Houdini's Magic Movie Ticket

The other day I saw I Am Legend for the first time, and I was disappointed. I thought Will Smith’s character was truly going to become a legend. And I guess he did, somewhat.

[SPOILER ALERT]

I thought he was going to truly become an awesome hero, but when you watch the film, you can see that he lets himself, and all of us, down. There’s a scene in which he goes a little crazy, and puts himself into a precarious situation. Then he becomes injured, and his dog pal defends him. His dog becomes infected by the mutant virus, and has to be put down. Then Will Smith becomes suicidal, and needs to be saved by a woman who accidentally leads the mutants back to his house. Then he realizes he cured the mutation disease, but the mutants are about to destroy it. So he suicide bombs them to save the cure, the lady who saved him, and her young companion.

You trace all this chaos back to one moment, and it’s the moment when Will Smith went a little crazy. There was no reason he had to die. It was very stupid. I thought maybe if they justified it, and there was some sort of difficulty that he faced that caused him to become overwhelmed and make a heroic sacrifice, then maybe his death would’ve been acceptable. You could argue that the psychological difficulty was enough for that. But I expected truly legendary behavior, and what I got was a guy who was succumbing to the psychological effects of prolonged isolation. I guess it’s more down to earth.

What really stuck out as lame was the fact that he himself had engineered that isolation, and it turns out that there was a colony of survivors just a state or two away. He was so dead-set on the idea that he was the only one left alive, and he refused to leave Ground Zero. But I think if he really was as brilliant as his character was supposed to be, then he would have done the research and investigation that would have lead him to the colony, where he could’ve conducted his experiments and research with a greater and swifter degree of success. This would then have entailed his survival, as he would not be living alone in a town full of monsters. Also it’s lame that the woman who saved him lead the monsters to him.

What’s weird, though, is that in a preview for the film a long time ago, I remember him standing next to a monster, and looking pretty much whipped. I’m wondering if there is an alternate ending in which he didn’t succeed… Hope not!

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