I’m not all that familiar with Manhattan, but how many bridges are there? I did a quick count and got 15, some of which were small. How far apart is Manhattan from the mainland in the northern part of the city? Just looking at the map rather quickly it seems some places are rather close, maybe they didn’t get around to destroying all of the bridges.
I’m still with Justin_B, I enjoyed the movie and glad that I got a chance to see it.
For me the movie was just right. It had great post apocalyptic images, which I just love, a good story, and it had a few annoying parts that could be picked apart with friends after it was over. That’s part of the social aspect of movie watching for me. I saw it with my cousin and we ranted and raved in the car on the way home, then I did the same thing with a friend at lunch today who’d also seen it. That’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of movie going for me: the post-film discussions. YMMV.
That doesn’t make sense either. How the hell could a military doctor afford a townhouse that size in Washin
Well, first off he wasn’t ‘just’ any army doctor obviously, if he was that involved in the effort. He was a full bird colonel so he wasn’t exactly just some schmucky or something.
It’s plausible he could have afforded the house he had…I can think of several ways it could happen without even stretching the imagination.
-XT
That doesn’t make sense either. How the hell could a military doctor afford a townhouse that size in Washington Square Park? :dubious: I though he just moved into it and modified it to suit his needs (including recreating his daughter’s bedroom)? The survivors’ colony was poorly handled. Alice couldn’t have learned of it from radio broadcasts because Neville would’ve too (unless he’s only making broadcasts and not listening for others) so she really must’ve had visions from God :rolleyes: . It’s true that the infected could’ve climbed over the walls of the colony, but I suspect they’d be less of a problem in rural Vermont that in NYC. Fewer places for them to hide from the sunlight and weather. How was Neville’s “cure” supposed to be of any value? Even assuming that they have the resources and know how to create a serum from a blood sample (and Alice preserved it all the way to Vermont) they’re already immune. What are they supposed to do? Go around capturing infected, restraining them long enough to inject them, and turn them loose. It’d be easier just to kill them.
But would the immunity necessarily be passed on to their kids? Even if you couldn’t hunt down all of the infected and inject them (which probably wouldn’t be to realistic), that doesn’t make the cure useless.
I also thought the part about them keeping the blood sample viable from NY to the survivor colony was pretty far fetched. Even assuming they could get out of the city relatively rapidly, and assuming the roads wouldn’t be choked with cares and such ( :dubious: ) by the time they got there the sample would have degraded unless they figured out how to put it on ice or something.
-XT
There were a couple of nice touches - Neville had a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night in his living room. I remember thinking at the time, wow that place is really well-decorated to have a knockoff print like that in the living room. I looked it up - the original piece is in NY’s Museum of Modern Art. Was the scene where Neville was fishing also in the MoMA? Definitely something I would do, go get a great piece of art to hang in my living room. Just a nice touch in the movie and fairly subtle.
I noticed that too, and suddenly thought of all the great art that must be in New York museums.
No, he was fishing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is off of Central Park. MoMA is located a bit south of there.
I did notice that he collected all the great works of art that were located in New York and thought that it was a clever bit of set design.
So this means you figured out how she got all the vamps to lay off when she rescued him?
Yeah, she turned the UV lights on her roof rack on full blast and the vamps scattered. We saw that on screen.
IIRC there were Van Goghs and Picasso’s in Hestons’ house in Omega man , but I don’t know if they were paintings actually in L.A. or not. Damn right I’s have the Starry Night in my place, but I’d long for the crows flying above the cornfields, and a few Irises
I vaguely recall reading the story many years ago, but I never saw any of the other film adaptations.
I enjoyed the movie up until the bloodsuckingvampirezombies appeared. Up till then I thought it was a straight scifi movie and they turned it into merely another CGI gorefest, IMHO. I definitely thought the chief bloodsuckingvampirezombie was wanting his womancreature back.
Will Smith has whatever it is that makes you look at him. He even did some acting. I think that instead of it being an OK movie it could have been a great movie, but there you are. I don’t make movies, I just watch them.
