I really enjoyed this movie but I gotta tell ya, it was a huge bummer.
But first, what I liked about it. I always dig movies like this with big apocalyptic scenarios set in the future. It’s fascinating to me to speculate what could happen in certain circumstances. And good movies make it look so real, it’s easy to get into it. I Am Legend is a good movie. The scenario is believable and the flashback scenes of the impending doom are very dramatic and have weight. A movie is much scarier when it has an element of reality to it. Zombies and aliens are one thing, but an out-of-control virus that wipes out most of the planet is far too potentially real. And the scenes of a deserted NYC are amazing. Very effective and you can’t help but wonder how the hell they did that.
Okay, things I didn’t like. Will Smith is miserable pretty much the whole time. For good reason, but still, as an audience member looking to be entertained, it got to be a real downer. Especially when everything under the sun seemed to go wrong for this guy. You find out his family blew up in a helicopter accident while he was watching. He has to kill his dog, his only companion, because it gets infected. I’m thinking “GEEZ! Can this be any more of a bummer?” And of course the “monsters” bust his place up and corner him in the lab just as he figures out he has the cure. Fortunately 2 fellow survivors get the cure to the right people, but of course Will Smith dies to keep the monsters away. The only way it could have been worse is if his family got infected and he had to kill them himself. But I’m sure they are saving that for the sequel. 
Overall Will Smith did a great job. I believed his character and he really connected the experience of being completely by yourself for so long. The mutated human “monsters” were a little too CGI, a little too cartoonish, especially by today’s standards. But they were pretty scary nonetheless.
One thing I would have liked to have seen in the movie was a little more closely following the book. In the book, Will Smith’s character is in fact the last man on earth and he becomes a legend to the mutated humans because he is this shadowy figure that comes and kills them. Essentially flipping the monster legend to show that in this new world, normal humans are the mythical nightmare creatures. Normal humans are the ones who don’t fit in, not the other way around. But it was a good movie. I did enjoy it overall.
