I Am Legend
Robert Neville, a brilliant scientist, isn’t quite brilliant enough to stop a man-made virus from escaping and killing everyone in sight. Somehow, though, Robert is immune. But what good is surviving if you’re the last person on the planet? He’s determined to find a way to save the human race — using his own virus-free blood.
Director
Frances Lawrence
Genre
Science Fiction, Action, Drama, Horror
Other
PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence; Running time 1 hour and 40 minutes
Cast
Will Smith, Alice Braga, Dash Mihok, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Charlie Tahan, Willow Smith
Lay has not been feeling well since before Christmas, but we’d promised his nephews a movie and a sleep-over, so I took them to see I Am Legend.
Will Smith, is, as always, excellent and believable. The rest of the cast is good as well, but as you might imagine, Smith carries most of the movie himself with only his dog. The CG effects are OK. The movie is well paced with a lot of underlying tension, and I think this balance was probably difficult to achieve, but pulled off by the director. Smith’s days are made up of a lonely routine of scrounging for survival and doing his lab work, and to make the film believable, this had to be shown. At the same time, the pacing had to be fast enough to hold the audience and create the necessary suspense.
I won’t spoil it, but unfortunately I found the ending to be surprising only in its weakness. It was as if the writer was on a deadline, and had to rush the writing of end. That was my only disappointment.