Plot holes big enough to drive an 18-wheeler through, :rolleyes: but if you’re caught up in the excitement they don’t strike you until after you leave the theatre. Or at least, that’s the ideal. This movie didn’t quite make it for me.
On Roger Ebert’s website, in his “Answer Man” column, somebody’s written a letter about this movie that makes all of us look like geniuses: the writer thinks that in the movie, somehow the water and power in New York magically still work, and that this is an enormous plot hole. Sometimes people are stupid. I’m glad there’s a SDMB.
Ahh. I must’ve either missed it or misinterpreted it. Fair enough.
We have the same line of thinking.
I would imagine that the military would see it prudent to leave one or two bridges intact and then control access through those points.
Just saw it last night.
That was by far the worst thing about the movie. I just knew when it got to the scene where Robert and Anna are arguing about God, that it was going to end with a “God will provide” message.
The second-worst thing–his wife and daughter died after having a spinning helicopter crash into their helicopter? Utterly absurd. It really pisses me off that action scenes have to be more and more ridiculous every year so the computer science BAs can show off how well they learned Maya*. Which reminds me of the scene where Anna saved Neville, which was, as Equipoise put it, eye-rollingly bad.
The third was the actual cause of the infection. Medical exposition scenes are usually eye-rollingly bad, but this one completely failed to convince me. It was very much an “I’m watching a hyped-up Hollywood movie” moment. “Cure for cancer”? Come on.
That said, it was excellent as a horror movie; it really had me jumping several times. I loved the psychological aspect of it, too. Smith pulled Neville off brilliantly. And not since Memento have I been so impressed by the use of flashbacks. The screenwriting was the only weak point; as my date said, “That was like reading one of my essays where I bang out my conclusion at 4 AM the night before when I really just want to get it done and go to bed.”
The scene where the darkseekers almost killed Neville on the dock had some obvious (to me) CGI–specifically when his car swerved around and almost went over the edge. The car looked animated at that point, although one had to be looking for it to see it.
DrFidelius, MPTB actually did cop out. The ending was far too saccharine for an I Am Legend interpretation.
Well, the vampires in the World of Darkness game are like that. It’s fairly logical, considering that they also have incredibly elevated heart rates (remember the scene where Neville’s captured darkseeker was sedated and had a pulse in the 200-300 range?), are much more alert, and have no biological or nutritional needs other than blood and darkness. They just don’t have the physical burdens that living humans do.
He was a legend because he extracted the cured darkseeker’s blood, which contained the cure, and made sure it got to the survivors.
Definitely vinegar. You could see the label on the same (type of) bottle if you watched closely while he poured it on his jacket later (the scene after he saved Sam from the darkseekers’ warehouse stronghold and told her to stay in the car while he rigged up his trap). It’s the same as the bottle of vinegar I have in my kitchen cabinet.
cerberus, what was creepy about the Shrek scene? I’ve met people who know Monty Python sketches that well, and they don’t live in isolation. Allegorical, yes, but not creepy. IMO.
It’s worth noting that he took her to test a cure on her, not to motivate the infected. Unlike the impression I’m getting of the book’s Neville, the movie’s Neville doesn’t hold a grudge against the darkseekers. He doesn’t go hunting for them; he only ever kills one in defense of self or others. In fact, he seems to want to be as far removed from them as practical at all times. IMO, he was terrified of having to deal with one the entire time. As for the part where Neville casually replied that all of his human subjects had died, it seemed more like he was saying that as a professional physician/researcher than as a diehard mutant-killer.
Equipoise, she killed all the attacking mutants with her UV light. Not that difficult to believe; it’s a long-distance weapon with 100% effectiveness, and it kills fast. Notice how quickly Alpha Female’s skin burned under a much weaker UV light in Dr. Neville’s lab. The mutants certainly did have cars–there were cars everywhere. Neville used several different ones throughout the movie and it was never clear that all of them were his (although one was, since it was the same car he used to drive his family to the bridge).
