Legendary Casting
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Contains no spoilers. Contains sodium benzoate as a blog preservative.
I saw I am Legend this evening at the Uptown Theater. I now think that Will Smith and Tom Hanks should co-star in an action flick called "I was Cast as a Volleyball" in which Will and Tom are stranded on a desert island with vampire ghouls who are desperate to balance their odd number with just one additional player to round out their beach volleyball game. When Will and Tom refuse to play, the monsters get mad, and a beach bullet bingo battle ensues on the once idyllic sands. It doesn't look good for our heroes but in a surprise ending, Kevin Costner sails up in his catamaran crewed by tame wolves and saves them from the crazed ghoul leader, played by Tom Cruise (naturally).Or maybe it should have been an animated feature, where some text gets tired of going to its job every morning explaining the symbols on nearby maps and charts to curious students and business executives. Burnt out, it goes postal and terrorizes the city until a flying squad of numbers from a nearby children's television program comes to the rescue and uses a little bouncing yellow ball to beat the letters into submission...
Ahem.
After due consideration, Legend was an OK film but Children of Men was vastly superior as a science fiction post-apocalyptic film. Who needs altered human monsters when the unadulterated version is deadly and sufficiently crazy? Damn those Brits for being better with all things language-related... you'd think they invented English!
I give Legend a score of six and half fingers out of ten -- the monsters seem to have gotten peckish and snacked on three or four them.
This section DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS. This portion of the review is organic and free-range rambling that contains no preservatives or food colorings (except for lots of green sentiment). As such, expect to pay about three times as much to read this portion.
Oh, how many times must Richard Matheson's literary legacy (well he's actually 81 and still alive) show up on film before they stop messing with the ending? This is the third screen adaptation and they still haven't gotten the message right. It's not about science, technology, or the hubris of mankind. It's about the monster within; the importance of perspective; and a reminder that the victors write the history books.In Matheson's original 1954 novel, the tagline "I am Legend" is not a brag. It is a surprising revelation that arrives just before the hero's ignominious death. He was trying to survive and maybe, just maybe, rescue humanity. But to his surprise, his final legacy will be as a dangerous monster and killer of innocents. He will fade into legend as a mysterious and hated creature of the night. As such, it is one of the best philosophical twists that I've encountered in short fiction in a while.
Legend was visually impressive enough, and Will Smith is pretty badass strutting around the empty streets of Manhattan with a tricked-out M-4 carbine and his faithful dog (who proves to be a far more effective weapon). But once again Hollywood does its part to dumb down America. The film starts off promising enough but never really transforms the monsters into something more than special effects. I wonder how much footage ended up on the cutting room floor. It would have been a better story if the film had retained some of Matheson's original essence, wherein the human becomes a monster and the monsters become human. Maybe there will be a director's cut with an alternate ending (a la Blade Runner) and the addition of missing story threads... But I won't hold my breath.
If you have the time and interest, you can (a) read the short novel, (b) go see the movie, and then review the (c) wikipedia and (d) IMDB articles. With the writer's strike still in effect, what else are you going to do -- watch reruns of Friends?
The review is entertaining as ever. I'm just bummed the movie doesn't live up to the review. I'll still probably go see it, but was hoping for a real tour de force (fr). Maybe you could string together a bunch of your reviews and set them to a thrilling soundtrack and I could go watch that on the big screen? Just an idea.