white noise

Somehow there was a big buzz leading up to the release of I Am Legend, and it opened accordingly big in theaters, but I missed all that. Then someone told me it was basically a big budget zombie flick and I was suddenly intrigued. A zombie flick with a big budget? Starring Will Smith? This just seemed all wrong. I had to check it out. (As with all my reviews I’ll be vague enough not to give spoilers – even for a movie as predictable as this one).

Going into the film I new nothing of the original book from 1954, nor the other two film adaptations that came before this one. Knowing this now, I can understand why the premise is so strikingly unoriginal. As the trailers and movie posters state, Will Smith is the last man on Earth, but he is not alone. A virus has run rampant and wiped out most of the population and left a few as some part vampire, part zombie flesh eating subculture.

The best parts of the movie are when Smith is alone (except for his dog Sam) while the movie traces his daily routine. In this first act of the movie the pace is slow enough that you take in the amazing scenes of a deserted New York City and wonder what it’d be like to be truly alone. Not a month, or a year, but three years living alone. The set designers and CGI artists are some really talented folk making the post-apocalyptic NYC the real star of the movie. If you’ve been to New York (and probably if you haven’t) you just can’t stop wondering how they created such a believable, vast and desolate scene.

But wait I’ve seen all this before. Only it wasn’t NYC, it was London, where a virus outbreak turned the gen-pop into a different, but more believable breed of speed zombies. 28 Days Later came out back in 2002, and since then speed “zombies” (virus victims) have become all the rage (pun intended) (see also Resident Evil and Dawn of the Dead) rather than the slow, stumbling dim wits of the 70s and 80s. It’s like at some point the scariest thing about the slow, masses of traditional zombies – the shear number of them – just wasn’t enough. Film makers wanted to turn up the scary gain. And so zombies got fast. Wicked fast.

Maybe Freddy Krueger is at the heart of the zombie evolution. Of course Freddy wasn’t a zombie, but he was one of the few mainstream characters in the horror renaissance of the 80s, who would run you down. Freddy wasn’t full speed all the time, but he broke the tradition set by Romero and followed by Jason and Micheal Myers. Suspense gave way to terror. And it was only a matter of time before it hit the zombie genre.

With I Am Legend I get the impression the creative team wanted to turn the gain to eleven. Faster, stronger, with bigger months, and if that’s not enough maybe we’ll make them smart, too. Yeah, take that you seasoned horror movie fan. But wait, this movie is PG-13 (it’s a Will Smith flick after all) so we can’t get too gory. As a result, I’ve never seen a zombie movie with less blood and guts.

So all that becomes clear in the second act, and just like Smith’s acting you feel the baddies are a notch too over the top. As the movie barrels through the third act, you’re in the familiar territory of a big budget Will Smith action flick. Luckily the writers keep Smith’s wise cracks to a minimum. I wasn’t crazy about the ending, but it really could have been MUCH worse. In the end I actually wanted to see more of the movie, so I’d have to give the movie a pretty good mark. Unlike most big budget movies it wasn’t more of the big action ending that I was craving but just more of that surreal New York daily life. Although there were some seriously creepy missed opportunities in the subways stations or Grand Central, I dug the Bob Marley theme and soundtrack. And it helped up make up for Smith’s shameless, shirtless workout scenes.

I caught the film adaptation of the Stephen King novella, The Mist, a couple weeks ago after much anticipation and a blog post back in May. This story, after all, was the first thing I remember reading from King plus it inspired the game Half-Life many years later. Although I didn’t have a chance to re-read the story prior to the screening as I’d hoped, I remembered quite a bit of the story from many years ago. And from my memory the film held pretty true to the book – except for the interesting, but heavy-handed ending they tacked onto the end. Without giving anything away, the filmmakers decided to answer more questions than the original did. For a creepy story rooted in a lack of information, having answers and resolution provided at the end just felt all wrong.

By far this is director Frank Darabont’s weakest King adaptation. Of course it will take a miracle to pull off one better than Shawshank and The Green Mile. But it wasn’t bad either. Surprisingly, the visual effects didn’t disappoint as in so many other King movies. I went in with the attitude that’d we’d be best entertained by seeing very little of what’s in the mist, and if they had to show us, well, they better bring it. And they did. You practically can’t impress an audience anymore in this post-LOTR era, but the cgi has to be believable, else it’s a distraction. In this flick, all the baddies from big to enormous were done quite well.

In this film, it was the flatness of the characters that left this movie short of the others in Darabont’s resume. There just wasn’t much character development throughout the movie – characters were introduced quickly, and what you saw is what you got. Most fulfilled their very typical roles, and few had any kind of arc. Really the only development you see are stereotypical characters becoming bigger and more exaggerated caricatures of themselves…the bible thumper, the reluctant hero, the uppity out-of-towner, the town yokels, etc. In fairness I think Darabont didn’t have much to draw from – the simple characters worked fine in the short(ish) story, but on film where less is left to the imagination their shallowness was too obvious. Still, there’s plenty of action to keep things moving, and I personally managed to quickly forget the bits of dialog that were either lifeless or way over the top.

Overall it’s a fun watch. I just hope when Darabont takes on King’s The Long Walk, he returns to his old self and knocks one out of the park.