I am Legend - Open Spoilers

I think the preachiness comes in more with the result of the rather tacked-on religious conflict, in which Neville goes from screaming atheism to realising that Everything Has A Reason in the space of about 8 minutes. There just didn’t seem much point to it; it was crowbarred in so ham-handedly and with so little reference to anything that we’d learnt about Neville thus far that it’s hard not to find it jarring and weird, at the very least.

While I suppose it’s not necessarily preachy, it certainly seemed as if, having binned any ambition to give the vampires much complexity, they just cast around for some alternative conflict to add, and didn’t look very hard. I agree with all of your points about the plausibility of each character’s stance, but the problem with the whole religious theme is that it wasn’t established at all; from nowhere, it simply took over in the last act, and in the space of very little time assumed a disproportionate significance at the expense of the other (rather more interesting) ideas that were knocking around in the movie.

Well said.

I’ll also say whether or not the bridges were all blown up or where the deer came from or what exactly the dog handling Fred moving trap setting zombie vampire was up to was all cheap not very well thought out drama which at first viewing while stuffing popcorn in my mouth was okay but upon reflection made for a not so well thought out or made movie.

Interesting to come back to this thread after awhile, I assumed the deer and lions were from the zoo, I have no trouble imagining a zoo worker releasing them on the brink of armaggedon. I find the idea that deer would have migrated into the city far less believable. Sure, they could have swam or crossed the ice, but why would they? With the removal of human activity thoughout NY state it would take more than 3 years for there to be a need to penetrate the city all the way to Manhattan

I have no trouble imagining that the lions, desperate for food, were able to escape their zoo enclosure. While times were good they wouldn’t have any particular need to escape, they got good food to eat every day on a predictable schedule.

It makes sense that things fell apart before all the bridges were destroyed. I really don’t know why people can’t get past this.

In any case, Neville isn’t physically trapped in the city; he’s trapped by his obsession with fixing the problem, even after he’s lost hope of other survivors.

But making this argument implies that destroying all the bridges was an ongoing, time-intensive task. We saw them destroy the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in about 30 seconds, with a few missiles. They could have destroyed every bridge around Manhattan in less than half an hour.

My complaint about this issue is not that Anna’s appearance on the island couldn’t have been explained, but that they don’t even attempt to explain it.

mhendo, I think that’s the point: that we see things through Neville’s eyes, that is, we perceive Anna as pretty much coming out of nowhere–and that the important thing is that she’s here, not that she came from over there.

ETA: Actually, now that I think about it, they tried to pass off her boat story as an explanation, didn’t they? OK, maybe you’re right.

As with most here, I enjoyed the movie the most up until the dock rescue.

CGI

I really don’t know why Hollywood is so caught up with these crappy CGI effects. It sucks the life and character out of so many potentially awesome movies! Examples include the remastered Star Wars Episodes and the first 3 episodes, and especially this supposedly atmosphere-driven story.

There were several times when gazing into the unhinged jaws of the vampires that I felt as though I were back at home playing Resident Evil. In that case, I don’t expect the CGI to be so good as to be realistic. In a movie like this, though, is it so unreasonable to want to see the expertise shown in movies like 28 Days Later, The Birds, etc?

NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: Great makeup, puppets, and guys in costumes combined with good camerawork/lighting will ALWAYS create better creatures than computers. I mean, just compare Alien to Alien Resurrection!

The Deer and Lions

It’s perfectly acceptable to have deer in the city. In fact, lots of regions in the US have a problem with keeping the deer population from dangerously overbreeding due to the lack of large numbers of natural predators. If human hunting wasn’t around to cull the populations, we’d probably have an ecological disaster of another kind on our hands until predator populations rebound.

The deer could have walked over during the winter, swam, etc. Hell, didn’t anyone catch the news article about the kangaroo being eaten by a shark recently?

As for the lions, it’s easy to figure out why they’d be out and about. Eco-nuts, convinced that the world is ending (this time they’re right!), assault the abandoned zoo to release the animals so they don’t starve to death in their cages. Either that, or the infected vampires try to get to the lions and the lions take them down and escape.

The Trap

The trap that catches Nevill is obviously not of his own making. As others have already pointed out, there is no bait for an infected. There is no cloak to protect the infected from being destroyed in the sunlight. Also, if it was one of his own, why would he set it up inside a rain puddle??? Remember, he doesn’t believe the monsters are intelligent enough to recognize a trap no matter how obvious it may be.

Oh, and something else I noticed… Was it just me, or was there a second trap in that puddle? Something that snapped into Will Smith’s leg to disable him? That kind of thing wouldn’t work on a vampire at all!

The biggest clue, however, is when the sun is setting and the leader vampire comes out with his dogs on chain leashes.

That being said, was anyone else curious as to why the leader then did not help his dogs finish the job on Smith? During that fight, he could have walked straight up to Smith and killed him.

The Bridges

At first, this disturbed me, too. However, I think it would make sense that even under a quarantine the US government would keep at least ONE land route. It’s just that the bridge that they choose for this role would be heavily restricted.

