by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: December 04, 2009

Very rarely in film, a perfect storm of original novel, screenplay, direction, and actor occurs. In "I Am Legend", the combination of the story, the actor and the direction have served to create a film experience that catches the viewer's mind and heart from the beginning and does not let go until the very last scene fades away.

The novel captured a large audience when American writer, Richard Mathesen revolutionized the science fiction and horror genre by introducing one of the first apocalyptic visions of human kind being transformed into something both less than and other than human. The focus of the novel is not on a group of hardy survivors, but on one individual who is stranded and alone among the horrors of very capable and very agressive predators who once were human. His devastating approach included the new idea of abandoned cities, zoo animals that have escaped and returned to their wild state, and of surviving on what has been left behind by a once thriving civilization.

From Mr. Mathesen's vision came the great zombie genre, where some kind of biological force transforms the living into the walking dead, imagining the biblical prophecy of the dead walking the Earth at the end of time. Several treatments of his novel, including "Omega Man", "The Last Man On Earth", and "I Am Omega" have testified to the strength and comprehensiveness of his ideas.

But in such a film, the actor who has the burden of being the only human who is there to do the entertaining will capture the audience or cause a complete rejection of the story. In choosing Will Smith, a highly popular veteran actor, and Francis Lawrence, a relatively new director who had a background in music videos and "Constantine", Starring Keanu Reeves, someone created a situation where the single actor was able to keep the audience engaged, to describe the story, and to do it well.

The changes that were made to the zombiefication in "I Am Legend" helped to update and justify the hard to believe concept of humans who could survive and become so aggressive after they have lost their humanity. In this treatment, the virus was designed to cure cancer and to spread with incredible effectiveness. But the virus became a twisted and devastating epidemic that quickly overwhelmed civilization's ability to contain it, resulting in the transformation or death of most of humanity.

Will Smith manages to capture the harrowing and grinding emotional processes that simultaneously break down and sustain a grief ridden individual who has seen his family killed, who is a scientist who holds hope of finding a cure for the virus, who refuses to give up on the hope that other humans survived, and who goes through a process of deterioration into alcoholism and rebirth through finding that another human lives.

The most heartbreaking twist in the film occurs as a consequence of Smith's limited ability to communicate his humanity toward other normal humans in the face of required inhumanity in dealing with the zombies. The conflict is heart wrenching as Smith attempts, after years alone, to relate to the only other survivors of the apacolypse.

The ending will not be given away in this article, but seeing this film is an experience that will add to your list of the most memorable and moving of films that are based on groundbreaking novels.

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