I am Legend: My movie review

My RATING (1-10): 7

The movie begins with a newspaper interview with Dr. Kripper (Emma Thompson) who is speaking about the her scientific breakthrough. She has taken the Measles virus and altered it at a genetic level so that it attacks only cancerous cells. The treatment has proven 100% effective in over 10,109 clinical trials. The film then cuts to three years later and we see that New York is deserted. Grass is breaking through the concrete, cars are rusting in the streets, and entire buildings are covered in titanic sheets of plastic with Biohazard signs plastered all over them.

Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is driving down one of the overgrown streets in a Ford Mustang when a herd of deer suddenly dart out from behind a building. He guns the engine and chases them through the streets, singling one out until it leaps over a blockade with dozens of cars blocking the road. Neville screeches to a halt, looks at Sam, his German shepherd companion, and steps out with his M4 rifle to track down the deer. Silently making his way through the tall grass growing between the cars, he spots the deer’s tail and takes aim just as it goes around a bus and under an overpass. Cursing, Neville lowers his rifle and begins to walk around the other side,

Sam at his heel. As he approaches the corner he raises the scope to his eyes and edges around, catching sight of the deer through an abandoned car. Carefully edging his way around the car for a clear shot, Neville takes aim and… A lioness leaps out from behind a car on the other side of the deer, grabbing it and wrestling it to the ground. Neville holds the rifle to his and looks as though he is going to shoot the lioness, but he lowers it as a lion and two cubs come into view. He seems torn until his watch starts beeping. Turning off the alarm, Neville glances at the sun, which is beginning to makes its way down the horizon. He turns to Sam and tells him its time to go.

Neville drives home, switching vehicles to an SUV with a large amount of gear strapped to the roof rack. As he pulls up to his house, we see several barrels, with what looks like explosive devices attached to them, scattered around the outside area of the house. As Neville exits the SUV, he grabs a satchel and a squirt bottle from the back seat. Walking backwards up to the front door, he squirts the ground and stairs behind him with the liquid inside of the bottle. A shot of the kitchen reveals it to be well-stocked and very orderly. When Neville takes a can of Tomato sauce from the cupboard, he replaces it from a stack under the table. He makes dinner for him and his dog while the TV plays a recorded news broadcast that is obviously several years old as it shows one of the hosts outside measuring the snowfall with a ruler. Neville tells Sam to eat her vegetables and not just push them around her plate. His watch alarm goes off again and he takes Sam upstairs to have a bath. After turning on his iPod player, Bob Marley starts to sing “Don’t Worry”. He washes Sam, telling her that he’ll forgive her for not eating her vegetables today if she eats double tomorrow. While singing along with the music, Neville starts to zone out and looks as if he is remembering something until Sam’s barking brings him back to reality and the beeping of his watch. He shakes his head and then gets up and starts to cover every window with massive steel shutters and locks the door with an industrial-sized bolt. As the sun sets, he curls up in the bathtub with Sam, listening to the howls of the Infected and slowly drifts off to sleep and starts dreaming…

In the New York of three years ago, two unmarked, black government vehicles pull up to Neville’s house and he jumps out of one of them. His wife, Zoe (Salli Richardson) runs down the stairs of their apartment holding their child (Willow Smith) and Samantha as a puppy and asks what’s going on. A man in a military uniform jumps out of the first car and tells Neville that they still have a 30 minute window. Neville tells his wife to get in the car and as they drive off, he asks how much money she got. When she tells him she has $600 dollars he tells her that’s not enough and, once she is across the bridge, she needs to stop by an ATM and pull out as much as she can and then head to her sister’s house where he will meet her in two weeks. She seems extremely frightened and asks him if “it” has become airborne. Neville guardedly tells her that he doesn’t know and dismisses her request to come with them, telling her that New York is Ground Zero and that he has a two-week window to stop the spread of the virus. During this conversation his daughter is in the back complaining because she is confused. They only go visit her aunt during summer and it is Christmas. Eventually Neville and Zoe tell her to be quiet after she tries to get their attention by making a butterfly with her hands and saying “Look at the butterfly, Daddy.”

