir It Up” and “Redemption Song.” Neville named his daughter Marley after the reggae musician he so idolizes. He’s aghast that Anna has never heard of the artist, which may be true in a 2012 where the apocalypse has come. He shares the following story about Marley, “He believed that you could cure racism and hate, literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people’s lives.” Neville likens it to a “virologist’s idea.” It’s an interesting idea, but one that is meant for the audience. It’s not practiced by Neville in this new world order where creatures come for him in the night. He is not trying to cure with love, as he only sees these new creatures as a plague to be wiped out. He does not take his own Legend’s words to heart.

The Final Frontier

Another nice nod to Bob Marley by the filmmakers includes Will Smith showing Anna the “best album of all time.” The compact disc he holds up happens to be the 1984 compilation album Legend by Bob Marley and the Wailers. It is definitely the best-selling reggae album of all time, with 14 of Marley’s greatest hits. Maybe this should be the “legend” of the title. The filmmakers also put an easter egg in the film which would take nine more years to come to fruition. As Neville drives through the deserted Times Square, a poster on a building shows the Batman and Superman logos, with a date of 5/15/10. This is a version of the logo for the DC comic book Batman/Superman. When I Am Legend was released, Warner Brothers (the rights holders to DC-related films) had just released Batman Begins and Superman Returns. This was meant to imply that by 2010, in this alternate universe, a Batman/Superman film was coming. Many thought it was a tease for a future crossover, and it was in a way. It took until 2016 for Zack Snyder to have the two heroes meet in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

As of this writing, word is that a sequel to I Am Legend is in the works. Will Smith is set to return as Dr. Robert Neville, which may seem strange based on the synopsis above. However, when the DVD version of the film was released, it included an alternate ending, which was the original ending for the film. It was an ending that more closely mirrored the Matheson novel, but one that didn’t test well with preview audiences. So rather than have an ending where Neville realizes that he is seen as a monster in the eyes of the dark seekers, and survives–traveling with Anna and Ethan to Vermont, they released an ending that some test audience reacted better to. The new sequel will reportedly use the Alternate Ending as its official canon, which should confuse a whole new group of viewers at some point in the future.

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