by Roger Bourke White Jr., Dec 2007
First off, a quiz:
Question: What do "A Star is Born", "Eddy and the Cruisers" and "I am Legend" have in common?
Answer: Movie makers love them! Love them so much, they make them again and again.
I am Legend with Will Smith is the third remake of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name. The other version I remember seeing is the 1971 Omega Man version with Charlton Heston. There was a 1961 version called Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price, but I missed that.
In both of the versions I watched, I found the movies ho-hum because the basic premise is so flawed.
The basic premise is:
That's the premise, here are the problems I see.
The first and hardest problem is coming up with a suitable plague. Especially in this day and age, plagues don't travel easily. In this latest version, the Will Smith version, the plague travels around the world first as a genetically modified virus that cures cancer. This choice for a deadly virus vector was a mistake: a cure for cancer suffers from three problems: first, there are many kinds of cancer, so a single cure is improbable. Second, cancer cures suffer from the Curse of Being Important, so any cure discovered will be watched very carefully. Third, while it's high profile, few families have cancer problems at any one time, so the people getting the cure would be small in number.
A better choice for a deadly plague spreader would have been a cure for acne. Acne is something that is in almost every family, that every family cares about, but it's not so important that a cure for it would be carefully scrutinized.
The second problem is why was Manhattan cut off? Why were the bridges blown? If this plague started from some wildly popular cure-gone-rogue, it would have been widely spread over the world before the bad symptoms showed up. There was no reason to cut off Manhattan.
Cutting off Manhattan is what half the movie is about. Not cutting off Manhattan cuts off all the panicked evacuation scenes, as well as the broken bridges, and the streets-being-parking-lots scenes. So, it's important to have a good reason for cutting off Manhattan.
I thought about this a lot, and I could come up with no plague scenario in which it made sense to blow the bridges of Manhattan, and this bothered me all through the movie.
The third problem is why are the rabid zombies still alive? If these are infected people, and fast moving infected people, then their metabolic rates are human, or higher. This means they need to eat as much as humans, or more.
In way of comparison, Night of the Living Dead zombies rose from the dead. This meant they were clearly magically powered in some way, so they didn't need to eat for energy. But in I am Legend, the zombies are very specifically diseased humans, the Will Smith character is trying to cure them, so they need food. Where are they getting it? The Will Smith character is getting his food by systematically looting homes for canned and bottled goods. Because he's still finding lots of stuff in the homes, it means he's not in competition with the zombies, which means they aren't getting their food by systematically looting.
So... what are they eating? What have they been eating for the last three years? An addition to the basic eating problem: the zombies are mindlessly violent, so it's not like they could pick up on organic mushroom farming in the sewers as a diet supplement.
New York, and every other city, town and village in the world, pays a lot of money for a fire department. Paying this money is considered top priority for a reason: if a building catches fire in a city, the fire will spread... fast and far. London and Chicago are both famous for burning down from uncontrolled city fires... more than once.
This is the forth problem. Why isn't Will Smith driving around the charcoaled ruins of a city that burned down shortly after most of the people died and the city services collapsed? The zombies he shares the city with are not fire fighters, but they sure could be fire makers.
These problems kept me from enjoying the movie much. I could not suspend belief enough to feel much for the Smith character.
... I gave a lot of thought to how to improve this last-person-in-the-city scenario -- how to make it suitable for a technofiction story. It wasn't easy. First off, I could come up with no disease scenario that made sense. Second, I could come up with no reason to isolate Manhattan. Six months after the movie, I had an "ah hah" and wrote up my version of the last man in New York scenario.
So, all in all, I rank I am Legend as ho-hum science fiction. It's as good as it's story lets it be, which is not very good.
-- The End --