I Am Legend (2007) Review
6/10
Robert Neville drives a Mustang through an empty Manhattan hunting deer, talks to mannequins he has arranged in a video store, and broadcasts a message at the same time every day to nobody who answers.
The 6 is an average of two films. The first sixty minutes are exceptional and unusually patient for a hundred and fifty million dollar production. The last twenty are a different film entirely, made by a studio that had test-screened the real ending and flinched.
That is not hindsight. The book-accurate ending was shot, tested, rejected and released later as a DVD extra. Francis Lawrence has said he should have gone with it, and the announced sequel treats it as canon.
The Empty City Is the Achievement
Production shot on location in New York in 2006, closing whole blocks. The Brooklyn Bridge sequence alone reportedly cost five million dollars for six nights of filming.
The result is a depopulated Manhattan that no digital environment has matched since, because it is the real city with the people removed instead of a city built to look empty. Grass grows through the asphalt, deer move down Fifth Avenue, and the scale is correct because it is the actual scale.
What the film does with it is better than the spectacle. Neville’s routine is the subject: the same drive, the same broadcast, the same DVD returned to the same shelf, the conversations with mannequins he has positioned and given names. Three years of a man administering his own sanity.
Andrew Lesnie photographed it in flat daylight, which is the correct and unshowy choice. There is nothing stylized about the emptiness. It simply is empty, and the film sits in it long enough for the audience to feel the length of a day.
The one weakness in the presentation is the Darkseekers themselves, rendered digitally and moving with a weightlessness that nothing else in the film has. Every frame around them is a real location, and they are the only element the audience can see the budget in.
Solitude is written through routine and dies in description. A character alone is characterized entirely by what he has decided to keep doing when nobody is checking.
The specific detail is what carries it. The point is never that Neville is lonely. It is that he has arranged mannequins in a video store and is working through the alphabet of DVDs, and that he has assigned one of them a name he says aloud.
Then break the routine to signal the collapse. When a mannequin appears somewhere Neville did not put it, the film does not need to explain the threat. The audience has learned the rules well enough to know that something has changed.
Will Smith Does the Hardest Version
For most of the first hour Smith is acting opposite a dog and a shop dummy, and he is very good at it.
The performance is built on deterioration held under control. Neville is a military virologist keeping a schedule because the schedule is the only thing preventing collapse, and Smith plays the effort of that and leaves the sadness underneath it alone.
The scene with the dog is the film’s high point and it is unbearable. What makes it work is that the film has spent an hour establishing the animal as his only remaining relationship, in small unremarked moments, so the loss requires no dialogue at all.
Smith was the biggest star in the world in 2007 and this is the least movie-star thing he had done. Long stretches with no dialogue, no charm deployed, a man talking to himself in an accent that keeps slipping toward panic.
His scene at the video store, rehearsing a conversation with a mannequin he has been building up the courage to speak to, is the moment the film shows what it understands. Neville has not gone mad. He has constructed a social life out of the available materials, which is a far more disturbing thing to watch.
What the Novel Was About
Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954. The creatures in it are vampires, and the thing that matters is that they retain intelligence and memory. They are people with a condition, organizing a society, and Neville has been methodically killing them in their sleep for three years.
The novel’s ending has Neville captured and about to be executed by that society, and understanding at last what he has been. He is the monster in their stories, the thing that comes while they sleep. The last line gives the book its title and its meaning.
The title is the entire argument. Neville is not the last man. He is the legend, the horror story the new majority tells, and the novel is about the moment a person realizes he was on the wrong side of the transition.
This is the third adaptation and none of the three has kept it. The Last Man on Earth in 1964 came closest, The Omega Man in 1971 replaced the idea with an action plot, and this one shot the right ending and then declined to use it.
If a title states your theme, the ending has to earn the title. Change the ending and the title becomes decoration attached to a different story.
The mechanism Matheson used is worth stealing. Establish your protagonist’s routine as heroic, let the reader approve of it for two hundred pages, then reveal the perspective from which the same routine is atrocity. Nothing about the events changes. Only the frame does.
That requires the antagonists to have interiority the protagonist has not looked for. The moment they are mindless, the reversal is impossible, which is precisely why the film’s Darkseekers cannot support the novel’s ending.
The Ending That Was Shot and Buried
The alternate ending exists and was released as a DVD extra in 2008. In it Neville realizes the Darkseeker leader has been pursuing him because Neville has his mate strapped to a table in the lab. He returns her. They leave. Neville understands what he has been doing.
That version reveals the creatures can feel attachment, recognize each other and act on it, which retroactively converts every experiment in the film into something else. It is closer to Matheson and it is a considerably better film.
Test audiences rejected it, and the reason given is simple. It positions Will Smith as the villain, and in 2007 that was commercially unacceptable for the biggest star in the world.
So the theatrical version has Neville blow himself up with a grenade to save two survivors and hands the cure to a walled settlement in Vermont. It is competent, it is well staged, and it means nothing. The title is left hanging over a film that no longer explains it.
There is a religious frame bolted on to replace the one that was removed. Anna talks about hearing God, the settlement is a haven, and Neville dies a martyr. It is coherent as a substitute and it is a much smaller idea than the one Matheson wrote, which was about the arithmetic of majorities.
Why It Still Made Six Hundred Million Dollars
The film cost a hundred and fifty million dollars and took five hundred and eighty-five worldwide, with the largest opening for any non-Christmas December release at the time.
That commercial result is the whole explanation for the ending, and it is worth being honest about the tradeoff instead of pretending the studio was simply stupid. They tested two endings, one of them made audiences hostile, and they released the other one and made a great deal of money.
What it cost was the film’s reason to exist. Sixteen years later the conversation about I Am Legend is almost entirely about the ending it did not use, the sequel is being built on the discarded version, and the director has publicly agreed with the critics.
So the commercial decision was correct in the quarter and wrong in the decade. Both of those are real, and only one of them is still being discussed.
Audience testing measures immediate comfort, which is not the same as lasting value. An ending that makes people uneasy on the way out is often the one they keep arguing about years later.
That does not make testing useless. It makes it a measure of one specific thing. Know which thing you are measuring before you let it change your last chapter.
The practical test: does your ending change what the preceding pages meant? If yes, protect it, because that is the only kind of ending anybody remembers. If no, it is a conclusion and not an ending, and you can safely soften it.
Should you watch I Am Legend?
Yes for the first hour, which is genuinely superb, and then watch the alternate ending afterward. Taken together they make the film the book deserved. Taken as released, it is a very good survival picture with a title it does not earn.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 5 of my film lists