It will suck.
Clothahump’s Movie Guideline: if you see trailers for a movie more than 90 days prior to release, it won’t be good. The farther out you see them, the worse it will be. I’ve been seeing I Am Legend trailers for over six months now. Major Hooverage is indicated.
I’m still trying to piece together how the chick and her kid drove to Manhattan, and then drove to Vermont in the same vehicle. Wasn’t the island sealed off as a main plot point?
And as bad as the ending was turning out when Neville died, I was still sitting in the theater desperatly hoping that they would get to Vermont, find no colony, be out of gas, and the final scene would be the sun beginning to set.
I was disappointed. The first 2/3 of the movie were fantastic however.
Eh, I didn’t think it was that bad. Of course I never read the book. And make it a point to never read a book before I see the movie adaptation. I liked the first 2/3 of the movie. It wasn’t until the end that it started to fall apart. A few things that I took away differently than some of the other posters.
I think it was shown that the infected were starting to form a culture. Aside from the one woman that Neville took to motivate the infected, there was another scene that showed him in the lab with the woman that rescued him. He had a wall covered with photo’s of all the infected that he had experimented on. She asked him if they all died, and he very casually replied that they had. To me that was another motivation of the infected. They knew someone was taking them, but didn’t know who.
The woman said that she had been at sea on a Red Cross ship…they had put in someplace and the infection got on board. They didn’t say where they had put in, or how long they had been at sea. So they could have been surviving at sea for years, and put in to Boston or someplace close enough to have heard the radio broadcast.
I didn’t like that he wasn’t prepared for the infected to find him or to be trapped outside at night. Seems to me as well stocked and prepared his town house was, why bother? None of those steel shutters stopped the infected for more than a few minutes. You can’t tell me that in NYC there isn’t some solid concrete building you could have set up as your base of operations. Likewise having “safe houses” scattered throughout the city.
I think Will Smith did an excellent job in the role. Really conveyed the gradual descent into madness that isolation brought to the character.
Good movie well worth the admission. As long as you realize that it is “base on the book”, not a direct adaptation.
My wife and I saw it this morning. Will Smith has come a long way from his days as the fresh prince. whatever is said about the script, he did a tremendous job here.
They were out at sea for the three years and had put in at Baltimore. They knew about the village in Vermont because that’s where they were supposed to go in the beginning. She only knew about him because they turned on the radio near the city.
I never read the book, had never even heard of the book so I might try it now. I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t pulled out by the creatures at all and thought they were almost real. I really enjoyed the way that Smith slowly went crazy, and then while working was almost normal. With the exception of how they got in and out of the city I didn’t think anything was really odd.
Thanks for the tips about the title and the differences between the book and the movie. Just reading what you all say is making me like the movie less than I originally did, now that the high is gone. I still enjoyed it, but I can understand why book readers are very disappointed. Matheson’s story would have been great to see.
And now, I’m really down on the last part of the movie, starting from when Godlady showed up at JUST the right time, which was my main “oh come ON” moment, and was so strong I completely overlooked all the other ones that came after it. Yeah, how DID she get on the island? I didn’t think about that. How was she able to get rid of ALL the attacking mutants, get him out of his crashed car and into hers, get to his townhouse (I guess she knew NY very well), and know to close all his steel windows. And how were the mutants able to follow them to his home when they didn’t have cars? Spies in the sky? And her “sent from god” revelation, that was an eye-rolling moment too, as well as her being able to get back OFF the island (which was another thing I didn’t think about at the time), and the shiny happy “Vermont colony” (how’d they get that Wall of China built so quickly?) is all just making me shudder. Damn, things are just piling up.
I generally really hate such nitpicking, and I generally hate when book readers complain about changes, but in this case, I Am Legend is no Fellowship of the Ring, which was a brilliant and magical movie in spite of the changes and differences from the book.
Still and all, I thoroughly enjoyed myself for over 3/4 of the movie, thought Will Smith was great, liked the psychological aspects, was scared and excited when I was supposed to be, and I do want to see it again, to get a better perspective of it.
You never disappoint.
