(Note: I had originally intended to post this on January 3rd, but the events of that week overshadowed everything else.)
WARNING - Spoilers ahead!
Household 6 and I went to see "I Am Legend" for our New Year's celebration (hey, when the spouse is 6 months pregnant, you have to tone it down a little, ok?). Being a huge fan of the book and the previous movies, not to mention an admirer of Will Smith's acting, I had my hopes pretty high for this movie. Fortunately for our holiday, the movie delivered in nearly every area.
I thought the depicition of New York after the eradication of 99% of the human race was positively eerie. Seeing places I know devoid of human life, being reclaimed by the wild, really set the mood for the film. I can honestly say that this was one of the first movies in a long time that had me tense with anticipation at every turn (I think the last was "28 Days Later"). As usual, Will was fantastic - he is probably one of the best contemporary actors I can name, and the way he portrayed Neville as a man slowly going insane from isolation was incredibly moving. Sad to say, Charlton Heston's portrayal now seems a little lackluster in comparison.
I have only two gripes with the film (aside from the science, which is always a little shaky in the movies, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief some for a good yarn). The first is the most serious, and that's the math of the virus.
In the course of explaining why there can't be any other survivors, Neville discourses on how the disease was 90% fatal, and reveals that only .2% of the population were immune, while the rest became the infected creatures hunting them (using his math of 12 million immune to 588 million infected, that works out to be a fifth of a percent of the total population). 12 million people, spread over the whole world, is certainly pretty sparse, but the problem is that they wouldn't be evenly distributed. Consider Manhattan, with a permanent population of roughly 2,000,000. Using Neville's math, that would mean that after the plague there would be about 196,000 infected roaming the city, and nearly 4,000 immune survivors. 4,000!
Now, admittedly, a lot of those survivors wouldn't last long with the infected hunting them down for food. Some would be elderly, some too young to survive. Others wouldn't have the ability or the skills to adequately defend themselves. But I have to think that in 4,000 people, there would be at least a few who would have the tenacity and skills to band together and survive. Of course, you could make the argument for the movie's sake that all of these people abandoned the city shortly after the fall of civilization in order to find a more hospitable place to live (Manhattan not being known for its farmland, or other sustainable attributes), but all told, I think the writers missed the mark on their explanation of why there was no one else in the city.
My other gripe is the religious aspect that was brought in at the very end. I have no objection to the concept itself, but it seemed almost an afterthought in the movie - it really had no connection to the overall plot, and it was not developed in any significant way. Remove that device and the movie would not have suffered a bit.
Still, even with my gripes, an excellent movie! I'm looking forward to the DVD, and hoping they have a good chunk on the behind the scenes stuff.