The lonely guy

It’s tempting to dismiss I Am Legend, the Will Smith movie that’s the third remake of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name, as yet another CGI-driven Hollywood zombie flick. Tempting, but such a pat dismissal won’t do, for a few reasons.

First, Will Smith does soulful, affecting work here. It’s almost as though he doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that he’s in a post-apocalyptic zombie film. He brings a deeply-felt, palpable loneliness to his role as Lt. Dr. Robert Neville, a virologist who seeks a cure for a degenerative virus that has killed most humans and turned the rest into bloodthirsty zombies. He carries the premise far beyond its standard popcorn movie limitations. At least for half of the movie.

The other reason I Am Legend is much better than, say, The Invasion (yet another recent remake of Jack Finney’s1957 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Nicole Kidman as a Botox victim) is that the source material still resonates. There’s a virus (in the recent remake, it’s unleashed by a smug scientist played by Emma Thompson who seeks to “cure” cancer, ultimately releasing a mutating contagion with rabies-like symptoms), and a single man is left standing, seemingly immune to its effects. Every day, he patrols New York City, locating zombie/vampire enclaves, hunting for the odd deer or wild animal scampering around downtown Manhattan, and looking for fellow humans. In his reinforced townhouse, he conducts experiments with his own blood, which he thinks holds a key to the antidote. In this post-9/11 version, Neville feels a responsibility to protect “Ground Zero,” the place where the virus began infecting much of the US population.

Such modern twists — and another sub-theme involving Bob Marley music — do not detract from Matheson’s central premise, which still holds up nicely and even seems kind of timely. People messing with nature, trying to “perfect” God’s plan, never fare well in post-apocalyptic zombie movies. The notion of different enclaves — in this case, vampires and humans — surviving and developing their own alternate social structures seems ripe for reexamination in these divided, “us versus them” days of the war on terror. Good science fiction never really dates, after all: it just gets fresher and fresher.

But even though the Will Smith remake retains some elements of the original — in the book, Neville also finds a dog, though it quickly succumbs to vampirism and dies — it strays afar in the way of most ill-conceived Hollywood “reimaginings” of late. Nobody asked Tim Burton to desecrate the 1967 classic Planet of the Apes a few years back, but he apparently couldn’t help himself. And Hollywood can’t seem to stop filling up on old science fiction movies, looking for gold amid B-movies that had something big budgets can never quite recapture: a heart, and plenty of cool ideas. Even the Charlton Heston remake of I Am Legend from 1971, called The Omega Man, stayed truer to the idea of a vampiric (or at least albino and cult-like) society that ironically sees Neville as a threat to progress. In that cheeseball classic, Heston/Neville patrols a ruined LA in his jeep, swaggers around town with a machine gun mowing down vampires, and seeks to find a cure within his own blood. And, in the way of so many Charlton Heston films from that strange, martyr-filled cinematic era, he dies. (Heston also died heroically in ‘70s sci-fi flicks like Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Earthquake.)

But director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) does something that goes against the spirit of Matheson’s book: he dehumanizes the vampire colony, rendering them simply as vicious, CGI-designed bald creeps who want Neville’s blood. Thus, they just seem like manic denizens of the video game House of the Dead, creatures you wouldn’t hesitate to blow away with a bazooka. By eliminating their humanity, and any claim to a social order, a crucial dimension of Matheson’s story is also wiped out.

Much more interesting is Neville’s relationship with his dog, a German shepherd named Sam. We see Neville tossing dialogue lines at the dog, and are reminded of Tom Hanks’ repartee with a volleyball in Cast Away. It worked there, and it works here to convey the loneliness without end that Neville faces. And the special effects team does a really remarkable job of showing us devastated Manhattan streets, weeds sprouting up through concrete and tar, wildlife leaping about, bridges blown apart in a military airstrike.

The only special effect that ultimately matters, though, is Will Smith. He carries much of the movie, making us believe that he’s desperate enough to strike up a fearful conversation with a store mannequin (“Please say hello to me… Please say hello to me…”) with tears welling in his eyes. He curls up in a bathtub each night with his high-powered rifle and his dog by his side as the zombies shriek and wail outside his bunker.

Too bad the screenwriters chose to add another survivor and her son, not as a source of betrayal, as Matheson had imagined, but as a reality check. Smith recites large chunks of dialogue from Shrek to show he’s still “in touch” with modern culture, and goes on and on about the universal significance of Bob Marley (the movie goes into serious Marley overload about the third time that Three Little Birds pops up on the soundtrack. Couldn’t they play some other tracks from the “Legend” CD?). He questions God’s existence, and then verifies the same by sacrificing himself for the greater good. Cue Marley’s Redemption Song as the final credits roll.

I Am Legend is not the best adaptation of Matheson’s timeless sci-fi novel, but it retains some of its beating heart: the idea of a man, alone and questioning in the universe, watching it all fall apart and trying, against the odds, to put it all back together. Call it existentialism. Though Hollywood, with its endless craving for “hero” epics, would probably try to sell it as something else altogether.