It's an odd choice for a star vehicle although playing the last man on earth must appeal to some actors with an unfeasibly large superiority complex. This is Matheson's intimate story writ studio blockbuster. There have been other film adaptations but none so grand as befits Hollywood's succumbing to an almost complete cinematic invasion of the digital.
I Am Legend is based on a Richard Matheson novella much quoted and borrowed from since its publication in 1954. This is Will Smith, the only (civilised) man left alive who's looking for answers. The aerial overhead of deserted streets (that angle popularised by Ridley Scott's literal sounding title, Someone To Watch Over Me) shows a nifty red sports car zooming through the city – a hunter looking for prey. The dingy greenery poking through the sidewalks and road cracks are a small detail but the whole environment is sold within a few static wide shots. Even if the city cooperated to the nth degree, you would not get this level of lifelessness, of glorious abandon. The mundane truth of a deserted Manhattan belies what must have been months of meticulous CG work, both modelling and compositing. The first moments of Francis (Constantine) Lawrence's interpretation of a New York ravaged by neglect is, on the big screen, simply jaw dropping. So on the heels of my bemoaning the CG saturated Hollywood template in my review of the year, comes a movie that so neatly divides CG's pros and cons, it almost seems made to measure, a bear trap for almost immediate comment. Chapter One of Richard Matheson's I Am Legendīut I still can't get used to CG people and animals in a movie featuring real people and real animals.
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