Jan 02 2008
First film of the new year: I Am Legend
There are only so many books that a single person can read and — despite sayings to the contrary — I admit to deciding whether or not to read a book by its cover. You have to discriminate somehow, right? Some covers are good and some covers are really bad. Some covers are really good but seem to repel all the same. I remember seeing this cover with a monster on the front, for a book called I Am Legend, every time I went into Waterstone’s shop, nestled somewhere on the shelves that house the scifi/fantasy stuff.
It’s a really arresting cover but it somehow never managed to pull me further in. Maybe it really was too scary. Anyway, I think I’ll have to re-evaluate. I’ve just seen the Will Smith version of I Am Legend and had a good read of the relevant Wikipedia pages. It seems this is the third explicit film adaptation of the story. There have also been numerous other adaptations and stories heavily influenced by it. All that time and I didn’t know.
It really is amazing how bad a trailer can make a movie seem. Even films I enjoyed immensely (like Stardust) have made me cringe during the trailer. And stuff that seemed really good in the advert (like Shoot ‘Em Up) has turned out to be utter dreck. Why are trailers never representative of the actual movie? This is all to say that, from the trailer, I would never have seen I Am Legend at the cinema. Clips of Will Smith riding around in a fast car with an assault rifle and loud music just seemed so… well, Will Smith, to be honest. And more Wild Wild West than Independence Day, too.
But Helen’s mum wanted to see it and I’m so glad we did. It was completely other than I had imagined. An American 28 Days Later with a half-happy ending, but not so happy you’ll drown in the schmaltz. Unusually for a horror movie nowadays, it didn’t rely completely on ‘fright’ moments. There were lengthy periods of tension which didn’t end in something jumping out of the dark — just in the suggestion that something could have jumped out of the dark.
Besides that, it was the usual mankind-plays-god reaps-what-it-sows not-in-a-good-way story. This time it was Emma Thompson proferring the cure for cancer. It turned almost everyone into aggressive pumped-up monsters who hid in the darkened corners of abandoned buildings during the day and came to feed when the sun went down. Typical of any zombie movie nowadays (28 Days Later, Blade, Resident Evil, even Serenity), the baddies seem to gain +5 Superhuman Strength and +10 Jumping Out At Disconcerting Moments Without Warning thanks to viral infection. They must really eat their vitamins, that’s all I can say.
It’s best not to think too deeply on the (non) science in this kind of movie. Science and Hollywood have never been bedfellows, close or otherwise. Like Helen said, “if he’s going to put on a lab coat, the least he could do is button it up!”. Still well worth a trip to the cinema though.
The abysmal trailers for The Matrix kept me from seeing it in the theatre, a mistake which I fear will haunt me to my grave. I can only imagine how it looked on the big screen. To make up for this error in judgment, we saw the second installment of the Matrix films on an IMAX screen at the Air and Space Museum in Hampton Roads, Virginia. http://www.vasc.org/imax/ Hm, now they are playing I Am Legend, too bad we live two full days’ drive away, otherwise I would definitely be tempted.