Well, I read the book years ago…and saw Omega Man (years ago). I enjoyed the movie anyway…though as others have said, the ending was a bit lame. I was also disappointed in the ‘God spoke to me’ bullshit as well. I was also hoping that arriving in Vermont they would find no survivors colony. And the distortion of the “He has become a Legend” was…well, very disappointing. Kid and woman was lame as well.
All that said…it was a good movie. Will Smith was, IMHO, amazing. I totally was capitivated by him in the movie. Totally could sympathize with the character. Was totally teary eyed by the death of the dog. Could see hints of an emerging ‘zombie’ society, especially the leader who set the trap for him (that ultimately killed the dog) and was able to organize the zombies to track Will down and mass attacks against him (it was unclear WHY they were doing so…which was fine to me. Not EVERYTHING needs to be explained to me for it to be good. In fact, I prefer when they DON’T go into needless detail to lead me by the nose. I did think they dropped the ball with the zombie chick as that would have been a good plot point for the leader to have gone after…especially in light of how Will trapped her and then was later trapped in exactly the same way).
Over all I liked the movie quite a bit even as it was. YMMV however, especially if you’ve read the book slavishly for the past decade or so and can recite it chapter and verse…
-XT
While that didn’t bug me (I think it was implied that even Neville knew about the supposed survivors’ camp - people had to be evacuating somewhere), I don’t see how the walls around it helped – those things could climb vertical buildings no problem. A twenty foot wall would have been no problem whatsoever, especially with no spotters towers or gun platforms or anything!
Dude stole his woman, what more do you need? It was evident when Smith first captured her and the dude stuck his head out and yelled at him.
Some of y’all are sounding like fanboys with a big dollop of drama queen. All the points on which you nitpick a movie to death make you gag or shudder; I’m surprised you didn’t get a touch of the vapors and swoon dead away.
I’m just surprised they got so much right. A movie has to be judged on its own merits, regardless of what source material it may be adapted from. Any problems I had with this movie could have been fixed with half a page of rewrite.
I would have liked some mention of how there was still a connection to the mainland; I don’t think all those deer swam across the Hudson. Possibly things totally collapsed before the military could blow up all the bridges.
I liked the scene in the opening where you see a mass of cars that had been trying to leave town through one of the tunnels; it’s now flooded almost up to the entrance. That would happen; also the subways would be completely flooded. They pump a million gallons of groundwater a day out of the subway system; once the power was off and the pumps shut down, Manhattan would be trying to revert to marshland.
Oh, and judging from the billboards up in Times Square, in 2009 there’ll be a Batman/Superman movie that never gets released . . . .
Why do I suspect some studio executive or marketing expert insisted that there be a kid in the movie? It does seem that the writers and director at least tried to make the (obligatory?) kid as unobtrusive as possible-- to their credit.
I thought that with the exception of the scenes of abandoned and overgrown New York (which were striking) this was a pretty forgettable movie. They should have done more with the head zombie. (And fanboys, please don’t correct me in calling him a zombie.) Was Head Zombie the thinking man who set the trap for Smith’s character? Or was he the stupid and rage-addled critter we saw slamming himself into a wall in the basement? There was no consistency in the “character.”
With 28 Days Later, I looked forward to sequels. I wanted to see more movies set in its world. With this film, not so much.
And the CGI monsters (and CGI animals for that matter) were pretty unconconvincing, IMO.
Not having read the novel this is (loosely) based on, my g/f and I agreed that the first half of the film was good, but we felt like the whole movie would have been BETTER sans vampire zombies. But apparently the novel had the vamps in it so thats kind of moot I guess.
Why? I thought the best part of the movie was the sense of abandonment and lonliness of being the last person alive. Not only that, but its in New York, a place people associate with being teeming with people. At work I drive a bus downtown (well, in training right now 
) and there are so many things I have to pay attention to, as if I am in a living, breathing organism. The desolate New York that Will Smith occupied is like that organism has been frozen in suspended animation.
