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The world, the flesh and the devil

A good film is ruined by the Good Book
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 9th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A man and his dog. It's one thing to wipe out humanity, but must the dogs go, too? Will Smith in I Am Legend.
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I Am Legend

Directed by Francis Lawrence
With Will Smith, Alice Braga, Emma Thompson and Willow Smith

If there was an abundance of shaken witnesses describing 9/11 as “just like a movie,” it was due less to boxed “reality” becoming terrifyingly real than the fact that, since RKO’s 1933 Deluge, Hollywood has enjoyed destroying New York City, and audiences have appreciated it.
Lurking behind these cinematic thrill-killings of Manhattan is that walking deadweight, Puritan pride. Toothlessly haunting the margins of American culture is a disgust with big cities, especially for Gotham, which for many is Gomorrah itself. “The country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers,” Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer complains in Annie Hall. “I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”
I Am Legend should easily satisfy any armchair avenger with rural, revival-tent fantasies of apocalypse, as not only does Manhattan “get it,” but so does all of modernity.
There have been four films of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, including a Spanish one from the ’60s. Matheson’s tale of Robert Neville, the last man standing after a pandemic kills nearly everyone and turns the survivors into vampires, was first made into an interesting B movie in 1964 called The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.
The film (available complete on YouTube) is intriguing on many levels, foremost as an obvious influence on George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (which Romero admits). Another side attraction is that Last Man was filmed in Rome’s fascistic/futuristic EUR section, one year after Antonioni’s great L’Eclisse was filmed there. Alienation begets alienation.
Last Man veered off from its source novel, which prompted Matheson to demand his name be removed from the credits. Yet some of the film’s innovations reappeared in the later adaptations, the most famous being 1971’s The Omega Man.
Like some Grindhouse precursor, The Omega Man is all-action with a dash of blaxploitation. Charlton Heston’s Robert Neville is swagger itself as he takes on the diseased mutants (no longer vampires) populating a desolate Los Angeles.
The mutants, or “Family” (this two years after Manson), resemble the doomsday bomb-worshipping mutants from 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes (with special guest star Heston). They’re a cult dedicated to the eradication of science. So, Neville, the last scientist (or “user of the wheel” in Family parlance), is earmarked for destruction.
Mutants are battled by Will Smith in this latest Legend enterprise, though here they act like the rabid living dead in Danny Boyle’s superior 28 Days Later. However, unlike in Omega Man, these half-lives aren’t too worried about the kitchens of science. They’re too busy trying to find enough fresh flesh to nosh.
Director Francis Lawrence’s film starts strong, depicting a long-abandoned Manhattan that nature is quickly reclaiming. Suddenly cutting the bucolic birdsong in Times Square is the roar of a sports car, driven by Dr. Robert Neville (Smith). This is CGI at its finest, though hardly as time-consuming as the setups in 1959’s “last man” sci-fi, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, where filming was confined to early Sunday mornings — the only time Manhattan’s streets were “dead.”
With his trusty dog, Neville lives out his lonely existence trying to find a cure for the doctored virus that has wiped out almost all of humanity.
Halfway through I Am Legend, you begin to believe Matheson’s story has found its ultimate interpretation. This is primarily due to Smith’s honest, affecting performance. There’s none of Heston’s wind-up virility, though Smith’s Neville isn’t shy of action. There’s a powerful vulnerability about Smith, expertly showcased in a scene with mannequins where this last man allows himself to mourn the loss of human company.
Then it all goes pear-shaped, with the last quarter of Legend deteriorating into Christian parable, lacking everything but an altar-call conclusion. Why? Certainly, there’s a religious motif at the end of The Last Man on Earth, though the mutants in Omega Man easily stand for the medieval mindset that can’t quite accept Darwin’s voyage.
Here, however, after another lone human (played by Alice Braga) tells Neville she’s on a mission from God to head for Vermont, we know the medieval strain in American thought will be the true victor.
Sure enough, after rube-pleasing bombings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Washington Square, we’ll find humanity, in all its checked-cloth and quilted finery, at a little clapboard church in a gated community in New England. By comparison, urban flesh-eaters suddenly don’t seem so bad.
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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