In fact, if I were the military, I would keep open one bridge and completely restrict boats and other water vessels. The military could keep tabs on the bridge route easily, but if there were any boats visiting Manhattan, it’d be all too easy for an infected person to randomly manage to cross to the mainland. Irrational relatives might make the run via boat, or cargo ships might get inadvertent stowaways.

This makes the most sense to me, because a single land-based bride route could have multiple levels of security redundancy. Boats offer too much mobility.

Sink everything.

If the bridge is blocked by vehicles, it’s a simple matter to clear it off using abandoned bulldozers, or, if the keys are still in them and the batteries aren’t dead, driving them away.

The Vehicle/SUV

It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me as to why the woman came back to the dock. I can explain away the UV lights as already being equipped (if everything went down relatively slowly, there are probably several car-owners who had the same idea and equipped their own vehicles); however, why the hell would she be back at the dock?

Furthermore, why would the vampires stop attacking her? They didn’t stop attacking Will Smith’s SUV even though it had UVs!
Will Smith

A lot of people have been praising Will Smith’s acting because of this movie, and I have to agree that it isn’t bad. However, it’s like no one’s ever seen him in a really good acting role before!

If you’ve never seen it, check out the 1993 movie *http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/six_degrees_of_separation/Six Degrees of Separation *, which currently enjoys a 93% rating on RottenTomatoes.com. It’s a great movie, and Smith does some magnificent acting in it. Plus it was filmed during Smith’s third year as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!

Definitely a must-see :wink:

I thought it was Neville’s own pocket knife that he lands upon and hurts his leg. The knife he used to cut the rope.

I haven’t read the book, but I started reading this thread before I saw the movie, so I was watching it looking for hints of a zombie society - and I saw them. I saw the devotion of the Alpha Male to his mate, callously dismissed by Neville as behaviour even lower than an animal’s. I saw a cunning adversary, using his enemy’s own tactics against him. In the final confrontation, I saw not a mindless pack of ravenous beasts, but a torch- and pitchfork-wielding mob, come to slay the monster in its own castle. There was even some forshadowing in the hunting scene - it seemed for a second that Neville was going to kill the lion to save the deer, before realising that the predator was just doing its best to survive in its own way…

The biggest disappointment for me was that the hints were there, and with perhaps a little re-editing the movie could have pulled off the twist even at the very end, but they chickened out and went for the sappy Hollywood ending. Here’s hoping for a director’s cut…

It was his knife, he dropped it when trying to cut the rope.

Yeah, I was waiting for them to come out. Maybe there was still too much light for them?

I remember it. A scientist invents a chemical to make iron highly radioactive. The night before launch, his (IIRC) future father-in-law tried to destroy the rocket by setting it on fire claiming it will destroy the Earth. Hero climbs in with his dog (so it won’t get blasted by the exhaust) and launches. Guess what. He destroys the Earth. :eek:
Man is driven to go to the last lake on the Earth (meanwhile shooting his dog (Bowser?) who is mad with hunger), to die there hoping the bacteria in his body will reseed the Earth.

I believe it’s in Best Science Fiction Stories of 1955 collected by Issac Azimov. I’ll update if I can find it.

On one of the cabinets there was a newspaper article that something like “remember, people can’t come out at dusk but dogs can”. Meaning that dogs weren’t sensitive to be bothered by the indirect sunlight of shadows at dusk, but that people needed complete darkness.

Ahhh! Thanks for pointing that out. It was really bugging me.

Um…I think y’all are confusing the target audience of that newspaper and the information that it was trying to convey.

The newspaper was not trying to communicate to the zombies or to the infected, it was communicating with the uninfected survivors. Dogs were not susceptible to the airborne strain of the virus, so they had a higher threshold of risk that apparently included the ability to be out at dusk without running the risk of encountering an infectious strain.

There is no window of normalcy provided by slow decay from infected to zombie that I saw any evidence of. The dog went psycho within a few hours of being attacked. You really think a newspaper would be explaining how to keep the infected (be they K9 or human) from being damaged by the sun?

I think the dogs were unchained by the Alpha Male because they’re smaller and more agile and able to maneuver through the earliest shadows of dusk. I also think the Alpha Male was just fucking with Neville, knowing that his dogs would be able to take down Neville’s dog one way or the other. One bite and it is over. I think it is one more subtlety to the advanced intelligence of the zombies. What better way to truly torture your adversary than to send him home with an infected pup that would either attack him or require Neville to kill her with his own hands?

The thing on the cabinet door was a flier and it was about “Remember, infected dogs can come out at dusk”, i.e. warning uninfected people to be cautious of animals they see outside after sundown.

never mind.

Am I weird to feel that, provided I was alone on the island, freeing the zoo animals would be one of the first things I’d do (provided I took safety precautions)? Also, the female he cures actually has imdb credits…I’m sure her parents are so proud :slight_smile:

Why wouldn’t her parents be proud?

Because blockbuster movies are embarassing and a vile pox on the world of film.

Don’t you know anything? :wink: