Word: legendizing
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...original version of this article incorrectly stated that the plague in the film I Am Legend is bacterial, when it is in fact viral. The same story also misidentified Richard Matheson's TV work Trilogy of Terror as Tales of Terror
...turned into a fortress (and where, don't ask me why, he sleeps in the bathtub, with his dog). So now he's Jonas Salk, and Jesus too, ready to give his life so that others may live again. It's in the last half-hour that I Am Legend imports new elements that both propel the story to its explosive climax and just aren't as compelling as the day-in-the-life story that preceded it. The notion the movie floats, of an uninfected colony north of the city, is literally too Utopian to seem either plausible...
...post-nuclear world - Robinson Crusoe or Natty Bumppo after the H-bomb or an epidemic. The Shrinking Man, published in 1956 and immediately filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, considered the effects of radiation on an ordinary fellow who grows smaller and smaller, to infinitesimal size. In I Am Legend, Neville, seemingly the only person not killed or infected by a plague, fends for himself, searches desperately for other survivors and hunts down the bands of infected mutants who come out at night looking for people like him - if there are any people like him left. Both novels take...
...funny how filmmakers are drawn to Matheson's subject of post-apocalyptic annihilation, yet feel the need to "fix" the story and welsh out on its conclusions. Each of the I Am Legend adaptations embroiders or softens the original, offering a vision its makers see as more pertinent to their time. Not that there's anything morally pernicious about changing a book when it becomes a movie. The only question that matters: Does the new thing work...
...this I Am Legend, a qualified maybe. The word "mixed" isn't mixed enough to fit my response to this film. I like its fancifully ghostly, ghastly look: the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges missing their center sections (they were bombed to keep people from getting out or in), the whole idea of the most congested U.S. city utterly abandoned, as if everyone had finally moved to the Sunbelt or the Hamptons. I admire, and share, the movie's extended interest in Neville's daily ritual as cop (hunting down the vampire-like infectees), woodsman (looking for animals that will...