By Ryan Parsons | Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
I Am Legend
Reviews are starting to post for I Am Legend and they are more positive than we originally expected. Don't get me wrong, the film looks great, but a couple of the earliest screening reports tried to hint that it was more 'cheap zombie' than tentpole blockbuster.
I Am Legend Reviews
We got two official reviews and one more screening report for I Am Legend. Though some of the buzz to arrive in our mailbox still claim the film isn't amazing, all three are strangely positive.
Hollywood Reporter
Bottom Line: A fascinating take on old sci-fi tale but too CG-dependent and an unconvincing religious ending damages its credibility.
Will Smith plays a military virologist who has inexplicably survived a man-made virus that wiped out mankind in the third or fourth film -- depending on what you count -- based on a 1954 Richard Matheson science fiction novel. But the film can never quite decide whether it's speculative fiction or a B-movie horror show.
Variety
Remarkably eerie yet annoyingly larded with cheap horror-film shock effects, “I Am Legend” stands as an effective but also irksome adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 sci-fi novel. In what is to a considerable extent a solo turn as the last healthy human on a post-plague planet Earth, Will Smith strongly holds the screen in a one-man Alamo besieged by marauding cannibals. Potent B.O. looms worldwide.
AICN Screening Report
And yeah - it started tacky enough: Loads of attention grabbing shots of a digitally depopulated New York coupled with a "chase scene" that combines Fast & Furious-style driving with distractingly obvious CGI animals.
But then the movie proper started - and man, it's a BLAST! I don't care what everybody else says, but this bitch ROCKS. Not just because they actually manage to build a plausible backstory (even for the "vampires"), and give the scenario an atmosphere of dread and isolation. No, "I am legend" works because despite all the action sequences and FX fireworks, it's still very much the story of a lonely man incapable of accepting fate. The finer details of the script are too numerous to list here, but if you look for it, everything in the movie has a subtext, a mirror opposite, or some deeper connection. Mankind brings the plague upon itself, and every time things take a turn for the worse, someone has caused it. Even Robert Neville is responsible for everything karma throws at him, and when his carefully balanced world starts to unravel, it's strictly because he made mistakes, ignored facts, slipped up.
For a film with this much hype and talent, I have to admit that I'm surprised that Warner Bros would let such shoddy effect work to slide.
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