At this point, Neville wakes up in his bed (he must have moved during the night), with the sun streaming in through small cracks in the metal shutters over the windows. The first thing he does is exercise, doing pull ups and running on a treadmill with the dog running on a treadmill next to him. He then gets dressed and goes to a door under the stairs leading to the basement. Sam tries to follow him, but he tells her that she can’t come down there and shuts her outside. He walks through a room bathed in UV light, grabs a lab coat, and walks into a very well appointed lab. Starting up an Apple computer with a wireless camera he begins to make a video journal for the day. He attaches the wireless camera to a pair of glasses and walks over to a boxy looking structure covered with a black tarp while dictating details of his experiments. Neville pulls off the tarp revealing about thirty stacked cages filled with Infected rats. They are completely hairless and begin to throw themselves at the Plexiglas cage doors as soon as they see him. He sighs and begins to dictate that the anti-virus seems to have had no effect on most of the subjects and seems to have killed several of them. He stops, however, because one of the rats is not throwing itself against the cage door. It is acting, well, rat-like. He looks at it more closely, dictating that it seems to have markedly decreased aggression as well as regaining some pigmentation and the ability to dilate its pupils in the presence of bright light. He makes a note then heads back upstairs, taking off his lab coat.

Opening up an armoire next to the door he grabs a jacket, M4, a set of keys (he has about 20, all for different cars), and the some DVDs and heads outside to his car. As the sun shines down on the city, Neville stops by a video store with several mannequins set up outside and inside dressed in different clothing styles. He seems to have formed some sort of personal relationship with them to cope with being the only human being in the city because he greets them by name as he walks in. There is a very humorous scene here while he is replacing the DVDs that he brought where he looks over and sees a female mannequin wearing very fashionable and expensive clothing standing next to the Adult DVD section. He seems flustered then grabs a pair of DVDs that were next to the ones he returned and makes his way to the front counter. Explaining to the mannequin behind the counter that he is “halfway through the G’s” he seems like he wants to ask him something about the “lady” by the adult section but he just shakes his head and walks out to his car.

He then goes to gather corn from a small field while talking to Sam and assuring Sam that he would go talk to the lady tomorrow. After collecting several ears of corn he heads back to his car and a voicover, most likely a repeating broadcast over the radio, tells whoever is listening that he is a survivor and he will be at the docks by the bridge at midday, when the sun is highest in the sky. The message says that he can offer food, shelter, and protection and invites any other survivors to come join him. He pulls up to the pier and makes his way to a desk at the very end, pulling notes and reading glasses out of his satchel and setting them neatly on the table. After a few hours, he takes a break and goes to hit some golf balls off the wing of a Blackbird spy plane sitting on top of a Carrier. Sam is sitting next to him and jumps up, spotting something on the mainland. Neville grabs a pair of binoculars and sweeps the area, stopping when he notices the tail of one of the deer vanishing around a bus. He grabs his jacket and rifle and makes his way over to where he spotted the deer. Flushing the deer out into the open, Neville gives chase while Sam runs ahead of him. The deer cuts under the tattered edge of one of the building-covering plastic sheets and then darts inside of the pitch black building. Sam runs in right after the deer while Neville shouts at her to stop.

Halting at the door Neville desperately whispers Sam’s name into the darkness. Not hearing a response, he hesitantly makes his way inside, flipping on a flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle. Sweat pours down his face as he slowly, carefully stalks through the darkened building, fearfully whispering Sam’s name. He freezes and covers the flashlight with his hand when he hears a sharp, inhuman scream from a stairwell. After getting control of his breathing he again edges towards the door. Using quick bursts of light, moving his hand away from the flashlight for a second then replacing it, he comes around the corner and sees a pool of blood at the bottom landing of the stairs. Slowly making his way up to the top, he follows a trail of blood until he sees the dead deer’s muzzle poking out from behind a wall. Making his way down the hall with the deer’s head, which has been torn off, he looks down at the floor and sees millions of dollars just scattered on the ground. While distracted by the cash, he almost walks right into a room with a group of about ten infected arranged in a circle, sleeping. He freezes and seems to be trying to hold in a scream or control his breathing before he slowly makes his way backwards, trying not to make the money crinkle. He reaches the top of the stairs and hears a low whine from Sam from the other direction of the hallway.

Darting into a large room he waves his flashlight over the area until he sees Sam under a desk. He makes his way over to her and tells her to come out and then he notices that she is looking at something to the right of him. Whipping around he catches one of the Infected in the light as it leaps at him, firing several shots and killing it. Not stopping to make sure that its dead he takes off running with Sam following close behind as a chorus of roars and screams signify that the Infected have been woken up by the commotion. Neville spots a small square of light and begins sprinting for it, telling Sam to run ahead. Just as he makes to the light one of the Infected springs onto his back, throwing him forward… and through a window two stories up. Neville grabs the Infected and uses it to break his fall, rolling off as the sunlight begins burning the skin of the Infected. It has lost all of its hair and its skin seems to be almost translucent in the light of day. Neville watches it until it dies then makes his way back to the car.

Drawing a small vial of his blood, Neville tells Sam to stay in the car because the dog is immune to the airborne strain of the virus but not from the contact strain. Neville returns to the building and sets up a snare trap with a tarp right inside the door so that it will pull whatever it catches into the open, covered with the tarp. He crushes the vial of his blood on top of the tarp and moves out to the street, taking position on top of a car so he can watch the door. Noises start to emanate from the darkness, growls and hisses, then the distinctive clink of the trap going off. The counterweight Neville had attached to the trap falls and pulls the catch through the door, tangled up in the tarp. Neville stops its struggling with a quick blow from the butt of his rifle. As he looks at the still form in the tarp, another one of the Infected, a male, tries to lunge through the door at him, but is held back by the others. The Infected stares at Neville, ignoring the burns that are beginning to appear on its flesh before allowing the others to pull him back into the darkness of the building. Neville shakes it off and takes the captured Infected to his lab.

Down in his lab, Neville again has his cam-glasses on and has the Infected stretched out on a stainless steel table, chain-reinforced restraint bands around her wrists, waist, and legs and has pumped her full of drugs to keep her sedated, noting that it takes six times as much dosage as a normal human. He is going to inject the infected with the same formula that seemed to work on the rat in the hope that it might have similar effects on humans. He notes that the Infected’s heart rate is 200 BPM and the temperature is 106 degrees before he injects the serum. Watching the monitor with hope in his eyes, Neville is ecstatic when the heart rate and temperature start dropping, until the Infected begins to have a seizure and the heart stops completely. He sighs and injects her with another substance (unknown, maybe original virus?) that causes the Infected’s heart to start back up. Frustrated with the test’s failure, Neville wheels the Infected into a Plexiglas containment room and goes upstairs.

Sitting in the car Neville pulls out a map of Manhattan half covered in small x’s over each block. He circles the next block in a row and makes his way to the house he marked. Sam goes through and gives a single bark as an all clear, after which Neville makes his way through the house, checking medications and supplies for anything useful and pulling the curtains off of windows to allow sunlight in. As he rummages through the kitchen he opens a cabinet with newspaper clippings on it, one of which is a story about the infection spreading to dogs. He makes his way through the rest of the rooms, coming across a bedroom with a quaranting plastic tent stretched over the bed. The door next to it has a bow and a note that says “Do not open till Xmas.” Nudging the door open, Neville sees that it is a nursery with two cribs, both with bows on them. He shuts the door and makes his way back to the car.

As he is driving home he glances over and slams on the brakes of the car. Across a bridge he sees one of the mannequins from outside of the video store standing at the other end in front of a large building. He slowly drives towards it until his way is blocked by a fallen light post, then gets out of his car and starts screaming at the mannequin and asking it why it’s not at the store. Neville demands to know if the mannequin is alive and then opens fire on it with his rifle, blowing the mannequin to pieces and knocking it back into the large puddle of water it was standing in. Slowly walking over to investigate, and keeping an eye on the large hole in the wall of the building, Neville steps into the puddle and then hears the sound of a snare trap going off and sees a taxi cab slide off the bridge, tightening the noose around his feet and slamming his head into the ground as he is pulled into the air.

While he is out, Neville has another flashback, starting where the first one ended. The three unmarked vehicles pull up to the same dock that Neville was sitting at, waiting for survivors. People are being checked for infection and evacuated with Helicopters and Ferry’s but there is a huge crowd and they are starting to get desperate. Neville and his family are escorted to the front of the line where a woman with extremely red eyes is asking Neville to take her son with him. Neville ignores the woman and a soldier scans Neville, his daughter, and the dog, showing with a device that checks their eyes for signs of infection. When the soldier scans Zoe, however, she fails and is about to be escorted to the quarantine zone until Neville gets angry and pulls rank to force the man to rescan his wife. She is cleared this time and they make their way to the helicopter waiting to evacuate them. Zoe, Marley, and Samantha, the dog, all get onto the helicopter and they say a prayer with Neville before they take off. As he is stepping away from the helicopter his daughter hands him the puppy. He at first tries to resist but the helicopter is getting ready to take off so he grabs the puppy and moves away from the landing pad, waving to his family while the puppy tries to lick the tears off of his face.

Neville returns to reality still hanging from the trap. Sam is desperately barking at him and his watch alarm is beeping. He groggily looks around and notices that the sun is beginning to set behind the buildings. Reaching for a knife by his side, Neville tries to raise his torso to cut the rope holding him in the air but he can’t hold himself up long enough. He tries again and manages to cut the rope, but he lands on the knife, breaking the blade off in his thigh. Neville tries to remove the blade but the pain is too much so he begins to drag himself back to the car. At this point the sun is so low that the only light is a narrow strip across the bridge that is rapidly shrinking. Neville is about halfway to the car when he hears the snarls and growls coming from the hole in the building. The same male that locked eyes with Neville when he captured the female steps out of the darkness, holding back to Infected dogs. The male lets out a roar and releases the dogs that race towards Neville and Sam. They are stopped, however, by the band of rapidly thinning sunlight that lies across the bridge and Neville begins to drag himself even faster, trying to reach the gun in the driver’s side door of the car. The sunlight finally disappears as Neville drags himself to one foot and hops to the car pulling the pistol right as the first dog leaps for him. He shoots it dead, then attempts to shoot the one that is fighting with Sam, but a third dog leaps on him, knocking the gun out of his hands. Neville tries to defend himself against the dog, but its superior strength is obviously winning out. Just when the dog is about to get a hold of Neville’s neck, Samantha slams into it from the side, knocking it off Neville and into the side of the car. Freed, Neville jumps for the pistol and shoots the last dog.

Samantha has been injured pretty seriously and limps over and lies down. Neville holds back tears as he tries to comfort Samantha before he picks her up and puts her in the car and takes them home. Down in his lab, Neville lays Sam out on the table, shakily inserting a needle into the vial containing the serum that worked on the rat. Extracting some, he injects it into Samantha’s shoulder sits on the floor, cradling her in his arms. He softly starts to sing “Don’t Worry” to her as he strokes her hair. He blinks the tears in his eyes away and looks down at a clump of hair that has come off in his hand. He checks Samantha and sees that the pupils are fully dilated and her gums are rapidly becoming red and inflamed. Samantha starts to let out a low growl and tries to snap at Neville. He holds her head in place and tries to look away as he strangles her with his bare hands, still singing the song and only releasing her when her feet stop scrabbling at the floor of the lab (I’m not ashamed to say that this part of the movie had me blinking back quite a few tears). The next day he goes and buries her in the cornfield then goes back to the video store and stands next to the female mannequin in the Adult section. “I promised my friend that I would say hello to you. So, hello.” At this point tears begin rolling down his cheeks. “Please say hello.” (Saddest part in the whole movie, fair warning).

That night, at the docks, Neville sits at his desk. A huge pack of Infected begins to stealthily creep up on him, the only sound is the soft padding of their feet. The lead Infected all break out into a run and right when they reach the figure at the desk… Neville flips on the extra-bright UV lights on his car and floors it, driving straight through the center of the pack and knocking Infected flying left and right. He whips the car around and drives through again, but one of the Infected lands on the hood of the car and tries to break through the windshield of the car. Neville slams the car into a light pole, flinging the Infected off. The Alpha Male infected then commands two of the pack to slam into the side of Neville’s car. As they begin running towards him and picking up steam, Neville tries to throw the car in reverse, but he gets caught on the remains of the desk and the car flips onto its top when the Infected slam into the side of it. The Alpha Male makes his way to the car and begins to crawl inside snuffling at Neville like an animal. He is just about to tear Neville out of the car when suddenly blindingly bright lights illuminate the area. Neville passes out from the ordeal as a woman’s voice repeatedly asks him if he’s okay. He passes out for a second then groggily begins to wake up as the woman is asking him where he lives and if it’s safe. Neville tells her the address but instructs her to wait until the sun rises to avoid having the Infected track him back to his house. At this point he passes out and we return to the docks three years earlier.

As Neville is stepping away from the helicopter and waving to his wife and daughter, a pair of fighter jets fly by overhead and launch missiles at the Manhattan bridge, blowing up a center section and effectively quarantining the island. The helicopter begins to take off with Neville’s daughter making a butterfly with her hands again. Neville is waving to her and hears a commotion at the other pier on the dock. A group of people have broken through the containment fence and are trying to swarm the other helicopter taking. Their uneven weight, however, has thrown off the helicopter’s control and it goes spiraling through the air towards the helicopter with Zoe and Marley. As the helicopters head towards each other Neville lets out a scream and right as they are about to collide…

Neville wakes up in his living room. It is daytime, someone has put Shrek on the TV, and he can hear sounds coming from the kitchen. He feels his leg where the knife went in and sees that it has been neatly stitched. Standing up from the couch, Neville hobbles over to a desk and pulls a pistol out of one of the drawers. He makes his way into the kitchen and for a split second he sees his wife and daughter making breakfast, but then he blinks and sees that it is a different woman and her young son. She and her son are both frozen, unsure of how safe Neville is with the pistol that he is carrying. He notices what they are looking at and gingerly places the pistol on the counter. The woman invites him to sit down and says that she cooked some bacon and eggs, apologizing for the eggs because they are powdered. She serves Neville and her son then sits down to eat, introducing herself as Anna (Alice Braga) and her son as Ethan (Charlie Tahan). Neville is at a loss for words because he has been alone the past three years. He asks them where they’ve been and what they’re doing here. She tells him that they have been in Maryland but are now making their way Vermont to a Survivor’s Colony there. He becomes visibly agitated and says that there are no Survivor’s Colonies. When she tries to argue with him, he smashes his plate down on the floor causing Anna and Ethan to jump up and away from him as Anna pulls her gun. He apologizes, saying that he was saving that bacon and goes upstairs to cool off. Anna lowers her gun and tells Ethan to put the knife that he grabbed back on the table.

When Neville comes back downstairs, Ethan is watching Shrek. Anna keeps a sharp eye on Neville and he begins to speak along with the characters in the movie. After a minute or two of this, he stops and looks sheepish, saying that he really likes Shrek. He goes in the kitchen with Anna where he apologizes for his outbreak and they begin conversing. She realizes that he is the Robert Neville, the famous scientist. He takes her down to his lab and shows her the captured Infected woman who has been packed in ice in an attempt to lower her body temperature to increase the effectiveness of the serum. She asks him if there is any place her son can sleep and Neville carries the son, who is sleeping on the couch, up to his daughter’s old room. It is still decorated like it was three years ago and Anna looks at some of the pictures sitting on a shelf and asks what the little girl’s name was. Neville tells her the girl’s name was Marley, after Bob Marley, and is shocked when the woman says that she has never heard of him. He takes her downstairs and puts one of Bob Marley’s CDs on the stereo, explaining that Marley was an inspiration who believed that racism and hatred was like a virus that could only be cured with an injection of love and music. He tells her a story about how Marley was shot in his home two days before a concert promoting peace and still sang at the concert because “the people that are trying to ruin this world don’t take days off.”

Anna then goes into a spiel about how everything was God’s will, and it couldn’t have been a coincidence that she decided to come here and turn on her radio to hear his message. Neville gets really pissed off and yells at Anna, explaining that there were 6 billion people on earth when the virus was released. With an infection rate of 90% that means that 5.4 billion people were infected immediately. An immunity rate of only 2% meant that only 12 million people were immune to the virus. He then explains that the infected also turned on the immune, further lessening their numbers. He finishes by saying that there is no God, his fists clutched in rage in front of his face.

