Monday, July 5, 2010

I Am Legend

Minutes into this movie and having sussed the theme I thought I had discovered the wheel in proclaiming ‘Omega Man’, which I first watched about thirty years ago. Charlton Heston, not among my favourite actors, played the lead role. Then I found out that both films are based on the same 1954 novel by Robert Matheson, I am Legend. Will Smith, like Heston before him but with considerably greater achievement, attempted what is essentially a one man show; one man and is dog to be more exact. Monsters don’t really count although films like this would never really work without them.

Apocalyptic movies with one man against the world or what is left of it after whatever apocalypse has befallen it can easily go flat if the plot is not sustained. Dialogue is not the strongest feature so there is nothing like the great restaurant discussion in Reservoir Dogs to span the silences. Mannequins don’t talk back.

I Am Legend succeeded much better than Omega Man which started out in soaring style only to quickly lose altitude. The viewing public might prefer its one man heroics to be performed through roles featuring Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis. Straight down the line no-nonsense blood and gunfire. All nonsense really, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action. Besides, there is always a solution to the bad guys. The apocalyptic movies are often more sinister. In I am Legend the desolation and dereliction projected by lions stalking the streets of New York combined with the isolation and loneliness of Mr Solo talking to mannequins injects the eeriness that action adventure films lack. And there is always a hint that a panacea to put all right might prove elusive. The world saver might not himself be saved.

In his 2012 struggle Robert Neville, a military scientist somehow immune from what the rest of the planet seemed to have succumbed to, was locked in combat with vampire types, creatures utterly transformed by whatever affliction befell them. The Robert Neville of Omega Man was dealing with beings that appeared more human than Legend’s demons. The fiends of I am Legend conjure nothing of what exists on our streets whereas something resembling those from Omega Man might just be found howling Old Testament obscenities outside a gay bar or an abortion clinic. They can even be found hymn singing in the DUP.

The creatures stalking futuristic New York had undergone a transformation from humans into whatever monstrosities they had become yet were not really vampires in the traditional sense; although every bit as fearsome. Vampiric entities and their dogs that could move at lightening speed, adding new meaning to upward mobility, which saw them scale walls with the agility of a priest breaking into an orphanage. Deterred only by light, they were led by a creature, played by Dash Mihok, of unquestionable intelligence and about as evil as Marlowe in Thirty Days Of Night. Unlike Thirty Days, the flesh eaters of I Am Legend were not a transient gang stopping over for a month. No small sect this lot – 588 million of them – they aimed at mastery of the world rather than eating their way through the town of Barlow. From Neville’s perspective in New York it seemed the whole world, apart from a tiny few – you always get the malcontents who won’t do what their ‘betters’ demand of them – seemed to have joined the bite night gang, taking humankind to the brink of extinction.

Movies like this can be viewed as a secularisation of the vampire. The supernatural is stripped away but the horror that only the vampire can offer is retained; their existence explained away courtesy of a mutant strain of modern science. In this case it was a drug designed to treat cancer but turned out to be a vampiric carcinogen that only a tiny few proved immune to. The infected retain many of the characteristics – qualities would not be an appropriate word – of the vampire, the need to drain the lives of others as nourishment for their own. Waving crucifixes at these creatures will only ensure it is rammed well up where the sun doesn’t shine. The darkness: a sunless, appropriate and safe place for vampires where nothing but they can work.

In the struggle to cure or be killed a legend is born.

9 comments:

Try The Road for a less Hollywood post apocalyptic sense of grimness.

I seen this film a few years ago a cara and the lasting impression it left on me was it was crap!

Gonzo,

will make a point of watching it sometime. Has to be real life vampires in it, not those make believe ones!!!

It wouldn't surprise me if Gerry survived an apocalyptic disaster with only Big Bob for company.

His brass-neck would give him an advantage against any vampires while he would be well used to handling zombies being the leader of PSF.

yeah Dixie the experts say that rats and roaches would survive the holocaust,the bearded one would be well holed up in the bunker in Palace barracks with the rest of the vermin

Marty, get a grip. You just don't live in the real world, not believing in vampires or things like that.

lol Anthony I asked a wizard years ago to remove a curse that was put on me ,he said he could only if I could remember the exact wording of the curse ,I said "thats easy the words were I now pronounce you man and wife"!!!!!

Ijust got thrown out of the local mosque,I was stood there during prayers....and .......well....I couldnt help myself...I f##kin love leapfrog!!!!

Dixie, somehow we always manage to turn it round!!

Marty,

Ronan Atkinson once said they were only looking for the Ayatollah’s contact lens and there’s you playing leapfrog on them.

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