He’s also Jesus. Oh, and did I mention he’s Will Smith?
I guess it’s suitable that the current cinematic iteration of Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction novel I Am Legend has been such a long time coming. Come on, look at that title. It has the word “legend” in it. That’s not the harbinger of a quick, cheap yarn. Officially, it’s been in the works for a decade, although I suspect it may have been the gleam in some filmmaker’s eye ever since he took a gander at The Omega Man in 1971 and saw that it was a ripe vat of Charlton Heston Gorgonzola. Regardless, the new, improved Last Man on Earth was supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then he was going to be Tom Cruise. He turned out to be Will Smith. I don’t know about you, but if those three were going to be in some charismatic charm version of a Celebrity Ultimate Fighting Championship, I’d be rooting for Smith. He’s always had down to earth ease and humor to spare. The other two, not so much. The late 1990s budgetary willies that scrapped the Schwarzenegger version have turned out to be a boon. It also presents a quandary, though, that I Am Legend doesn’t have the imagination to overcome.
Smith’s casting as military officer, doctor, scientist, and all-around good egg/survivalist Robert Neville has been cited as a vital moment for African American movie stars because a) he is indisputably one and b) he is an international one. He and Denzel Washington are high-grossing proof that non-American audiences will appreciate a black American star as much as a white one. Smith is doing something even Washington hasn’t been hired to do: carry a $200 million movie—the kind of movie that needs to be an international hit—alone. And in this case, he’s really alone. He’s good, too. He’s the deft combination of buffness, hardiness, and sensitivity that makes him admirable and relatable to all comers. He made me tear up in a way that all the lovesick grief and lies in Atonement didn’t (although to be fair, as soon as I Am Legend put a beloved pet in peril, the waterworks were sadistically primed). Yet his presence has stripped the source story of its third act teeth, not to mention any notion of coherence.
If all fans of the novel (and the Heston version, to a lesser extent) are like the group of guys overheard after a packed Saturday night screening, they are not going to be pleased by what has happened to the legend in I Am Legend. To wit: they were infuriated by the brand new upbeat ending that reverses the original’s pointed commentary on how man becomes the boogeyman when civilization is annihilated and then allowed to re-evolve. Our hero is perhaps not such a hero to all living beings on the planet. But who’s to say the cycle won’t repeat itself again even when humanity gets to start over? Not the happiest thought out there. I couldn’t help but be mystified by their anger at this narrative alteration, though. I mean, the movie stars Will Smith, blockbuster star par excellence (he is legend), and The Happiest Man Ever on 60 Minutes (hey, can you blame him?). Nihilism isn’t his thing…nor is being the boogeyman.
Here is where the casting question gets interesting, for I Am Legend initially appears as if it could go in the source story’s direction before it takes a sharp turn into celestial trumpet territory. This edgy first hour is also the more successful and engrossing part of the film. Of course there are money shots galore of depopulated Manhattan. Even when the CGI wild life and tufts of grass look a bit too CGI (yes, I realize there would be logistical problems in letting real beasts run amok in Times Square, but wouldn’t that have looked way cooler?), it’s still something to see Smith’s Neville moving through the deserted metropolis free of constraints. The details of that daily life are an entertaining mix of pragmatism and privilege. Neville systematically breaks into apartments in search of supplies, and he’s decorated his Washington Square town house—cue Manhattan real estate envy—with some of the finest paintings from the Museum of Modern Art. Since all of the fuel in Manhattan is just there for the siphoning, he can power his state-of-the-art medical lab as well as his major appliances. He also uses all of the means at his disposal to protect himself from the viral zombies, and to rig a trap to capture one to do drug trials on a cure (now, being that it was a “miracle” cure that created the mega-virus that wiped out the population in the first place, I’m not sure why he thinks his cure will be the savior of mankind. Oh right, he’s the star).
It’s that capture that sets off the major mayhem. Neville has pissed off a particularly ripped CGI zombie (guess they do pull-ups too). He gets caught in a trap that he manages to physically survive, although his psyche takes a near critical beating. Now, I’ll grant that Neville would probably be too cracked by the experience at first to notice that the zombie in question used the same tricks on Neville that Neville used to trap what we can assume is the zombie’s lady friend. When he recovers his sanity through his first human contact in three years, though, Neville has the wherewithal to figure out that the zombies followed his pseudo-family home. Yet it never penetrates into his purported scientific genius head that there’s at least one zombie out there capable of observing, planning, and learning. If that’s not a sign of nascent rationality, I don’t know what is. Instead, he adamantly declares to himself and his more mystical-minded Latina companion Anna that the zombies have absolutely no humanity left. They are nothing but lethal, wholly irrational instinct (oooo, it’s 28 Months Later plus eight months).
That’s what we have to believe, anyway, if we’re going to buy the “optimistic” third act. Zombies are zombies, dammit. They are not capable of moving up the intellectual food chain. God doesn’t work that way, in the world according to Neville (but science does? No, it doesn’t. Yes, it does. No, it doesn’t. I’m so confused). God is all about saving mankind. Heck, He’s Anna’s very own personal GPS system guiding her to survival. The zombies are not, I repeat, not mankind. They’re just a really annoying reminder of where we went wrong. And guess who’s going to have to die for mankind’s sin of scientific hubris to save the last hope for humanity by taking out a passel of inhuman dark seekers? (But not before he sends his de facto Mary out of town clutching a vial of science that can cure the scourge—again, did anyone notice that this does not make a whit of sense? All the roadways out of Manhattan were destroyed. And if the zombies aren’t human, then why bother with the cure? My head hurts.) Instead of the boogeyman, Neville becomes a Bob Marley-loving Jesus. Hey, at least he likes good music. I’ll take “Redemption Song” over “Jesus Loves Me” any day.
But what if the narrative had stayed closer to the original—and followed its own initial logic—and turned Neville into the legendary monster feared by the new infected-but-civilized humans? Well, then we’d have a doozey of a representational problem, people. Schwarzenegger? No sweat. He was the Terminator, after all. Cruise? Yeah, I don’t think it would be an issue to have rational beings find him frightening. Smith? Oh dear. For when I wasn’t marveling at its gaping plot holes, I couldn’t help noticing something else. I Am Legend is almost entirely free of white men. Granted, it’s also almost entirely free of principal characters, so the odds of that happening are higher than usual. Nevertheless, white men don’t play a major role, either as hero or instigator. In the annals of $200 million special effects four quadrant blockbusters—or Hollywood, for that matter—this is rather exceptional. A white British woman invents the cure-turned-killer virus (it’s those friggin’ brainy women again, always causing the trouble). A South American woman brings the legend of Robert Neville to a multi-culti, super-green survivor colony in the mountains. And Neville? Between the biracial wife, the daughter Marley in dreadlocks, and his music taste, we know this is a man who hasn’t doffed his “blackness” on the road to success. Whiteness, in fact, is a quality that defines the ultra UV-sensitive infected. They are paler than pale: a whiter shade of pale, as it were. If they were to become that re-civilized group who live in fear of Neville, who make us view the strong, capable, smart African American Neville as a dangerous boogeyman, then what hope for interpersonal evolution could we ever possibly have off-screen? Zip. So instead he has to be Jesus. Sheesh, when can he just be a regular man?
Yes, by the way. That Bob Marley CD Neville hands to Anna is Legend. No comment.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
