I am Legend. According to Relevant Magazine this is the best film of the year. I just saw it in Brazil and my wife (a lifelong Will Smith fan) and I both agreed it was poor at best.
The start was good and they had me up to the point Will Smith’s character sees the ghostly backs of a huddled group of virus-stricken humans in the eerie blackness of some rooms under a bridge. After that, the film was caught between being a suspense mild-horror and a thought-provoking treatise on life as the only person on the planet. The latter storyline was far more interesting – and the film’s most intriguing scenes were of the main protagonist wrestling with his loneliness and his madness and with the existence or not of God. It’s interesting to me that seclusion might go hand in hand with a disbelief in God as is implied in the film. (A similar implication is made in the Count of Montecristo when the Count is locked up alone for several years). And yet by the end, and without giving away the plot, the involvement of God in the life of the world’s remaining humans becomes a possibility in I am Legend. These sort of questions are fascinating and would have made the film excellent if they were dealt with more thoroughly. For me, I would imagine the insanity of solitary confinement would sharpen my belief in God as the only thing to hold onto (see, for example, Richard Wurmbrand on this).
Sadly, the film only flirted with this line of thought. Instead, I was left with an annoyingly enduring memory of the CGD baddies. These were unoriginal to say the least – screaming, alien-like and wearing tattered rags. They seemed to be an almagamation of b-movie zombies, gollum from Lord of the Rings and something from a Billy Idol video (see above). A little more subtelty and less in-your-face cheap scares would not have gone amiss. I am Legend could have been great, but instead it felt like Will Smith had done a Kevin Costner in”Waterworld”. Nice idea, expensive effects, but ultimately overblown.
beyond random 