Really? I just had a reply on my Yankees site saying it was unbelievably good. I guess I'll have to go check it out for myself.
I went with my fourteen year old son. At first, I did it to be with my son moreso than the movie itself. My son wants to read Richard Matheson's book, with my own reservations if he's ready to read such a novel. He's been graded out to have a collegiate level reading, so he's read some pretty heady novels for quite some time. This time he wanted to go see this particular movie because of his interest in the book.
Well, knowing the little I know about Matheson's book, I thought I should go with him to make sure he understood some things. To my surprise, it's nothing like Matheson's book... ironically using the title "I Am Legend" 180 degrees differently than Matheson's intended. So did we enjoy the movie?
Yes, we both did.
This movie was a bit dark but that was intentional in my own mind. What became the main focus of the film was the slow downward spiral of Robert Neville due to the isolation, loneliness, frustration and what turns out to be depression towards the end. Will Smith turns in a very credible performance as Neville, but I imagine that with the name comes some of the star power and true to form, some of the scenes were highly unnecessary in my mind. What I personally thought was a very bad idea was the CGI scenes with the vampires. Too much and way overdone. Had they just kept to the main focus of Neville's own downward spiral, the movie would've been a top grade and very impressionable movie. It is as if the producers or movie company decided to hedge their bet with this story with the star power name and the computer graphics to make more of a splash with the younger audience while trying hard to maintain the main message and focus.
An example to me was perhaps the scariest part of the movie and this had almost a Hitchcock feel to it. Darkness, build up anxiety, left to the imagination of the audience. I'm sure all of us in the theater had different emotions while this scene played out (Neville goes into a dark building to rescue his dog). Too bad at the end, they decided to introduce the CGI vampires. Had they stayed with the darkness, left to my own imagination, I would've come up with much more frightening monsters. Instead, they took me off the hook with their CGI and frankly, they were not scary at all. Dark shadows, partial views of a vampire, my own imagination would make for a much better movie.
Do they believe that they need to lean heavily nowadays on CGI to show us what is scary? I think it's a crutch and truth be told, my son can conger up scarier monsters in his head than what they showed. So big drawback in a sense, but not enough to distract me from enjoying the Will Smith performance. In another scene with Neville and his dog (one of the most important scenes in the movie), the director gets it right and the focus stays on Smith and his angst. I was very impressed with this and after the movie felt that had the director used similar scenes for Neville with the vampires, like he did with Neville and the dog and also the mannequins (I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone so I'm trying hard to keep some things to myself), the movie would've been a smash hit.
As it is, the movie is just good (overall).
This is a message/drama film that mistakenly thought it should be an action film. Stuck between drama and action is not a good place to be for most films. Few carry that through well enough. I forgave the action part of the movie because the drama had me all the way. In the end, my son and I went to dinner, talked at length about the message of the film, the drama, and very little about the action. Neither one of us were impressed by that part. Also, when your son and you get a chance to talk Bob Marley, then the movie has done well by me.
My opinion, go see the movie, forgive the action, enjoy the drama.