I don’t think that’s any big deal. Infected people got outside of NYC somehow, even though the scanners were, if anything, overzealous in detecting the virus. I thought it was pretty clear that the infected had taken over the city before the military could get it sealed off.
ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies, yup, I definitely thought that hive thing looked like a circle-jerk too.
As for the audience, there were a couple of teenaged idiots in front of us. In the (supposed to be) heart-rending scene where Anna first sees a picture of Marley (the daughter), one of them screamed out “SHE’S A GIRL?!?” and most of the theater laughed. To be fair, I was thinking the same thing at the time. But when the same person yelled out something like “you asshole” when Neville put his dog down–that was absurd. His dog was turning into a freaking vampire. What was he supposed to do? And it was obvious from the expression on his face that it was probably the single most psychologically destructive thing he’d ever done. It really broke him, and it pissed me off that some teenaged asshat had to ruin the moment like that.
grayhairedmomma, Anna didn’t stay at the dock–she just happened to come back at exactly the right time to save Dr. Neville. Which was silly too. But, remember that part of her “God is guiding me” argument was that she showed up at exactly the right time to save Neville.
Zebra, yes, Anna heard Neville’s broadcast from Baltimore.
alphaboi867, Neville could afford that house because he was a freaking Colonel.
If you’re interested, you can read Mark Protosevich’s original script here. Not only is it set in San Francisco, but it’s considerably closer to the story arc of the book. The movie’s credits list Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman as writers of the screenplay. Goldsman was brought in later, and is the same hack who mutilated the I, Robot story for the big screen.
On the plus side, when the studio was originally thinking about making the film in the mid to late 1990s, the star was going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t care how good the script was, there’s no way Arnie could have made Neville convincing.
Yeah, i’m quite surprised at the number of people who are put off by that scene. It seemed fairly unproblematic to me.
I’m sure it’s possible that this is what the director had in mind. The biggest problem, for me, was that he didn’t take the 15 seconds or so that it would have required to explain how Anna got onto the island. It could have been explained quite easily, as you and others have demonstrated, but the absence of an explanation was jarring, and made it appear to be a large plot hole.
I’m not sure if you’re being tongue-in-cheek here, but do you have any idea how much a house like that costs, right on the edge of Washington Square Park in Manhattan? This was not some single-floor apartment, but a three-story (possibly 4?) house. We’re talking well into 7 figures, possibly 8. The New York Times real estate ads quite often have single-family (i.e., not split into apartments) houses in that part of the city (Greenwich Village area) for between 5 and 10 million dollars.
I should add, by the way, that my assumption regarding the house was that it had been commandeered for Neville by the army or the government.
He was, after all, the main guy in charge of trying to get control over the virus. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that, in a national emergency like this, he would be provided with living quarters in a central location.
I actually felt that one of the movie’s major strengths was the unreliable narrator perspective–that is, that the viewer doesn’t really know any more than Neville does at any point in the movie. Less, even–at least early on. The lack of explanation for how Anna and the boy ended up at the dock, and then how he ended up in a freaking car with another survivor!, etc., did a lot to put us in Neville’s head. Our shock and confusion was intended to give us some impression of his shock and confusion, IMO.
I’ve been thinking about the kid’s place in the movie, too, and I think I figured it out:
Speaking of which, that really bothers me now that I think about it. The relationship between Neville and Anna was just too chaste.
You have a point. Especially since he kept emphasizing “this is ground zero”. And would he really have had a basement lab in his own home, anyway? What kind of mad scientist would want to come home from a long day at the office/lab, only to isolate more chemicals and viruses and test them on rats? I think that’s another point in your favor there: it makes more sense that the army/feds would have rushed all that equipment in there when they realized they had a pandemic on their hands and then put him in there so he could get his work done without interruption. And really, even if his execution of his home defense was flawed, that house was about as naturally defensible as any domicile could be in the middle of New York City.