I haven't seen this version. I like the version with Heston, though it varies from the book (I hear). It's decent '70s scifi. The one aired last week on SyFy was horrible. It was like a Van Damme or Lundgren flick where they throw in the trappings of a scifi world, then execute what is basically a standard fighting/actioneer. the movie didn't even *feel* like it was another world: it looked and felt exactly as if it had been filmed in our current reality, and the fights and stuff were standard martial arts/gun battles from a hundred other movies, most of them non scifi. Horrible.
I liked "I Am Legend" in many ways. Smith did a creditable job. The sense of loneliness and despair is palpable. there are a couple of genuinely scary moments. The major mistakes in the movie are the plotting and pacing, in that the arrival of other humans on the scene takes place very late in the film. Things are then resolved quickly and unsatisfactorily. It's as if they spent all the writing and time on Smith as one man alone, then had to rush things at the end. Could have used anothe twenty minutes to work on that, or cut a bit of the stuff that came before. The other thing that was a bigger problem for me was the use of CGI for the mutated humans. They were in every single scene, painfully, obviously CGI. They were nowhere nearly as convincing as Gollum in LOTR, and it was distracting. The scenes where they attack Smith's house, or menance him on a pier, aren't exciting because they're leaping about like Spider-Man, and the FX used to display those superhuman feats are every bit as false looking as the worse scenes in the Spider-Man movies. I simply couldn't suspend my awareness of the CGI characters enough to be engaged by them--except for one, terrifying moment in a building where the cinematography obscures the CGI nature of the characters. Other than that, good movie. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Worf" <hellomahog...@gmail.com> To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 3:14:51 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: [scifinoir2] topic: the last man on earth I'm watching the original movie starring Vincent Price on my local PBS station. I think that if they had made the Will Smith movie with vampires instead of zombies it would have been more interesting. What do you think?
