Not Your Daddy’s Zombies!
by Flick Chick Vique
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I Am Legend stalks 3 & ½ Red Vines for a fine performance by Will Smith |
Good stories never die, they just get told over and over again. Such is the case with Will Smith’s latest movie, I Am Legend.
Based on a short science fiction book with the same name, the movie is Hollywood’s third attempt at telling the apocalyptic tale. The first made in 1964 was called The Last Man on Earth and starred the incomparable Vincent Price. The Omega Man featuring the venerable Charlton Heston followed in 1971.
While I haven’t read the book and continue to be dumbfounded by my ignorance of The Omega Man, I have seen Price’s version. It was so creepy and reminiscent of the true standard of all zombie fests, Night of the Living Dead, that I had to look up which film was made first to see who copied whom! Boy was I ever surprised! Who would have thunk that George Romero-the universally acknowledged mastermind of flesh eating zombies was NOT the first to commit those haunting images to celluloid! Nope! Though they were considered more vampire-like, the zombies in The Last Man on Earth beat Romero’s by 4 whole years!
But enough film history lessons! Today’s discourse is about the newest flesh eaters to grip the screen. The movie opens with Will Smith going about his solitary life as the sole survivor in New York City. In a series of flashbacks scattered throughout the film we learn that a cure for cancer mutated into a killer virus. Infection rate was almost 100 percent. Those who didn’t die now roam as flesh eating zombies. But they are vampiric in nature as sunlight destroys them. A few souls are immune to the virus and Smith is one of them. As a military doctor, he feels responsible for the virus that happened on ‘his watch’ and he spends his days searching for other survivors and his nights searching for a cure in his home lab.
Many have compared Smith’s role to that of Tom Hanks’ in Castaway and it would be a fair comparison. Though the reasons for their exile are vastly different, their predicament of loneliness and despair bordering on madness are much the same. Will Smith once again flexes his well-developed acting muscles to give a performance that is moving and exciting. Unlike its predecessors, this movie version is packed with explosions, chase scenes and intense action sequences. And like any really good horror film, the movie has a lot of heart. Hey you have to care about your heroes to be scared for them! And these amped up zombies are faster, stronger and more blood thirsty than have ever graced the screen. Like the vampires from the recent 30 Days of Night, these aren’t the slow-footed, dim-witted creatures most of us were raised on!
Wrapped in a cocoon of sci-fi fun, I Am Legend explores the deep psychological effects of solitude with a healthy dose of philosophy and a dollop of religion on the side.
Enjoy the wild ride!
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