Time Immortal

The following contains a few spoilers. Skip this post if that’s not your bag of chips.

In my previous review of I Am Legend, I wrote the following:

Having recently isolated a promising strain of his anti-viral treatments, Neville elects to capture one of this clan of infected, and does so. It is at this point that his world will begin to unravel, although he doesn’t realize it. And I have to say, I think that a big part of why everything comes apart for him has to do with his atheism and, I think, his need to analyze everything through purely scientific categories. The vampire he captures appears to be an 18-year old girl, and just as the trap he sets is sprung, Neville witnesses something odd: another vampire, this one looking much older, briefly peers out of the darkness from which the girl was taken, staring at Neville with an expression that suggests both rage and loss. His face begins to burn from the light, and he withdraws. Later on, Neville remarks — in a video journal entry he is making for himself — that in his estimation, the social de-evolution of humanity is complete; the infected are now incapable of recognzing when actions will or will not be harmful. He misses entirely the significance of his own actions: he took the girl from her clan, or possibly her family. As primal and as violent as the vampires are, love — in the form of devotion to family — still exists even in them. Neville cannot see that, and his inability to recognize something very human in the infected will have dire consqeuences in the near future.

As I was watching the movie for the second time, I wondered in the back of my mind what would have happened if Will Smith’s character, trapped in his basement by the “vampires” and apparently left with no choice but to sacrifice himself to protect Alice Braga’s character so that she can escape and take the cure for the KV “vampirism” virus to the other human survivors, had shown the suddenly healed girl to the attacking “vampires”. It was only after he took the girl that the “vampires” really took a vested interest in hunting him down, and I opined in my first review of the movie that love was what motivated them to act so uncharacteristically — they wanted their “family” back together.

As it turns out, almost the same scenario was supposed to be the original ending of the movie. The difference being, I see, that the girl was not cured.

And while I usually tend to agree with the people at LIBERTAS, this time I have to take exception with their conclusions. I don’t think this alternate ending would have diminished the religiosity of the film one iota, at least not in terms of symbolism. Smith’s character still have realizes that he was wrong, both in his assumptions about the vampires and in his assumptions about God. His line to Alice Braga — “I’m listening.” — is still there, and just as powerful as he walks out into a room full of “vampires.” Indeed, the message might almost have been more powerful — the scientist who had previously not even thought that love might exist amongst the “vampires” suddenly realized that even in the midst of hell, love remains.

This movie freaked me out. Which is odd, because if I think back on it, the “vampires” (they were vampires in the novel, and while that’s not quite what they are in the movie, the term is sufficient for the purposes of this review) aren’t all that scary. The CGI is decent — Hollywood is getting better and better at creating visually realistic human-esque creatures — but still evident for what it is, and for the most part the vampires spend most of their screen time yelling and running at things. with half their clothes torn off. To be sure, it’s about as frightening watching these virus-ravaged people attacking Will Smith as it is to watch video footage of soccer hooligans rioting.

But the tension-building in the movie is excellent. (Readers should take note that what follows will contain spoilers; if you haven’t seen the movie yet, my apologies.)

Okay, let’s talk premise first: Will Smith plays a military virologist who has been alone in what appears to be an empty New York for three years, ever since a virus wiped out pretty much all life on the planet. The exact breakdown that Smith’s character gives later in the movie is that 90% of people who contracted the virus simply “bled out” (hemorrhagic fever?). Less than 1% of people were found to be immune, and the other 9+%…well, we’ll get to them. Suffice to say, for the moment, that it’s the immune people who got the raw deal out of all of this.

One interesting point that I should note is that, although it is never explicitly stated, Smith’s character is an atheist. This is hinted at in one of the flashbacks that pepper the movie and provide well-timed bits of exposition; as his wife and child are loaded on a helicopter, she pauses to say a prayer. Will Smith bows his head…but if, O Reader, you’ve ever attended a worship service with a congenial atheist relative, you know that sort of bow. Smith’s virologist — Robert Neville by name — is not bowing out of any personal faith conviction, but is instead simply showing respect to his wife. A more…uhm…vocal declaration of his atheism will follow in due time, after additional hinting, but more on that later.

At any rate, the movie begins with some amazing establishing shots (I don’t want to know how many millions of dollars it cost the production company to arrange for so many empty areas in New York City), in which Neville kind of gets to play out a big kid’s dream; he drives fast cars all over the empty streets of New York, uninhibited by traffic lights or traffic itself, hits golf balls off of an aircraft carrier (his target appears to be a car dealership and its supply of front windshields), plays with his dog, and attempts to watch every movie in the video rental store…alphabetically.

Of course, there’s a darker side to all the fun and capering; he attempts to hunt one of the deer that have moved back in to the city area (which plants are reclaiming for their own), picks corn from a field of stalks that has erupted (or he may have planted it; we aren’t told) in a park, and scrounges through abandoned apartments for food. As he goes, wherever he goes, he carries a machine gun with him, and is meticulous about opening windows and ensuring that his surroundings — and his person — are bathed in as much direct sunlight as is possible.

And everything is on the clock. At mid-day, he waits at a set of docks near a ruined bridge (which, we learn, was destroyed deliberately in compliance with a quarantine order for the island of Manhattan) to see if anyone has picked up and answered the radio transmission he is constantly sending out. By 5 PM, his beeping watch informs him that it is time to return home. And as the sun finishes setting, he slams thick metal doors shut over all the windows in his home, and bars his door.

And for good reason: he is not so alone in Manhattan after all, as the screams and cries of the vampires during the night hours reveal. At first, the tortured roar is only heard as a muffled background element, as Neville cradles his dog Sam and his assault rifle in the tub, before retiring to the bedroom.

