I Am Legend has a moody, highly creepy beginning, and one wonderful avoid-monsters-in- the-dark scene. And then it goes to hell, and not in the good way you'd expect from a horror movie. There are two distinct reasons. The CGI zombie/vampires look like, well, CGI zombie/vampires. They're not remotely scary because they look like pixelated Play-Doh. George Romero got more terror out of shambling actors in face-paint than this movie does out of sinewy digital demons.
The other issue is, yet again, the screenplay. I Am Legend the film is the third adaptation of I Am Legend the novella by Richard Matheson. The first film was the Vincent Price vehicle, The Last Man On Earth, which would qualify as a good try; low budget and occasionally moody. The second had Charleton Heston doing his low-key overacting thing in the interesting but unfocused The Omega Man. The problem with all the adaptations is an unwillingness to trust Matheson, one of the great horror writers of the century, and an excellent screen writer in his own right. (Look him up on IMDB -- quite a long list of screen work, including some classic Twilight Zones, as well as a bunch of adapted stories and novels.)
The Matheson story has the last man alive trying to survive in a world that is infested with VAMPIRES (not mutants or zombies or whatever they make them in the film) who are infected with a virus that turns them into bloodsucking monsters. The main character is immune. He spends the day breaking into houses and staking the vampires, the nights playing classical music at 11 volume to drown out the cries of the creatures who used to be his neighbors, who want him to come outside ... There is a twist at the end like a Möbius loop -- which deals with the idea of what exactly makes a monster.
There's not a writer of vampire stories since the fifties that doesn't owe a debt to Matheson, from King to Rice. And somehow Hollywood just doesn't get it. Part of this is an unwillingness to take the risk of having the leading man turn out to be an unsympathetic killer. Part may be a director or screenwriter's need to try to top Matheson's cleverness. Or maybe they shoot Matheson's ending and it just doesn't test well in previews...
There's another problem with I Am Legend as an adaptation, which is more worrisome, but not surprising. Will Smith, doing his best to play the lead in this mess, asks another survivor how she is sure that there is a colony of uninfected humans in Vermont. She replies, "God told me." She turns out to be right.
Matheson's story is of a Godless universe. His anti-hero is trying to survive and find a cure in a horrific landscape devoid of divine influence or help. There's no God in the novella, and that's part of the point of the tale. Keep God out of a classic vampire story hollywood twits -- he doesn't belong there.
Back to the CGI issue. I've often thought that Hollywood is out of touch with TV. If filmmakers actually saw how CGI was used so cheesily on TV, they'd find more creative ways to do things. Every Saturday, the Sci-Fi channel runs a bad monster movie with computer SFX monsters. So when I see something, like The Mist, or Cloverfield, the effects are often better, but there are moments that don't look any different than the Sci-Fi movie or a Discovery channel dinosaur special. Spielberg showed in Jurassic Park that the best mix was puppetry, models, CGI, and shadows, as well as some creativity.
As a final note -- notice the resemblance between the big monster in Cloverfield and the one that does a walk through cameo in The Mist? And the spider things of the same species in both? Maybe it's not CGI. Maybe there's a Screen Monsters Guild we don't know about ...
No comments:
Post a Comment