Neville stops his rant and cocks his head to the side. From outside the house a long-low roar echoes over the street and he gets a panicked look on his face as he asks Anna if she waited until the sun cam up to return to the house. She says that the sun was coming up but that Neville was losing a lot of blood and needed medical attention so she went to the house to treat him. He curses and explains that the Infected have tracked them down as he runs to the wall and flicks a switch activating a ring of UV spotlights around the house. The Infected already have a running start, however and managed to knock down several of the lights, creating openings before they can cause too much damage. Neville then grabs a remote device and waits until the Infected are in the middle of the barrels before he presses the button, causing all the barrels to ignite and killing dozens of Infected. Unfortunately, the concussion also dazed Neville and wrenched several of the metal shutters off their hinges, allowing two surviving infected to enter the house. Neville runs upstairs and is attacked by one while the other runs upstairs for Anna and Ethan. The Infected latches onto Neville’s shoulder and proceeds to toss him around the room before throwing him back down the stairs. Neville lands next to an umbrella holder which also holds his M4 rifle. He grabs the rifle and proceeds to open fire on the Infected who has followed him down the stairs. The Infected dives into the kitchen and Neville sights on a pallet of the squirt bottles he was seen with at the beginning of the movie. A single shot detonates the bottles, sending the Infected flying out of the kitchen before it scrambles back upstairs away from Neville’s rifle. Neville follows it up and kills it before it can escape out the window. The rifle is now empty so Neville throws it on the floor as he looks out the window and sees the Alpha Male staring at him.

Hearing a crash from upstairs, Neville remembers the other Infected that went after Anna and Ethan. He races up the stairs and pauses at the top when he hears a crash coming from his bedroom. Neville peers around the corner and sees one of the Infected crawling on the ceiling opening up a hole to the roof while Anna and Ethan hide under a dresser. Neville’s pistol sits on the nightstand and he starts moving towards it when Ethan lets out a peep. The Infected stops what it’s doing and drops down from the roof to hunt down the sound and Neville dives for the pistol and shoots the Infected in the chest, killing it. At this point the Alpha Male sends another wave of even more Infected at the house and Neville leads Anna and Ethan down to the basement lab area, locking the door behind them, and telling them to get into the Plexiglas room where Neville was keeping the Infected woman that he was experimenting on. They all run in and are shocked to see that the woman is showing signs of the infection reversing itself. Right then, the other Infected burst through the door to the basement and Neville closes the Plexiglas door just as they reach it. One of the Infected begins throwing himself at the door trying to break through until the Alpha Male picks him up and throws him across the room.

The Alpha Male then proceeds to start bashing the door with his head, eventually causing the glass to splinter and look like a distorted butterfly. His daughter’s voice runs through his head, telling him to look at the butterfly. He looks over at Anna and sees a butterfly tattoo on the side of her neck. Scrambling through the medical supplies, Neville pulls out a syringe and vial and proceeds to draw some blood from the Infected female. Telling Anna and Ethan to get into a small opening (chimney?), Neville hands Anna the vial and tells her that it’s the cure and that the Infected won’t stop trying to break through the door. Anna tells him that there is room enough for all of them inside but Neville closes the door, telling her to wait until daylight to come out. He then turns around and pulls a grenade out of one of the other drawers and faces the Alpha Male. When the Alpha Male is almost through the glass Neville charges at the same time as the Male while pulling the pin on the grenade, detonating the Alpha Male and all the other Infected in the basement.

The next scene shows Anna and Ethan driving through rural Vermont countryside in the fall. The leaves on the trees are bright red-orange and there is no sign of the Infected. They pull up to a large steel door set into a concrete wall. Exiting the car, they walk up to the door and hear a beep before the door opens to reveal two armed military men guarding the entrance of the sanctuary. A voiceover tells about how Robert Neville gave his life for the cure while Anna hands it off to someone in the sanctuary, presumably a scientist.