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I Am Entertained
Warning, post contains spoilers about I Am Legend, both the book and the recent Will Smith movie.
I saw this last night, I'd been looking at it with lustful desire tinged with realistic disappointment that it couldn't possibly be good for some years, since reading a very old script for it that turned the third act into an escape through a ruined city in converted buses, which I am fairly certain was recycled into the finale of the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake.
Eschatology is something of a passing flirtatious entertainment genre with me; in that I adore bleak survivalist post-apocalyptical scenarios with plucky heroes single-handedly defeating zombie hordes but make it too real like Threads and I actually have a minor mental breakdown. When The Wind Blows also gave me problems.
But damn it, I Am Legend was a fabulous book and for the first hour and a bit of the latest movie adaptation I was absorbed, besotted, adoring of the scriptwriter who had managed to cram so much in. The visuals were perfect (if scientifically implausible) and the atmosphere, the tense solitary existence with only a dog for companionship, only to have the surrounding horrors revealed once we have bought in to this lone existence.
My issue is that Neville is a scientist, and upon noticing and discovering abherent behavior in what he himself has termed as a complete societal breakdown when the leader of the vampires not only bellows in protest but then sets up an identical trap for him, displaying intelligence, creativity, an understanding of Neville's painful lonliness, why God is it then played down into a blip in the plot?!
The lynchpin to returning the movie to the brilliance of the book would be to give the leader dialogue, make the other vampire's chatter and screams coherent enough for us to pick out words as they attack the house, and then in the lab beneath the house, trapped with glass between them explain that the woman and child were exactly what Ruth was in the book; a vampire able to control her lust and with the appearance of a normal human (since we never see her exposed to sunlight I don't see this as being too difficult) sent to infiltrate his laboratory.
The vampire's motivation is that they want to stop Neville experimenting on them, they've accepted their lot, they're terrified of this monster who attacks them during the day, drags them off, kills them slowly and painfully with his serums and keeps polaroids of his victims on the wall. Then Neville becomes the legend he is supposed to be in the title.
Hollywood, should you somehow be listening, it wouldn't even need expensive reshoots. All Smith needs to contribute are reaction shots as his hypocrisy is exposed, his betrayal at the hands of a woman and child that he has latched onto; he's been outsmarted. And when he offers a cure, to be turned down and told that all they want is to create their own society and live in peace, without the fear of the day stalker killing them off one by one, that would provide a far more effective and powerful message; that when the status quo shifts and you don't keep up, you have become obsolete and should not fight tooth and claw to return the world to the way it was.
The film is so close to being that good and true to the book, without a cop-out hopeful upbeat ending that it really did leave me cold that they missed the chance to give the vampires a voice. Also, some tiny bit of information regarding the liquid he keeps poyuring everywhere would be especially helpful, since its left unsaid whether its the garlic solution Neville uses in the book. Calling them night stalkers or dark stalkers or whatever they called them, sorry 28 Days Later already used that trick by calling their super-zombies "Infected", second time around its just not going to work. Why not call them... oh, I dunno, vampires?
Jan. 7.2008