I Am Legend

I was looking forward to seeing I Am Legend. We saw it at the Vue@The O2 cinema (Screen 11). I mention this because screen 11 at Vue@The O2 is the largest screen I've sat in front of since the Southend On Sea Odeon closed many years ago. 770 seats. I'd forgotten how different the atmosphere is in a large cinema compared to the small screens you get in a typical multi-screen complex. For a start, you don't hear the childish comments from the one idiot who is usually sitting at the back, and you get a background hubbub of noise which rises and falls with the film sound track and I think is an important part of the cinema experience. Great stuff! And one of my fondest childhood memories is of Saturday morning pictures at the Odeon and the huge shouts of "shut the door" whenever some poor child left the auditorium to go to the toilet. I read that the Odeon's capacity was over 2,000 and I remember it was full most Saturday mornings. That must have been quite some event!

I Am Legend is not a new story (See "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) and "The Omega Man" (1971)). Neither does this film deal with it in any original way. Will Smith is the last man in New York City and most of the film considers how he deals with this situation emotionally and psychologically. It's superficial and has that Hollywood gloss which almost always serves to make it less real (see "28 Days Later" by way of contrast), although it's well done, and Will has turned into a fine actor. The photography is great, although I wish I wasn't sitting so close to the big screen as I'm not used to having to turn my head from side to side to watch a movie! Particularly impressive was the way NY City had been turned into a desolate backdrop, slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Less impressive was the way the 'infected' were all created by computer graphics, and not played by actors (at least that's how it looked). That made them look and behave more like aliens, than diseased humans and I'm afraid completely unbelievable.

Watch out for a brief, but typically impressive performance by Emma Thompson as Dr. Kripper - even though she's not credited at the end of the film!

One final comment.... Why do Will Smith movies need a scene which shows him exercising half naked? It's pointless.