"I Am Legend"

Dec. 14, 2007 | Those of us who live in big cities, who never see bears rummaging through our garbage or find wildcat prints in the snow, often think we're protected from nature. But even when we think we've built the most sophisticated fortresses against it -- office buildings that require three forms of ID for entry; apartment complexes with astute doormen who will let no raccoon pass unannounced -- nature always finds a way to come charging back. In her 2001 book "Wild Nights," a study of the way the creatures of the natural world find ways to assert themselves into the urban landscape, Anne Matthews writes, "More and more scholars now suggest that even a megacity is part of a larger land-use story, in which cities are as vulnerable to nature and fortune as any other life-form; some endure, some thrive, some shrink." And sure enough, coyotes now trek from God knows where to take up residence in Central Park; battle-scarred pigeons, missing eyes, toes and even parts of wings, roam the streets with a survivor's cockiness; certain weeds and even trees can, and will, grow anywhere; and we all know what they say about cockroaches and nuclear war.

In the opening sequence of "I Am Legend," Will Smith, as the last person alive in 2012 New York, navigates the deserted streets in a chick-magnet sports car. But in this solemn landscape, three years after a virus has wiped out most of the global population and turned others into bloodthirsty vampire zombies, there are no chicks to magnetize -- nature has taken its course, but that course is out of the question. There are cars in the streets, but they're not moving: Long abandoned, they snooze at intersections, while odd little plants push up through the pavement around them. There are no traffic sounds, only the singing of birds. And as Smith's character -- his name is Robert Neville -- trolls around in that sports car (he's looking for something, but we don't know what it is yet), his dog, a German shepherd named Sam, pricks up her ears. Before long, we know what she's on to. We hear a dull, clattering tattoo, a sound that seems to be traveling beneath the pavement, and then we see its source: a herd of deer running through the streets of Manhattan, past once tony, now useless Madison Avenue stores, past a Staples filled with office supplies that no one needs, past any number of empty, permanently decaffeinated Starbucks. The sound of their hooves is a drumbeat of fear and freedom. In a world turned upside down, they've gone wild in the streets.

"I Am Legend" is supposedly an adaptation of Richard Matheson's much loved 1954 science fiction novella about the last man alive in a world populated by vampires. Fans of Matheson's stark, unsettling and eerily beautiful book may be outraged by this version, which was directed by Francis Lawrence (who made the 2005 comic adaptation "Constantine"). The details of Matheson's story -- which has been adapted for the screen twice before, most recently as "The Omega Man," with Charlton Heston, in 1971 -- have been either submerged, changed beyond recognition or deleted entirely. The setting has been switched from California to New York. Here, the virus-infected mutant creatures that surround Neville aren't really vampires, but skinless, seemingly mindless zombies motivated only by their own bloodthirst.

"I Am Legend" is really two movies seamed together, à la Frankenstein: The last half-hour seems to have been grabbed from some other, very different movie. It's as if, two-thirds of the way through, Lawrence realized that after spending this kind of money (reportedly, the movie cost some $200 million to make), he'd better deliver the zombie-filled special-effects dazzler the audience -- or, perhaps more significantly, the studio holding the wallet, Warner Bros. -- would be expecting.

But in the first hour of "I Am Legend," Lawrence captures the essence of Matheson's story, its mood of creeping despair, its vision of a man trying not to fall apart within a world that's already broken into pieces. And he adds something else: a sense of wonder mingled with dread, suggesting that even this nightmare-future world can hold its own kind of rough, wily beauty. Lawrence shot the picture on location in New York, and even though it's heavily enhanced with CGI, to anyone who knows the city even from casual visits, the settings are unnervingly recognizable. (His production designer is Naomi Shohan, and the cinematographer is Andrew Lesnie, who previously made plenty of people believe that Middle-earth was an actual shooting location.)

The industrial-chic trendiness of Tribeca becomes a foreboding canyon of damp, deteriorating squats, hiding places for any number of unseen, inhuman creatures waiting to strike. Most remarkable of all is Times Square, here seen only in daylight: Neville and Sam hit the streets by day, looking for food, supplies and possible survivors, and wiping out as many zombie vampires as they can find, but they must be back to their Washington Square home before nightfall, when the creatures -- who can't tolerate sunlight -- are free to roam and maraud. So in the daytime, they're tourists in a city that used to belong to them: The Times Square in which they find themselves has already forgotten its many recent pasts (from lively hub to tawdry playground to family-friendly entertainment mecca) and is slowly transforming itself into a primeval forest, stretching back toward a past no human can remember. Small trees have popped up wherever they can find a place to do so -- mostly between those endless rows of stalled cars -- and lowlier types of vegetation thrive too, as if they've won a battle against humankind that they didn't even know they were fighting. In the movie's opening sequence, Neville and Sam corner one of those deer in the middle of Times Square, only to lose their prey to a lioness who, they quickly realize, is trying to feed her cub. The image is one of life trying to rejuvenate itself in the face of despair.

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