The wasted potential of I Am Legend
The wasted potential of I Am Legend
I Am Legend is a good movie, but there's a better version out there, one that prioritizes themes of isolation, faith, and grief over conventional action and deus ex machina.
(Spoilers to follow — but the movie’s been out since 2007 and it’s based on a book from 1954, so like you should know all about it already)
It’s not until our sports get snatched away from us that we start to take shit seriously. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment during the coronavirus pandemic. When sports died. That’s when it became real for me.
I’ll admit, when news of COVID-19 began trickling out of China and even when reports of COVID-19’s arrival in America started appearing, I never thought our lives would be uprooted the way it is today and likely will be for the foreseeable future. I figured it would only be marginally disrupted. Washing my hands twice as long as I used to. Not rubbing my face or biting my nails. Wiping down all of the equipment at the gym before and after. Trying not to touch anything on BART, but still using it as my primary mode of transportation so I don’t have to worry about finding street parking outside my apartment. Fewer trips to my favorite restaurants and dive bars. All inconveniences, sure, but minor enough that I could happily pass the time until coronavirus became nothing but a story we’d tell our future kids about.
And then, our sports were taken from us. The NBA suspended its season — I found out just before I headed into a movie theater to watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire, just after I ate lamb kebabs at a Mediterranean restaurant and had a Maker’s on the rocks at a shitty dive bar. March Madness, MLB, the Premier League, NWSL, and more cancellations followed. I’m not saying you are an idiot like me and didn’t fully grasp the seriousness of the situation until sports were taken away, but I do think it’s the moment so many of us who depend on sports for entertainment and in some cases like my own, our livelihoods, understood just how much can and will change. If sports were cancelled, shit was indeed serious. Our entire way of life was in jeopardy.
Sure enough, days after sports were cancelled, the Bay Area ordered us to stay inside our homes. Soon after, the entire state of California was under lockdown. Illinois and New York have since followed suit. More should hopefully join us in taking the most serious of steps to contain this disease — and I’m not just saying that because I’m jealous of y’all who can still go outside to do shit other than grocery shopping and dodging runners to maintain a six-foot gap between ourselves and others.
After seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I said that I wouldn’t panic unless they banned movie theaters.
Well, movie theaters have since been shuttered, leading to recently released movies to be distributed online as VODs (like Birds of Prey and The Way Back, both of which I’ve written about for this newsletter, so please go watch both of those very good movies, because what else is there to do?).
As I’m writing this on Saturday night, I’m on Day 5 of lockdown. Last night, I watched I Am Legend with a belly full of wine, whiskey, and gluten free brownies — you know, the essentials of quarantine. Some people, in a time like this, gravitate towards a distraction, movies that aren’t about a man living alone in New York City three years after a virus turned most of what’s left of humanity into Darkseekers — vampires, really. I am not one of those people. I like to wallow in my moods. And right now, I’m feeling anxious and scared. When the world is crumbling around me, I want to watch a movie that comes close to mirroring our reality — a completely crumbled world. On Friday night, I wanted to watch a movie about a man living alone in isolation after the world around him disappeared into oblivion. It’s therapeutic.
So, on Night 4 of lockdown, I put my formerly wasteful, suddenly useful DVD collection to use.
I slid I Am Legend into my Xbox. I let myself wallow in it.
I Am Legend, a movie about the end of the world, starts with sports.
Dave: “… spring training camp. And he’s definitely got the inside track. Word is that they’re having some problems with injuries.”
Eddie: “Really? And, uhh, are they looking into free agent signings, last second, anything like that?”
Dave: “Possibly. And they’ve got a strong farm club too. They’ve got some Triple-A ballplayers they might be bringing up. But again, Peter would certainly be able to tell us a little more about that in the next half hour.
Eddie: “Who do you like?”
Dave: “I’m telling you, so far, I like what I’m seeing in New York. They’ve got a strong ball club as usual. That’s in the American. And in the National, I’m still liking Chicago with a little bit of twist here for Los Angeles.”
