The Culture Beat

The latest Will Smith blockbuster demonstrates true star power. Classic film director Howard Hawks once remarked that few stars could, like Humphrey Bogart in Hawks’The Big Sleep, be tolerable enough to audiences to appear in every scene. Smith joins the singular company of Tom Hanks in Castaway in carrying the bulk of the story by himself. The film is a remake of the classic Richard Matheson sci-fi novel about the apparently “last man on earth” who must fend off vampire-like mutants following an apocalyptic event that has destroyed the rest of humanity. It was made earlier as just that, The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price and again with Charlton Heston as The Omega Man (1971). Thus, for long time sci-fi fans, this is not a new concept.

But the execution is new–the opening scenes of a ghost-town Manhatten, grass growing from cracks in the streets, wildlife roaming the city canyons and an eery stillness that haunts the viewer and Smith’s character are the best things about the film. For several years, Smith has increasingly stretched his capacities beyond the jocular action heroics that made him a star. This film takes his character, an army medical researcher whose cancer cure has mutated into this civilizaton-destorying catastrophe, and who has lost everything, to the edge of sanity in his efforts to find a cure.

So, yes, I Am Legend joins the dark wave of popular culture depicting desperate characters in deep crises that extends from television sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica, to films of various genres: crime (No Country for Old Men), war (the spate of Iraq-centered flops like Redacted and Lions for Lambs), even to fantasy (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). The Entertainment Weekly review notes that the film’s medical mutation nemesis doesn’t resonate with the threats most on audience’s minds so the subtext that gives hit films their immediate relevance is missing. Despite the record-breaking opening, I question whether word-of-mouth will be strong enough to keep the movie charging along. The first and second act of the movie play well with a particularly scary scene shot in mostly darkness–a rare cinematic use of absence of image to stir the power of our imaginations–it’s what we can’t see that we find scariest. But like the earlier adaptations, I Am Legend changes the originally bleaker ending for a bittersweet but very abrupt one that may leave your head cocked quizzically as you barely have time to decompress from the high-octane tension of the climax before the screen fades to black and the credits roll.