I Am Legend (2007)
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Robert Neville is a scientist who was unable to stop the spread of the terrible virus that was incurable and man-made. Immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and perhaps the world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. But he is not alone.
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What critics say influenced I Am Legend
Few actors could even aspire to such a burden, and Smith's success evokes favorable comparisons to Tom Hanks' career-best work in Cast Away.
It’s a science fiction spin on Cast Away: Tom Hanks’ plane-crash survivor knew the whole world of six billion people was still out there waiting for him to return, but Neville has been alone in New York for three years, and his regular daily radio broadcast pleading for other survivors to make themselves known has gone unanswered.
I think the idea was to provide enough PG-13 thrills to placate the more easily placated genre fans, while serving up Will Smith in a sci-fi variant on Cast Away (2000) with a dog to talk to rather than a volley ball.
As a study of a man alone in the void, however, I Am Legend is closer to Tom Hanks with his volleyball in Cast Away than to the existentialism of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel.
Will Smith has the same kind of everyman likability that has made Tom Hanks the world’s biggest movie star, and he has the same obligation here that Hanks had in “Cast Away”: to keep the audience’s interest despite being alone on the screen.
When Robert isn�t hunting, hiding or playing doctor he must find someway to pass the time and it becomes rather embarrassing to watch Smith try to pull off Tom Hanks� Cast Away act by conversing with inanimate objects, namely mannequins in a video store and doubly so when reenacting an entire scene from Shrek in such a robotic fashion that it wouldn�t put kids to sleep, but keep them in wide-eyed amazement at what a bad actor he can be sometimes.
Or, rather, he had wanted to make an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s science-fiction novel “I Am Legend” (which was already the basis of his 1962 short film “Le Nouveau Monde”) and wanted to emphasize its vampire element, but his producer didn’t agree.
Then, my favorite part, the inevitable montage of deserted cityscapes that look like the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse except with abandoned cars and weed-cracked pavement and herds of deer sprinting through Times Square.
Inspired by Richard Matheson's gripping novel, I Am Legend, the independent filmmaker from Pittsburgh envisioned a trilogy of films depicting a chaotic world where the recently dead are reanimated and viciously attack the living.
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That change, however, pales in comparison to the ending, which is more reminiscent of “The Player” than the original story.
I Am Legend (filmed as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man) and its own uncopyrighted self inspiring other features and remakes, a thirtieth anniversary edition, several sequels by Romero (two of them presented as parts of the original script) and others by Russo (which brought the two former friends to courtroom confrontation).
The hook is simplicity itself: pare away the new conception of the mindless undead as a biological plague (a notion Romero confesses to having lifted intact from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend) and cannibal holocaust, and this is a straightforward "stressed out cast trapped in small location tries to survive through the night" chamber piece.
I mean, in the end isn’t it just a retread of the novel “I Am Legend” and “The Last Man on Earth”?
For my taste, they show up too early, and when they do, "I Am Legend" turns into a megabudget version of "Night of the Living Dead."
Considered a horror classic, it has influenced writers including Stephen King and films such as Night of the Living Dead, but its track record on film isn't as impressive.
Will Smith stars as the Last Man on Earth in a scary, inventive, exciting and breathless adventure that combines the best elements of “Children of Men,” “Escape from New York” and “The Road Warrior,” but leaves out the worst stuff – such as the story-clogging despair and political allegory in “Children,” a movie that made apocalypse look like kind of a downer.
First adaptation, the 1964 Vincent Price starrer “The Last Man on Earth,” lensed in Italy by helmer Sidney Salkow, was a cheesy affair, while the 1971 “The Omega Man,” toplining Charlton Heston under Boris Sagal’s direction, murkily altered the story to put the leading man up against an albino cult called “the Family.”
Previously done as the 1964 Vincent Price film "The Last Man on Earth" and then as "The Omega Man" in 1971 starring Charlton Heston, the story is about a lone man living in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by some nasty germs and their living dead victims (vampire type beings the first time around, zombies with the second).
Vincent Price first played the role in 1964's "The Last Man on Earth" and Charlton Heston took it on in 1971's "The Omega Man."
Based pretty loosely on the Richard Matheson classic, it was already filmed in 1964 as “The Last Man on Earth” and in 1971 as “The Omega Man.”
A handful of adaptations of the book have already been made, including 1964’s cheesy “The Last Man on Earth,” starring Vincent Price, and the 1971 Charlton Heston vehicle “The Omega Man.”
First adapted to screen in 1964 as an Italian co-production called "The Last Man on Earth" and then in 1971 as "The Omega Man," "I Am Legend" has intrigued generations of readers and viewers with its musings on loneliness and implications about the disintegration of modern society.
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Instead of terrifying us from the get-go with all the panic and evacuation, Lawrence and editor Wayne Wahrman sprinkle it throughout (in probably some bit of Day For Night irony that was funny to the two of them) as dream sequences meant to wake us up with noise displacing the far eerier quiet that�s supposed to be weighing on Robert�s psyche.
What is worse is that the CGI does little to expand on what flesh-and-blood actors in well-done make-up could have accomplished, unless we consider the elongated screech of the lead Seeker, which aurally sends chills up your spine, but visually does little more than bring back bad memories of the equally lousy digital effects in The Mummy Returns (2001).