I am Legend - Spoiler Alert (plot details, review, thoughts - discussion invited!)
So, today I saw 'I am Legend' at the pictures. NB also references to 30 Days of Night.
I should know by now to stay away from apocalyptic movies - they make me want to start putting shutters on the window, stockpiling food and water, and buying endless supplies of batteries. Worse, they always make me feel...like something is coming. I start thinking about what I would do if.... I think I might be neurotic.
Anyway, the start of this movie is a phenomenal piece of scene setting. Switching from the announcement that I guess everybody on this planet is hoping comes tomorrow, that a cure for cancer has been found - a doctor has retrofit the measles virus to eradicate the disease. It's been tested on 10,009 patients, and all of them are now clear of cancer. Then we cut to three years later, and New York is a graveyard - a desolate ruin, eerily silent, yet with the echo of the millions who used to walk its streets.
There are just so many ways that this movie is full of awesome. One of them is Will Smith - my mum didn't want to see this movie because he was in it, and to paraphrase her comments, 'He can't do serious acting - only wisecracks and fistfights' or words to that effect. Come the end of the film, she was in awe. I never liked Tom Hanks' portrayal in the movie Cast Away but then he has never appealed to me as an actor. Perhaps it's unfair to compare the two performances then as, although there is a common theme of isolation and its effects, the events surrounding the heroes' predicament are drastically different.
Still, I felt hollow inside at the life of Robert Neville - Smith was a poor bastard brought to the edge of insanity, sometimes scuffing at the line to borrow from Kurtz in Dreamcatcher, as a man who had survived the worst imaginable nightmare, and survived it alone. And even though the K-virus that had wiped out 90% of the population, left perhaps 12 million who were immune and then created rabid mutants of the rest to feed on those survivors, was not his doing, he still held himself responsible for failing to stop it. In the three years since the virtual eradication of the human race, he has tried to find the cure, even when you think what is the point? Facing an army of cannibal like humans, even if he did find a vaccine, how could he possibly hope to administer it? His world is gone, and even a miracle cure can't bring it back.
It was not by any means your typical disaster movie, where the protagonist stumbles from one crisis to the next so that it is basically a carnival ride of peaks and troughs, all stomach twisting anticipation and fast bends, with nothing resembling actual thought or emotion. It was both, and when he had to kill his dog I cried. I like dogs, but it was just that Sam had become his only companion. More than that, she was the last thing his daughter had held before she died, and even though he still stayed in the family home, I think Sam represented his best and only friend and also the last solid present connection with his family and the old world - the last thread of normality.
His sacrifice at the end, to ensure the survival of his cure for the virus, was painful to watch and yet so courageous. He had finally achieved what he had spent so long trying to create, and yet he would never see the world that would be saved because of it. But he would also be reunited with his family.
Uplifting, frightening, depressing, nerve-shredding, this was a film that make me think a lot. Not all pleasant things.
The way the government reacted to the crisis was one of the things that troubled me, and could I suppose be considered an eye opener. They chose to seal off New York city, trapping people not yet exposed to the virus with those who were carriers. I saw a news report on GMTV (a UK breakfast news show) a few years back - well before the London bombings and the attack on Glasgow Airport. Bio-terrorism was the latest panic inducer, and typically the media were stoking the fire. The reporter was outside a subway and said that if there was a biological attack, the people inside would be expecting the authorities to respond to their plight and get them out. He said the only thing the authorities might show up to do would be to close the door. And he did, pushing over the huge foot thick metal barrier. Why do they have those types of doors anyway? See, now I'm getting paranoid.
I don't actually know what the Government would do if something like that happened. We currently have a bunch of brain dead Romero-extras in power, and they can't seem to get anything right let alone something so urgent, so serious. Can you trust governments in these situations? Or is it impossible for a person to consider without bias what should be done if something like that were to happen? The Government has to consider the country rather than the individual if push came to shove. But is that the right thing to do? Do you sacrifice a few hundred or a few thousand to save a nation? Where do you stop?
The movie also had my mum and I talking about what we would do if something like that happened (we like to debate and pretty much any subject is open for discussion and we always end up disagreeing *hee*). On a serious note, we discussed what would happen to us. In 30 Days of Night, some of the survivors hide in a loft, trying to keep quiet so that the vampires don't find them. Two of the survivors are a man and his Alzheimer's affected father. To be honest, if I'd known that was going to happen, I might not have gone to see the movie. It was too close to the bone for me, because my Dad has Dementia and it was painful to see the man try to still protect his dad, when his condition lessened their chances of survival (he didn't understand the situation and ended up wandering outside). One of the characters killed his wife and children rather than let them fall prey to the vampires. What would you do? Would you try to survive even when survival seemed unlikely or impossible? Or would you take what my mum considers the coward's way out (but then she's RC and considers suicide to be a sin)?
