Last man standing

Will Smith plays Lt.-Col. Robert Neville, one of the sole surviving members of the human race battling against mutants in I Am Legend. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Call it third time lucky: I Am Legend, the third film to be based on Richard Matheson’s seminal sci-fi novel, is darker, smarter and more believable than its predecessors. It’s also as much a drama about the terrible effects of loneliness as it is a zombie-vampire flick.

Yes, it’s still a horror story, with Will Smith battling feral, blood-hungry mutants, and there are the now obligatory computer-generated FX. But director Francis Lawrence uses them far more judiciously than we’ve come to expect from this kind of blockbuster. He knows that scarier doesn’t mean gorier; and if we’re to buy into a film, it’s the actors, not the computer geeks, that have to carry the story.

Or in this case, one actor. As Lt.-Col. Robert Neville, the lone uninfected survivor of a viral holocaust that has killed off most of the world’s population and turned the remainder into aforesaid mutants, Smith spends more than half the movie by himself. His only interaction is with a loyal female German shepherd and some store mannequins that serve as his imaginary neighbours. Frankly, when I saw the dog and the mannequins, I was worried; in his last sci-fi outing, 2004’s I, Robot, the actor was upstaged by a humanoid. But here, Smith gives a toned-down, sympathetic performance that brings an emotional core to this post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Since its publication in 1954, Matheson’s cold war-era novel has been a continuous source of inspiration for filmmakers — in particular, for the George Romero Living Dead flicks and their progeny. The first direct adaptation was 1964’s The Last Man on the Earth, a B-movie quickie shot in Italy with Vincent Price that exploited the story for low-budget horror. The Omega Man, a more ambitious 1971 remake with Charlton Heston, gave Matheson’s material a countercultural spin. Lawrence’s version combines elements of both, but reshapes the story to fit the current fascination with the figure of the hero, from the 9/11 firefighters to the superpower-endowed characters of TV’s Heroes.

Where Price and Heston roamed deserted cityscapes by day, killing the infected ghouls, Smith’s heroic Neville tries to save them. A scientist-soldier, he flushes the Night Dwellers out of their dark “hives” to serve as human samples in his ongoing experiments to discover an antidote. In flashbacks, we learn that he was working to stop the virus — a cancer cure gone horribly wrong — even before Manhattan was quarantined. When his wife (Salli Richardson) and daughter (Smith’s real-life daughter, Willow) fled in a mass migration, he stayed behind selflessly while the island was reduced to a graveyard.

Neville and his dog remain vigilant on the empty streets of New York. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Now, three years later, he roars up and down its eerily empty streets in a red Mustang — the only other traffic being the occasional herd of deer — or broadcasts radio messages from the South Street Seaport in the hopes of finding another survivor. At night, Neville shuts himself up in a fortified brownstone in Washington Square, decorated with paintings he’s lifted from the Museum of Modern Art, seeking solace in the upbeat reggae of Bob Marley and watching the same DVDs over and over. (If Heston’s Neville knew all the dialogue in Woodstock, Smith’s can recite Shrek by heart.) In his basement lab, cages of vicious rats and photo records of countless mutants attest to his endless pursuit of a cure.

Production designer Naomi Shohan and her team do a brilliant job of creating an abandoned New York in assiduous detail, from the rank weeds overgrowing the sidewalks to the rooftops of skyscrapers still sealed off with quarantine plastic. Tidy urban parks have grown into unruly fields, and lions (presumably from the Bronx Zoo) prowl the avenues. It’s a vision of nature reclaiming its place that recalls the Sara Teasdale poem There Will Come Soft Rains. The picture was shot on location and these scenes are not without their amusing moments — like when we see a Broadway where current hits Wicked and Hairspray were apparently still playing in 2009, the year the virus hit.

Smith’s Neville moves through this wasteland in a pretence of normality, “renting” videos from a local store, talking to his mannequins, feeding and bathing his dog, Samantha, as if she were a beloved child. He’s far more convincing in the role than the swaggering, insufferable Heston, and more compelling than the likable but wussy Price. Smith’s hero may have a soldier’s buff body and honed reflexes, and he may be a scientist who made it to the cover of Time, but he’s also gratifyingly human. He clings pathetically to illusions, he weeps, he even whimpers in fear — when was the last time a movie hero did that? Smith — who can act when he chooses — too often skates by on his natural screen charm. Here, he really works at sculpting a genuine character you can actually feel for, and not just laugh along with.

The intelligent screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman is a bonus. It draws heavily on The Omega Man, but where that film used the story for a hippie-era debate on civilization and its follies, here we get the current dispute between God and science, faith and reason. And unlike the Heston film — a cult classic, perhaps, but now painfully cheesy — there’s no embarrassing attempt to be hip and sexy. When this last man on Earth discovers he has a young female counterpart (Alice Braga), he doesn’t jump her bones. Rather, Smith is like Robinson Crusoe coming upon Friday’s footprint in the sand. In a beautifully played scene, we see how emotionally shattering such a revelation would be to a man who had all but given up hope, having become convinced he was alone.

Lawrence, a former music-video maker whose first feature was the 2005 graphic-novel-inspired Constantine, obviously knows how to direct a thriller. There’s a scene early on where a frightened Neville is forced to enter a possible mutant hideout that will have you holding your breath. Unfortunately, the mutants themselves look like they’ve leapt from the pages of a comic book — hairless, howling creatures, they’re preternaturally strong and agile despite the fact they must be starving. Lawrence uses them sparingly, but when they do appear, we’re reminded again of the limits of CGI. Used cleverly, it can alter reality without our noticing it, but too often, it adds a patina of artifice that turns an otherwise authentic-looking film into animated fantasy.

Action fans just looking for kicks will find I Am Legend too sombre and moody, while others may feel that, after 28 Days Later and last year’s powerfully dystopian Children of Men, this film is behind the curve. All the same, this is the best big-screen treatment of Matheson’s novel so far — at least until the post-apocalyptic trend comes round again.

I Am Legend opens across Canada on Dec. 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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