“Please say hello to me.”

Justin’s rating: The last of us. Except that girl. And that other guy. And that bunch of party animals over on Fraternity Row.

Justin’s review: Having just reviewed The Last Man on Earth, I wanted to complete my personal Richard Matheson trifecta by going back to watch 2007’s I Am Legend (a title that should be on this site anyway). Considering the boom of plague movies and post-apocalyptic franchises that emerged in the last decade, it’s certainly strange to look back over time and see that this movie was somewhat novel for its era.

A supposed cure for cancer ends up backfiring as badly as it could, wiping out most life on earth. In New York City, there is but one man who remains to get jiggy with it: Army doc Richard Neville (Will Smith). Unknowing if anyone actually exists elsewhere in the world, Neville carries on his work of trying to solve the plague that took down his wife, daughter, and so many others.

However, it’s been three years of living among the dead, and Neville is starting to crack. We get to follow him as he goes through his routine of scavenging, talking to store mannequins, hanging out with his cool German Shepard, racing cars down the still streets, and setting up home defenses. Defenses? Indeed, because some of the people didn’t die — they became bad CGI zombies. That’s the worst disease you could inflict on anyone.

So I want to jump ahead to two big criticisms (and one smaller one) that holds I Am Legend back from being a classic. The first are the aforementioned zombies. They’re so painfully generic and uninteresting that once the movie reveals them, all the tension goes right out of the room. They don’t exist to be “real” in any sense… just cannon fodder for Will Smith to kill with his Home Alone booby traps and high-powered rifle.

These flow into the second weak point of this film, which is that it had this opportunity to take Matheson’s novel and do something bold with it — and ended up chucking most everything that made that ’50s book special. Other than the title, the post-apocalyptic setting, and a guy doing stuff during the day while barricading himself at night, there’s no connection between the two. They had a great opportunity to return to the vampire themes and a society of the intelligent undead… and decided that CGI zombies were more acceptable for a PG-13 rating.

Finally, my smallest criticism is reserved for the way the studio botched the ending. If you haven’t heard, this film took the much better shot ending and kicked it to the curb in favor of a last-minute, go-out-with-a-bang reshoot that’s pretty awful. Allegedly, the sequel is set to use the original ending as its starting point. We’ll see.

Yet there’s no call to discard I Am Legend because of these factors. Those heavy flaws aside, what we have here is a meticulously crafted post-apocalyptic world set not in some bombed-out wasteland or small Midwestern town but New York City itself.

It’s hard to convey how eerie and amazing it is to see this bustling, loud, crowded metropolis absolutely still and silent (save for the wind and animals), overgrown in parts by vegetation or the rising flood waters of the river. There’s so much environmental storytelling going on where certain arresting images prompt your brain to fill in the gaps and piece together what happened. Or might have happened, at any rate.

And before this movie devolves into the siege of the big-mouthed zombie dudes, Will Smith absolutely owns it as a guy struggling with severe loneliness and a crushing burden to fix a very broken world. Watching him go about his routines isn’t the jolly fantasy that we sometimes have about playing around in the apocalypse by ourselves.

Seeing Neville so desperate for companionship that he constantly runs old morning talk show broadcasts in the background should make anyone rethink that wish of wanting to be in this situation. Even a dog is no substitute for a face, a conversation, and a life. Even though he’s shown to be a competent survivalist, he’s also suffering from deep depression and PTSD. Every day he returns to the same spot on a pier — where he sets up a desk and waits for someone, anyone to respond to his radio calls.

It’s just a shame that when he finally gets companionship, the movie quickly slides downhill into a muddled, boring ending that tosses out all of that fantastic worldbuilding and tension.

As a high-budget look at a post-apocalyptic NYC and some survivalist fantasy, I Am Legend is a decent way to pass the time. It’s just such a shame that what could’ve been great took a less ambitious path to only being good.

Intermission!

• “So you have actually cured cancer?” “Yes. Yes we have.”
• New York City has never been this quiet… or this flooded
• How much tarp does it take to cover an entire high rise? Because that’s got to be one huge, heavy piece of fabric. Maybe just lock the doors?
• DEER JUMP SCARE
• This seems to be a very unsafe way to hunt
• Yes yes they had the Batman vs Superman poster years before they made the movie. But we all knew it was coming, so what?
• I think it’s kind of brilliant that they don’t use a movie score for the first part
• NYC has a lion infestation
• I don’t know if I’d run several generators inside my house
• I am kind of curious where Neville got those talk show tapes
• iPod!
• Sleeping in a tub looks so uncomfortable
• Shut up kid in the backseat
• The works of art that he’s saved and tucked around his house
• A video store full of mannequins is so creepy
• Playing golf off an aircraft carrier
• Fishing for zombies. And that one zombie has some serious anger management problems. Rage much, bro?
• Fishing in the museum looks peaceful
• Fred, why you move?
• “Fred, if you’re real, you better tell me right now!”
• It always bugged me that Neville never bagged a deer in this movie
• The disappearing light is pretty freaky
• The Air Force taking out the bridges
• This movie is a commercial for Shrek
• Boy he wired up a whole lot of explosives