I've just read this back and boy it's depressing. Maybe it's just how I'm feeling right now. Going to post it anyway. Better out than in, huh.
I should know by now to stay away from apocalyptic movies - they make me want to start putting shutters on the window, stockpiling food and water, and buying endless supplies of batteries. Worse, they always make me feel...like something is coming. I start thinking about what I would do if.... I think I might be neurotic.
Anyway, the start of this movie is a phenomenal piece of scene setting. Switching from the announcement that I guess everybody on this planet is hoping comes tomorrow, that a cure for cancer has been found - a doctor has retrofit the measles virus to eradicate the disease. It's been tested on 10,009 patients, and all of them are now clear of cancer. Then we cut to three years later, and New York is a graveyard - a desolate ruin, eerily silent, yet with the echo of the millions who used to walk its streets.
There are just so many ways that this movie is full of awesome. One of them is Will Smith - my mum didn't want to see this movie because he was in it, and to paraphrase her comments, 'He can't do serious acting - only wisecracks and fistfights' or words to that effect. Come the end of the film, she was in awe. I never liked Tom Hanks' portrayal in the movie Cast Away but then he has never appealed to me as an actor. Perhaps it's unfair to compare the two performances then as, although there is a common theme of isolation and its effects, the events surrounding the heroes' predicament are drastically different.
Still, I felt hollow inside at the life of Robert Neville - Smith was a poor bastard brought to the edge of insanity, sometimes scuffing at the line to borrow from Kurtz in Dreamcatcher, as a man who had survived the worst imaginable nightmare, and survived it alone. And even though the K-virus that had wiped out 90% of the population, left perhaps 12 million who were immune and then created rabid mutants of the rest to feed on those survivors, was not his doing, he still held himself responsible for failing to stop it. In the three years since the virtual eradication of the human race, he has tried to find the cure, even when you think what is the point? Facing an army of cannibal like humans, even if he did find a vaccine, how could he possibly hope to administer it? His world is gone, and even a miracle cure can't bring it back.
It was not by any means your typical disaster movie, where the protagonist stumbles from one crisis to the next so that it is basically a carnival ride of peaks and troughs, all stomach twisting anticipation and fast bends, with nothing resembling actual thought or emotion. It was both, and when he had to kill his dog I cried. I like dogs, but it was just that Sam had become his only companion. More than that, she was the last thing his daughter had held before she died, and even though he still stayed in the family home, I think Sam represented his best and only friend and also the last solid present connection with his family and the old world - the last thread of normality.
His sacrifice at the end, to ensure the survival of his cure for the virus, was painful to watch and yet so courageous. He had finally achieved what he had spent so long trying to create, and yet he would never see the world that would be saved because of it. But he would also be reunited with his family.
Uplifting, frightening, depressing, nerve-shredding, this was a film that make me think a lot. Not all pleasant things.
The way the government reacted to the crisis was one of the things that troubled me, and could I suppose be considered an eye opener. They chose to seal off New York city, trapping people not yet exposed to the virus with those who were carriers. I saw a news report on GMTV (a UK breakfast news show) a few years back - well before the London bombings and the attack on Glasgow Airport. Bio-terrorism was the latest panic inducer, and typically the media were stoking the fire. The reporter was outside a subway and said that if there was a biological attack, the people inside would be expecting the authorities to respond to their plight and get them out. He said the only thing the authorities might show up to do would be to close the door. And he did, pushing over the huge foot thick metal barrier. Why do they have those types of doors anyway? See, now I'm getting paranoid.
I don't actually know what the Government would do if something like that happened. We currently have a bunch of brain dead Romero-extras in power, and they can't seem to get anything right let alone something so urgent, so serious. Can you trust governments in these situations? Or is it impossible for a person to consider without bias what should be done if something like that were to happen? The Government has to consider the country rather than the individual if push came to shove. But is that the right thing to do? Do you sacrifice a few hundred or a few thousand to save a nation? Where do you stop?
The movie also had my mum and I talking about what we would do if something like that happened (we like to debate and pretty much any subject is open for discussion and we always end up disagreeing *hee*). On a serious note, we discussed what would happen to us. In 30 Days of Night, some of the survivors hide in a loft, trying to keep quiet so that the vampires don't find them. Two of the survivors are a man and his Alzheimer's affected father. To be honest, if I'd known that was going to happen, I might not have gone to see the movie. It was too close to the bone for me, because my Dad has Dementia and it was painful to see the man try to still protect his dad, when his condition lessened their chances of survival (he didn't understand the situation and ended up wandering outside). One of the characters killed his wife and children rather than let them fall prey to the vampires. What would you do? Would you try to survive even when survival seemed unlikely or impossible? Or would you take what my mum considers the coward's way out (but then she's RC and considers suicide to be a sin)?
I've just read this back and boy it's depressing. Maybe it's just how I'm feeling right now. Going to post it anyway. Better out than in, huh.