Also, it was definitely Neville’s sense of nostalgia/sentimentality that kept him in that apartment building. Rather than find a location that was naturally well-defended (limited entrances, durable construction, discreet location, etc) he decided to simply fortify his own home. Also, I think that after three years of having to face the darkseekers Neville has lost any belief that they show any kind of intelligence, which also works against him.
He definitely over-did it on the explosive trap- These things are essentially mutated humans, and while they are fast and viscious, they aren’t really any more durable than normal humans. Considering the armament he had stockpiled, and the fact that he was in the military, you’d think he would have set up better traps- instead of wiring cars to explode, use claymores and such. Setting off the car bombs really put him in a worse position since it knocked out power to his house and rattled it pretty badly.
A year ago I had asked dopers how zombie-proof their houses were. This scene is a good example of some solid ‘DOs’ and ‘DONTs’. I agree he should have set up a network of safehouses.
I seem to recall seeing that it was vinegar at some point, but I can’t cite you a specific scene.
Along with all the other complaints, which I heartily join, I felt that the film introduced plot points, then never followed up on them. The biggest one would be the developing intelligence/society in the zombi/vampires. We see that they’re obviously becoming something more than just drooling, ultra-violent freaks; we see that there’s even a leader, who is directing their efforts against Neville. Where does this ultimately go? Not much of anywhere, other than the big boom-boom at the end.
Also, the butterfly theme. It recurs throughout the film. I was more than half-expecting that the “cure” would be somehow butterfly-related, but nothing. Nor is there anything especially butterfly-like going on in the film–I’m not seeing any metamorphoses, unless it’s Neville’s last minute conversion to Gawd-fearing-ness.
Speaking of: I don’t suppose you all noticed that, when the VT survivor colony opened its big ass doors, framed right between them was a little white chapel? Just in case we missed all the god crap before that…
I just saw the film today in a Times Square theater. I thought it was great until the woman and boy showed up, then it all turned to crap.
How did they get into Manhattan when all the bridges are destroyed and the tunnels flooded, and then how did they get out again?
The “vampires/zombies/mutant whatevers” looked completely horrible and fake. I don’t care what disease you are infected with, when a human being screams their jaw does not dislocate a foot like some snake. Completely took me out of the movie. Just terrible. In fact if this film had nothing to do with the mutants, and was just one guy surviving on his own in an overgrown NYC, it would have been so much better, though obviously that would have been a different movie. All the scenes of Will Smith driving around the desolate Manhattan streets were so eerie and fascinating (those scenes, btw, looked completely realistic, though it was funny seeing billboards and theatre marquees for things that have already closed still being around in 2012.)
That’s what I assumed happened. Zombies attack helicopters, flip them all over the place (leading to the death of Neville’s wife and kid) and the whole situation deteriorates from there. Neville is sending out a radio message, one that is presumably not just limited to New York City, so it seems that he knows that there is at least one way to get on and off the island. He also talks about the whole plan getting messed up and I guess it started with the initial attempts at containment.
Question though, how did Neville’s wife and kid die in the book?
IIRC, the plague.
Much like everyone else in this thread, I saw the movie and absolutely loved most of it. Will Smith’s performance is worthy of notice that it likely won’t get due to the type of movie it is. There were so many little moments that worked so well: seeing Fred at Grand Central, “Please say hello to me,” his throwing of the breakfast and the explanation that he was “saving that bacon.” When he was running down the vampires, it clearly wasn’t some action driven fight scene. It was the actions of a man desperate to get suicidal revenge. The ending made a waste of it. All of the power and emotion that the movie built so elegantly was wasted with the (as was said above) Signs ending.
There were certainly some things that the book did better than the movie, but even simply taking the movie on it’s own, it was a waste of a lot of it’s own work.
Perhaps one day they’ll make a movie of Earth Abides, which is blessedly zombie-free.
He does seem to dominate the others, though. And there must have been some way for them to communicate, or they wouldn’t have been able to set that trap.
As I recall, Matheson did the script for the first film version of the book, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price (which George Romero has acknowledged as an influence on Night of the Living Dead). He was so disappointed with the results he asked to be allowed to use a pen name in the credits.