Eddie: “Okay. So we’re looking at New York-Chicago World Series, possible Los Angeles.”
Dave: “They could be a dark horse.”
Eddie: “Hey, hold him to it at the end of the season. That’s going to do it for us from the sports desk right now. Back to you guys, in the studio. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: “Thanks for nothing, Eddie.”
Studio person: “Thank you, guys. That’s not all we’re following. Here’s Karen at the health desk …”
It’s an effective way to begin the film, to establish a sense of normalcy, one that we all recognize, before blindsiding us with the bad news. Karen, at the health desk, has a far more important update than Eddie and Dave. She’s interviewing a doctor who has cured cancer by genetically re-engineering measles. We watch this interview as if it’s on our own TVs. Suddenly, the interview ends and the film has skipped ahead three years. It turns out, the cure to cancer ended up being a virus that turned humanity into Darkseekers. New York City is empty, overrun with fauna — except for Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith), driving a red sports car with a German Shepherd (A Very Good Girl) riding shotgun. An automatic rifle rests in his arms. He’s hunting local game.
Neville lives alone in New York City because it is “ground zero” and he still thinks he can “fix” this. He spends his days out and about, gathering supplies, broadcasting a message to anyone still out there, and fucking around — he is, after all, living like he’s in an open-world video game. He fishes in a koi pond. He golfs off the wing of a military jet stationed aboard an air force carrier.
He cares for his dog, Samantha, like she’s his daughter — bathing her, cooking for her, scolding her for not eating her vegetables while he rinses the soap from her fur. She even runs on the treadmill beside him while he works out.
The only place Samantha isn’t allowed is downstairs in his laboratory, where Neville conducts tests on rats and sedated Darkseekers as he desperately searches for a cure. He’s not having any success. He locks up his house at night when the Darkseekers come out.
Via sporadic flashbacks, we discover that Neville lost his wife and daughter during the evacuation. The only human contact he has now is with mannequins he’s dressed and situated outside and inside a movie store. He’s given them names — Fred, most notably — and has conversations with them. He even tries to flirt with one (not Fred nor the family below).
Not much happens in terms of plot in the first half of this movie. We watch Neville and Samantha go about their days in isolation. He fails at hunting when a lion steals the prey he’s been stalking. He hits a golf ball and pauses on the wing of an airplane to admire his shot as the ball barely misses the hole far down below. He picks a new movie as he makes his way down the aisle in alphabetical order. He tries to find sleep in a bathtub, comforting Samantha in his arms, as the Darkseekers screech outside. He wakes up to Samantha licking his face. He watches a recording of morning news from some earlier date as he eats breakfast. He works out (side note: Will Smith has managed to stay in remarkable shape during isolation). He heads back out into the world to gather supplies and do shit. It’s the quietest we’ve ever seen Manhattan. It’s utterly bleak and depressing. It’s slow and methodical. It’s organic.
It doesn’t stay that way, but I wish it had.
I like I Am Legend. I think it’s a good movie and deserved better than its 68 percent approval rating (from both audiences and critics) on Rotten Tomatoes. I think it warrants a rewatch — along with more popular isolation movies like Cast Away and The Martian — during our own period of isolation. That’s why I’m writing about it 13 years after its release. But I’m also writing about it because I think there’s a far more interesting version of I Am Legend than the version that made its way to theaters in 2007 and to my DVD collection at some point between now and then, a version that further delves into themes of isolation, the erosion of faith, and grief instead of settling for conventional action and deus ex machina.
The second half of the movie is when it begins to turn into a more conventional science-fiction, post-apocalyptic, thriller. Most of it is still well done — it’s very thrilling! — but also entirely forgettable. We’ve seen action sequences like this before in most zombie or outbreak movies. The man with a gun and flashlight making his way through a dark building, knowing that the monsters are lurking in the shadows (Silence of the Lambs did it far better). We know the jump scare is coming, we just don’t know when exactly. The man trying to make his way back home before the sun goes down and night unleashes the darkest of terrors. We don’t know how he’ll make it home, but we know he will. None of it is wholly original, even if it’s all compelling and gripping and tense and fun.
This is when I Am Legend reverts to an ordinary movie instead of aspiring to be so much more. It squanders its potential. I Am Legend settles. It’s fine with just being another good movie when there was greatness within it. The second half is when the movie abandons the slow, methodical, and organic process that the first half presented. The process is replaced by cheap solutions that aren’t earned.
When Neville is attacked by Darkseekers and is on the brink of death, he’s saved by a woman, Anna, who appears out of nowhere. Up to that point in the film, we’re led to believe he’s entirely alone. He broadcasts a message to potential survivors every day without fail, but nobody ever comes … until Anna happens to find him just as he’s about to be killed. She shows up at the exact moment he needs her. Because he’s fading in and out of consciousness during the rescue, we don’t even really get to see how Anna saves him and manages to get him back to his house without the Darkseekers stopping her.
Not long after, when the remaining humans are cornered by Darkseekers in Neville’s lab during the climax of the movie, he’s stunned to learn that the sedated Darkseeker he’d been experimenting on has suddenly been cured. All of a sudden, he has a vaccine. Up to that point in the film, we’re led to believe that all of his attempts to engineer a cure have been futile. He’s not close to a breakthrough. But suddenly, when they’re trapped by an army of Darkseekers, he’s somehow managed to create a cure that he wasn’t even aware of. The problem is solved without us seeing how the solution came to be. It just happens, because, well, it’s a movie and a solution was needed before the end credits.
In between those two contrived moments, Neville and Anna briefly have a conversation about faith. Anna is sure that God is still around. That God gives a shit about us. That God will save us. Neville is convinced of the opposite.
Anna: “The world is quieter now. We just have to listen. If we listen, we can hear God's plan.”
Neville: “God's plan.”
Anna: “Yeah.”
Neville: “All right, let me tell you about your ‘God's plan.’ Six billion people on Earth when the infection hit. KV had a 90 percent kill rate, that's 5.4 billion people dead. Crashed and bled out. Dead. Less than one-percent immunity. That left 12 million healthy people, like you, me, and Ethan. The other 588 million turned into your Darkseekers, and then they got hungry and they killed and fed on everybody. Everybody! Every single person that you or I has ever known is dead! Dead! There is no God!”
It’s understandable why Neville lost his faith along the way. During an earlier flashback, as Neville put his wife and daughter on a helicopter to leave the city, the family prayed together. Neville was a willing participant. Mere moments later, the helicopter went down. It’s been three years since that tragedy, and he’s still without a cure.
At the same time, it’s been three years of nothing but failure and he’s still persisting. I like to wallow in my moods. Neville doesn’t. He draws inspiration from Bob Marley’s music. He tells Anna about him.
“The people that are trying to make the world worse never take a day off, why should I?” he says, quoting Marley. “Light up the darkness.”
He hasn’t given up. He’s still trying. He’s still clinging to hope.
But the movie doesn’t attempt to wrestle any further with Neville’s diminishing faith. There’s that fascinating conversation with Anna, and then the movie mostly drops it. The movie ends a few minutes later, while providing a hint that Anna might’ve been right. Maybe she was God’s plan. But Neville and Anna never discuss it again, because there’s no time for chitchat. The monsters show up before they have another chance to address the complexities of faith in a world devoid of hope.
It’s not the only missed opportunity to delve further into more complex ideas, some of which resonate in the current climate. The first half of the movie lays the groundwork for so many interesting themes, but abandons them at the precise moment when a deeper investigation is necessary.
The movie initially presents the Darkseekers as blood-thirsty savages that lack any sense of humanity. But by the end, it’s clear that they’re more than just that. They’re smart. They’re able to set traps and lure Neville into them. Maybe they tracked Neville back to his house because they want to rescue the Darkseeker imprisoned in his laboratory — the ending to the director’s cut chooses to grapple with that idea. For them to want that, they need to have sympathy. They need to care about each other — or at the very least, more than fresh blood. That would’ve been a compelling idea to lean into, Neville wrestling with the fact that what he’s been experimenting on and killing is far more human than he ever thought. The idea is left unexplored.
The bond between Neville and Samantha is hammered into our hearts. But after Neville is forced to strangle Samantha to death, we don’t get to see him grieve. We get to see him angry, which is why he nearly dies, but we don’t see any of the stages after anger. It’s after Samantha dies that the plot kicks in and we start to get acquainted with Anna and deus ex machina. We rarely get to see him struggle with the loss of his only remaining family.
My favorite moment of the movie might be when Neville wakes up after Anna rescues him following his failed attempt at avenging Samantha’s death. He’s broken and bruised, but okay physically. She’s made breakfast — bacon. After a minute at the table, he voices his frustration with her. He was saving that bacon. And she cooked all of it. He’s devastated. His grief over Samantha’s death is manifesting itself in this moment. It’s bacon. It’s really not that important in the grand scheme of things, even in a world where bacon is a delicacy. But to him, it feels like the end of the world. Because when everything is going wrong in your life, the smallest of things can serve as the spark to an explosion.
One of my favorite songs, 100 Dollars, by one of my favorite bands, Manchester Orchestra, is about one of those moments.
“This song’s about … the first time I like lost my shit in front of my wife was when I lost a hundred dollars. My dad gave me a hundred-dollar bill in the kitchen of my parents’ house and by the time I had made it to the car outside, I had lost this hundred-dollar bill, and it was one of those things where like you freak out, but it’s in no way about the hundred-dollar bill at all.”
Neville’s freakout is not really about the bacon. It’s about Samantha. It’s a good moment, because it’s deeply human and relatable. I wish there were more of those moments.
The bond between Neville and the mannequins, Fred especially, isn’t hammered into our hearts, but it is hinted at at multiple junctures. When the chief Darkseeker moves Fred, Neville, thinking that Fred moved himself, has an epic meltdown — it’s brilliant acting by Smith, who convincingly plays crazy, but is still human enough for us to give a shit about him, even though he’s pointing an assault rifle at a mannequin he named Fred while yelling at Fred to answer his questions. It’s not difficult to imagine the scene feeling like a comedy, instead of a tragedy, in the wrong hands.
It reminded me a lot of Tom Hanks in Cast Away, screaming at that Wilson volleyball to come back to him. It shouldn’t work. But it does. It also made me appreciate Castaway more. There’s a movie that understood its strengths. It didn’t hint at themes of isolation and communication, and then abandon them for a shark attack or pirates raiding Hanks’ island. It leaned into them. By the time Wilson is floating away from Hanks’ raft, we understand how Hanks came to befriend a volleyball and why he’s crying about its departure. We understand it because we spent two hours alone with Hanks on that island, so that when he finally drew a bloody face onto Wilson, we got it. We didn’t just think he was crazy. We thought he was justifiably crazy. We understood his desire for connection, even if he was looking for it in a fucking volleyball.
It’s frustrating, because I Am Legend begins in similar fashion. The first half of the movie is so methodical and detail-oriented in establishing the world and the state of Neville’s loneliness. But the second half of the movie abandons all of that so that it can rush to a contrived ending. The second half of the movie doesn’t take away from the brilliance of the first half. It doesn’t ruin the movie. As someone who has never read the source material, I don’t even hate the ending. I just hate how they arrived at the ending — two convenient plot devices save the day. The first (Anna arriving at the perfect moment) saves Neville. The second (a cure miraculously arrives in the nick of time) saves humanity. But the second half of the movie does squander the potential the first half built.
The first half establishes the world and Neville’s state of isolation. The second half could’ve investigated what the first half established so goddamn well. Instead, it decided to blow it to smithereens.
