I Am Legend.
There is nothing legendary about this film or its story. After witnessing brief excerpts of a few movie trailers and being aware that the movie starred a popular and skillful actor, I felt there was no need to investigate (and possibly spoil) the content of the film itself. The synopsis, in my mind, had to do with aliens or something to that effect. Wrong.
Ah, and before I begin diving into the contents of the movie, please be warned, I do fully intend to reveal spoilers and other such sensitive information, so if you’re interested in being surprised as to what this movie is really about, please feel free to attempt to do so without reading further. But I doubt you’ll be surprised. “Cliche” rings quite loudly in this film.
The film starts out with a TV interview about a cure for cancer. It cuts off and suddenly you see Will Smith driving a red Mustang through an abandoned city of New York (or so it appears). I don’t know who selected the car, but I think that they could have picked something better. Are there no Lamborghini in New York? Surely, a nicer vehicle could have been featured for such a brief period of time, as he drives an SUV the rest of the movie.
Anyway, poor vehicular selection aside, it quickly becomes apparent that Will is hunting deer, nearly hairless deer. But later we find, he doesn’t intend to eat them. The next scene places he and his dog in his home, having some assorted vegetable meal together (not out of the same plate, of course). The TV is on, but appears to be playing back recordings of television shows. On his way inside, he pours water on the porch.
The movie, in its entirety, lasts only a few days; during three of the nights, Will has dreams about his life when the panic hits. I will go ahead and tell you all three of them now. In the first one, you learn that there was a viral outbreak of the “mutated virus” that supposedly “cures” cancer. In the second, you learn how Will stays in New York in an attempt to discover a solution while he sends his family to safety via helicopter — his daughter hands him the dog, named Sam, before the helicopter takes off. In the third dream, a bunch of “dark seekers,” as they’re called, attack a nearby NYPD helicopter, which loses control and crashes into the lifeline helicopter that his family is in. They’re dead. I’d have nightmares about that, too.
So, the first morning that the movie takes you through reveals that Will is not only a Lieutenant but also a scientist. Downstairs, he has a laboratory in which he has been experimenting on rats. Keeping records on all of the experiments (by recording on an iMac with “six redundant drives” — at least he’s using an Apple), he wears a headset of some kind to record live video. At this point, it becomes evident that his “hunt” was an attempt to capture and experiment on animals… Or something.
The next day, Will is playing golf because he has nothing better to do. Sam sees a deer and begins chasing it, so Will follows. Promptly, the deer dashes into a dark corner that opens up into a pitch-black building. The dog follows, and Will freaks out. Apparently, the darkness is where these “dark seekers” hide.
What are “dark seekers”? They resemble vampires, in my opinion. Poryphoric hemophilia and all that jazz. Basically they are humans who received the virus and converted to some bluish, super-powered, less-than-sentient zombie-like monsters. Sunlight apparently kills them quickly, and animals are affected, too. However, it seems that deer and lions (witnessed at the beginning of the movie — I don’t know how lions ended up in New York, but anyway) are not harmed by sunlight. I don’t know why, seeing as another part of the movie reveals that dogs — a non-human animal — are harmed by sunlight as well. Plot hole? I think so.
Anyway, dark seekers. They seem to thirst for blood, too. After saving his dog, Will sets a trap by placing a vial of his blood in the entrance of the building. Interestingly, prior to setting the trap, Will takes his coat off, tosses it on the ground, and douses it in water; he then puts it back on and prepares to set the trap. The movie never makes it clear (or even deducible) what the purpose behind the water is or what effect it has (if any). Anyway, a young female dark seeker promptly attempts to consume the blood and gets caught. However, a larger male seeker sticks its ugly head out into the sunlight intentionally to yell and fuss and throw a fit at Will. Will makes note of this behavior in his personal video log after stating that the dark seekers degenerated into a completely inhuman existence. That seems contradictory, seeing as the large male dark seeker exhibited what I would consider sentience. (Later, it becomes clear that this individual dark seeker is the leader of all the rest, communicating to them en masse via gnarly growls and yells.)
Further clarifying that there is sentience among these seekers, is the fact that a trap is set to capture Will. The leader of the dark seekers holds back a few dark seeker dogs and then releases them. (Apparently, Will never sees this although it happens in front of his face.) They do not get him, but they get his dog, whom he later must kill with his own hands because it was infected with the virus. Long story short, it’s obvious that the dark seekers have some kind of coordination and intelligence.
Will gets depressed after losing his dog, tries to kill himself, and is saved by a woman (and her child). A lot of drama takes place in the house. Then the dark seekers show up after following them to Will’s house (something, apparently, they could not do before because he always went home during daylight hours). Some zombie killing and immense explosions take place, and the trio wind up locked in Will’s own lab, where one of his experiments (on the young female human he captured earlier) seems to be reverting back to human. Then the dark seekers break through the door in a matter of seconds, and the three get behind a glass door where the operating table and reverting human are. For whatever reason, the dark seekers suddenly can’t just break through the glass, which doesn’t make sense, but I can stretch my imagination a little.
In any case, the leader of the dark seekers begins ramming into the glass, eventually forming a butterfly figure with the broken shards. Will then remembers his daughter saying “Look it’s a butterfly!” while playing with her hands when they were on their way to the helicopter. Then he looks down and sees a butterfly tattoo on the woman’s neck. I don’t know what the heck butterflies have to do with anything, but okay. A sign, a symbol of some kind.
Then Will draws blood from the woman (I think, it was hard to tell what happened, it may have been from the female specimen), hands it to her, and says it’s the cure and to escape through this random chute he opens. They disappear, he grabs a grenade, the seekers break through the glass, and everyone blows up except the woman and her son.
The woman and her son travel to mountains in Vermont and save the world with his cure. And that’s somehow is his legend…
So there you have it. In a nutshell, you have mindless vampires that are a result of a cure for cancer, who cannot come out during the day (although infected animals — with the exception of dogs — can), and are sentient although Will refuses to acknowledge it after becoming victim to a number of traps set up in the same fashion as the ones he used to capture human specimens for his experiments in an attempt to cure or reverse the effects of the mutated virus that brought mankind to the brink of extinction. Cliche? Yes. Plot holes abound? Yes. Good movie choice? No. Well-produced piece of garbage, providing minimal entertainment? You got it.