I am Legend

*Warning! Spoilers!*

I finally went to see I am Legend on New Year's Eve. I was glad I had completely forgotten the preview and had let my 16 year old stepson's enthusiastic comments persuade me to see it on the big screen and not wait for the Netflix release. I thought the film was a nice surprise, but too much of a throw-back to one of my favorite movies of all time, 28 Days Later.

I enjoyed being scared watching the big screen (and told my husband more than once that I was ready for him to take me home!) but the movie ended too abruptly and left too many questions unanswered. Unlike in 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, which were primarily composed of chase scenes with lots of flashy, nearly sickening camera work, I am Legend created a real believable world and a believable, fallible hero years after the contamination. Robert Neville's character was motivated to make a difference, and he had learned how to survive and cope. His laboratory research was fascinating, and I could feel his feelings of helplessness, loss, determination, and acute loneliness. I love that this is a story of human resilience, and more than that, of a great pioneer. Neville wasn't merely trying to survive, he had succeeded and was going to make it. His work was in solving the crisis, in finding the cure, but his own humanity and psychological distress of isolation nearly wrecked it all.

I was disappointed at the deus ex machina element. At least Anna and Ethan were supposed truly to be Godsends. But it didn't jive in the story. I didn't want some Anna I didn't know to deliver the cure to a colony of survivors. And why did Neville blow himself up if he was convinced there was no one else out there? At the end, he had an epiphany, and he was acting on faith, but I was sorely disappointed. He was valuable because he was a doctor and knew about the disease. Had years of research under his belt. He knew how to work up an effective cure. What good would a vial of blood do to an untrained person? Neville's findings and lab were being destroyed by the zombies, and there was no good way to protect himself and the "messenger" without first killing all the zombies. Maybe it's just not as good of a movie if he hadn't been killed, but I wanted more answers.

Why didn't he just wait in the safe with Anna and Ethan until dawn until the zombies all burned up? Maybe the house would have been too dark and the only option was to kill all of them and himself. I wanted to know if the safe not safe enough without a granade going off too. The way the beasts tore through the house made me think they could tear through the safe as well. I felt like we were owed a better explanation. And I felt like that although Anna saved Neville from his late night "zombie bowling," she was the one who brought down the demise of his home fortress, and most importantly, of his laboratory. For the zombies followed her. But if it weren't for her, he wouldn't have known there was a cure.

The movie was a good one. The use of flashbacks and recorded news reports kept to a minimum was beneficial to the story's "show don't tell," and I liked finding out about the disease by Neville's actions: sprinkling water on the porch, barricading the windows after dark. And of course, he talked to the dog. Which told us that the dog wasn't completely immune as he was. I enjoyed how the story was revealed to the audience. And, admittedly, I was more than a little titillated by Will Smith's half-naked pull-ups in the dining room. Which was a necessary visual element, by the way, because later when he had to cut himself out of the trap, we believed he had the athletic prowess to do it.

The details were delicious. And I wanted more. From his "renting" videos to pumping gas, from his growing seedlings under lights run by generators, to how he was growing and stashing food, I couldn't get enough of his surviving. I only wish he could have thrived too, and lived with Anna and Ethan and started a new family of immune humans.

This was a good movie, one where I was genuinely scared. How better can today's moving pictures scare us, except by preying on our fears about our utter human vulnerability? And I'm not convinced that zombies aren't a threat in our logical 21st century society.

I'm reading the novel by Richard Matheson next, which was written about vampires, not zombies. Stay tuned for that review!