The end result is a good movie that could’ve been great.
It’s 11:06 on Sunday night — Day 6 of isolation — when I’m finally sitting down to write this final section. Before, as I was procrastinating, I was reading about the real world again. Movies are a welcome distraction, but their effectiveness in a time like this has limits.
I read a horrifying ProPublica article on a respiratory therapist who has seen the horrors of COVID-19 firsthand.
“I have patients in their early 40s and, yeah, I was kind of shocked. I’m seeing people who look relatively healthy with a minimal health history, and they are completely wiped out, like they’ve been hit by a truck. This is knocking out what should be perfectly fit, healthy people. Patients will be on minimal support, on a little bit of oxygen, and then all of a sudden, they go into complete respiratory arrest, shut down and can’t breathe at all.”
I read about the Senate’s inability to help us survive this catastrophe from an economic standpoint.
I read a New York Times article about the measures needed to fix this shit-fuck of a situation from a health perspective.
If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.
From afar, it certainly feels like we’re procrastinating, trying to avoid taking drastic actions that are necessary to solve this situation even though drastic actions are going to be entirely necessary eventually and we should just get it over with and do it now before it’s too late and we become the next Italy.
I don’t know. I’m not an expert on any of this. I’m a work-from-home sportswriter and podcaster who stays up way too late writing about movies on Sunday nights because I think it’s fun. I can’t “fix” this the way Neville did. All I can do is ride it out while trying to do my part in minimizing the spread of the disease and remaining hopeful that my friends and family aren’t affected beyond the boredom of isolation — my dad has started playing Mario Kart, by the way, and my friends and I moved our monthly poker night to an iPhone app.
It’s 1:04 a.m. now. It’s Monday, Day 7 of isolation, technically. I’m searching for an ending so I can climb into the bed that’s less than three feet behind me, because sleep is good for my immune system and anxiety level, and also because I’m just so tired.
I don’t know how to get to the ending I want, but since the beginning, I’ve known that I want to end this newsletter with something that Neville says. I just don’t know how to get to that point in an organic way. But it’s late. And I don’t feel like trying anymore. So, I guess I’m going to pull an I Am Legend, and just skip the process and jump right to the ending, as contrived as it might be. Here it is.
“God didn't do this,” Neville says. “We did.”
Couldn't have reviewed this film an better myself. Up until you see the ridiculously fake-looking mutants, it's an absolute masterpiece. One of the best apocalyptic epics ever, that gets replaced by a contrived religious message down the track.
The only way you get a version of the movie you truly want is if Will Smith isn't the star during his reign of popularity. Or if Smith is doing a smaller, art-house movie directed by some independent who's goal is to capture the solitary of the world and not produce that Christmas season's blockbuster film. WB simply won't allow it especially since they were hoping to franchise this world and make a few more.
I know you reference not knowing the source material. In the book, he is the last man on earth. Everyone else is infected, but the infection doesn't make the creatures in the movie. Instead, they are vampires who form a society, and their main issue is the last man on earth who is hunting and killing them. The vampires can speak, reason, and basically do everything one does in society. They're just vampires now. The reason Neville sees himself as a legend and the title of the book is I Am Legend, is the way the vampire society sees him as the last surviving human. It may capture the feel you are looking for in this action movie.
Also, did you know this is the 3rd movie based on Matheson's book? In the 60s, Vincent Price stars in The Last Man on Earth and that screenplay is actually co-written by the book's author. It might be closer to what you are looking for as an isolation piece. It is on Prime for free but since the movie is so old, there are other places to stream it for free. In the '70s, Heston starred in Omega Man, which takes the idea of I Am Legend but then changes everything else up. In fact, so much is changed, that Matteson says the movie is so unlike his book he has no issues with it. But it also has the feel of isolationism that Smith's version captures so well at the beginning. In fact, there are a few scenes that seem to pay homage to Omega Man in Smith's movie.
Good post, and hang in there.