Revisiting I Am Legend

I find I Am Legend to be a fascinating film. Its really broken up into two sections: the first 80 mins and the last 20 or so. The first 80 minutes are brilliant, intense, and heartbreaking. Robert Neville is living a lonely existence in a ruined New York City. Much of this section is about his day-to-day; scavenging, hunting, eating, bathing his dog, while also searching for a cure for KV, the virus that ended civilization. This might sound banal but its got this quiet intellectualism to it. He acts strange but in the context his behavior makes perfect sense and Will Smith performance is elegant and minimal.

There is a great scene in the beginning where Neville is hunting deer through a verdant Times Square. He comes across one in a cross street and just as he takes aim to bring it down, a lioness pounces on the deer and drags it to her mate and their cub. Neville just looks on, continuing to aim, as this family eats, I'm assuming, their first meal in quite some time. At this point, it becomes clear that Neville is no longer human, but simply a living thing trying to survive. He lets the lions have their prize and he returns home.

Then, to cement this idea of Neville dehumanized, after he captures a female dark seeker to experiment on, a male exposes himself to sunlight in anger. Neville comments on this behavior in a video log. He describes it as irrational and notes how the infected have lost any semblance of humanity. Its clear that Neville is actually the lost one; he doesn't even see that the female is the dark seeker's mate, which is fairly obvious.

Neville's only friend in the world is his dog, who he has to kill when it turns into a vamp. This is a bit manipulative but whatever I like being manipulated sometimes. Neville speaks to mannequins, hoping for one to talk back and when he realizes there is no hope, he tries to kill himself.

However, his suicide attempt is thwarted by Ana, another survivor who rescues him just before he is eaten by a dark seeker. They drive off together and Neville wakes up in his flat with Ana and Ethan eating breakfast. Neville tries to adjust to normalcy and finds difficultly with it. And rightfully so, he hasn't spoken to another human in over three years.

After a short adjustment period, he explains the philosophy of Bob Marley to Ana. This marks the end of the first section and beginning of the second. This second section sucks. I really do not like it. I get the impression that production stopped for a week or so, the director Francis Lawrence was fired or left, was replaced, and they decided to make a completely different movie. The second section finds Robert Neville a nearly different person when he describes Marley and how mankind should "light up the darkness". Then dark seekers attack his pad and he sacrifices himself so Ana and Ethan can escape with the cure. The tone changed drastically from this intimate and dark character study to a bombastic actioner with a messianic hero and happy ending. I just don't buy it.

I've read that the special effects takes over toward the end of the film. This is true as the attack on Neville's house features digital dark seekers and copious amounts of gunplay. But this switch is minute to how Neville's character changes. Granted that characters are supposed to change during the course of a film, but Neville's change appears to be arbitrary. He goes from a dehumanized calculated survivor to an optimist of a childish degree with little more than the movie Shrek to piece it all together.