I Am Legend (2007) Film Review
I can’t say I had high hopes for the latest film version of ‘I Am Legend’. It is after all one of my favourite books and Hollywood has a habit of taking great horror and science fiction books and turning them into run of the mill action films.
Will Smith plays the lead Robert Neville, possibly the last man left alive after a virus cure for cancer has slightly more side effects than they were hoping for. Obviously this one slipped past the rigorous testing and FDA approval…
In the book the infected are quite clearly vampires but the film plays more to a 28 Days Later style ‘infected’ zombie type thing but with the light aversion intact. The virus also appears to convert all the infected into strangely moving CGI versions of humans, which was one of the disappointments with the film. The CGI work is just overused and it reaches that weird, looks real but something is not quite right style last seen in all the Spider-man movies.
If you’ve read the book and are hoping for some scrap of the plot to be still ticking along in the background then you can pretty much forget it. I’ve read the book a few times and it felt like and for the most part was a completely different story, right down to the actual use of the ‘Legend’ phrase which in the book is quite tragic (in a good way). It’s not a bad plot, it’s just not the plot but then the book would be rather hard to film as it stands.
All that aside, it is an entertaining action film with a few jumps here and there and some great shots of the empty city, although I preferred the grimy urban look in the 28 Days films to I Am Legend’s sunny tropical jungle city. Much like the last Will Smith genre adaptation I can remember ‘I, Robot’ it’s a great action film that bears only a passing resemblance to it’s source material.
A thumbs up for weirdly moving zombie entertainment but go and read the book…