KV — the Krippin Virus — began, we are told, as a cure for cancer. In a brief cameo by Emma Thompson, it is outlined how a geneticist manipulated the measles virus to create a retro-virus that hunts down and kills cancerous cells in the human body. In the very first scene of the movie, we learn that the virus appears to have a 100% success rate — every one of over 10,000 patients in the initial human test group were cancer-free after the treatment.

We’re never told exactly what went wrong…some hasty chatter suggests that the virus may have begun to mutate rapidly, on par with how the virus responsible for AIDS can sometimes mutate rapidly. Even here, the tension-building surrounding the outbreak of the virus (which apparently takes place in Manhattan, which Smith’s Neville keeps referring to as “his station” and “Ground Zero”) is masterfully done — Neville, in his house, plays back on his television recorded news broadcasts concerning the illness, and it is in those snippets of background chatter that we can glean some details: at some point a few weeks prior to the global holocaust, over 5,000 patients using the Krippin treatment began to show symptoms of a disease similar to rabies. Robert Neville evidently had been taking the lead fighting KV for a while, because the newscasters articulate their hope in his ability to find a cure; a Time magazine magneted to the front of Neville’s fridge accompanies the picture of him with the herald “Savior”.

And in the flashbacks, we learn that KV at some point mutated into an airborne strain — this as Neville hurries his wife and child to the evacuation point, at which place he will also witness their deaths in a helicopter crash.

Neville is walking a thin line now between madness and sanity. At the movie store, he has positioned several mannequins in different clothing styles to play the role of street-corner friends, patrons of the store, and even the clerk behind the counter. He even jokes with the clerk about being too nervous to even say hello to one “woman” at the end of the ‘G’ section. And yet, when he returns to his home, he is all business and poise — his daily regimen includes exercise time and time in his basement lab, as he doggedly attempts to isolate a cure for KV, basing it in part on his own immunity. A wall virus-ravaged rats in plexiglass containers are his test subjects for each successive attempt at a cure. On the opposite wall are dozens of polaroid pictures, the faces of infected human test subjects that have died when he has attempted to use on them anti-viral samples that proved partly effective on the rats.

For the first third of the movie, at least, the movie just keeps you guessing, feeding you some details and hiding others. The first encounter with the vampires is exceptionally well-done, set up as it is by Neville’s dog Sam running into a dark warehouse in pursuit of a deer (the infected feed off of the animals just as Neville desires to do). Rounding one corner in search of Sam, Neville suddenly recoils in horror, and then briefly shines his light down a side hallway; for a second, it plays over a group of vampires all huddled together and quivering, as though desiring to keep warm even as they await the onset of night. Finally, we see them attack when Neville is forced to kill one that ambushes him just as he is attempting to rescue Sam. And in his escape, two or three of the infected are killed when they crash through a window into the daylight, roasted alive by the UV radiation.

Having recently isolated a promising strain of his anti-viral treatments, Neville elects to capture one of this clan of infected, and does so. It is at this point that his world will begin to unravel, although he doesn’t realize it. And I have to say, I think that a big part of why everything comes apart for him has to do with his atheism and, I think, his need to analyze everything through purely scientific categories. The vampire he captures appears to be an 18-year old girl, and just as the trap he sets is sprung, Neville witnesses something odd: another vampire, this one looking much older, briefly peers out of the darkness from which the girl was taken, staring at Neville with an expression that suggests both rage and loss. His face begins to burn from the light, and he withdraws. Later on, Neville remarks — in a video journal entry he is making for himself — that in his estimation, the social de-evolution of humanity is complete; the infected are now incapable of recognzing when actions will or will not be harmful. He misses entirely the significance of his own actions: he took the girl from her clan, or possibly her family. As primal and as violent as the vampires are, love — in the form of devotion to family — still exists even in them. Neville cannot see that, and his inability to recognize something very human in the infected will have dire consqeuences in the near future.

Because the vampires set a trap.

The ambush sequence was one of my favourite scenes, and it makes you realize just how much attention to detail has gone in to the movie up until that point. As I remarked, both to myself and aloud during one scene, Neville is in shadow, as he has turned down a street with skyscrapers on all sides to investigate one of the video store mannequins, which has been moved during the night to a new location. The movie sets you up, very well, to realize the tactical consequences of Neville’s location, the implications of his being deep in the middle of a forest of steel. The trap that is sprung to capture Neville uses the same mechanics that his own trap to capture the girl employed. And the consequences are dire; the aggrieved vampire releases three infected dogs into the street to deal with Neville, and his hound Sam bravely intervenes. But she is viciously mauled by one of the dogs, and becomes infected; Neville must put her down after she begins to show symptoms back in his lab, where he has desperately attempted to cure her.

It almost makes me wonder, in fact, if the intent of the screenwriters was to imply that the vampires are even more clever than just setting traps; it makes me wonder whether they were actually targeting the dog as opposed to Neville, knowing that he’d have to kill her if she were bitten. The effect on Neville is profound — he attempts to set a trap for the infected by going to the docks at night, using another mannequin to make it look as though he is sitting at a desk he has set up for himself there, and then running at them with an SUV. His attack, which may have been nothing more than an elaborate suicide attempt, fails, and he is almost killed…but then two other survivors, drawn by his radio broadcast, intervene and pull him to safety.

The movie gets almost religious at this point, going so far as to have the very next shot be that of a rosary dangling from around the mirror of the vehicle that Neville’s rescuers have bundled him in to. He manages to rouse himself from unconsciousness just long enough to warn them against taking him directly to his house (which he gives the address to), for fear of the infected discovering where exactly he lives. And when he awakes in the morning, he meets Anna and Ethan, KV-immune survivors from a Red Cross ship out of Sao Paulo, who fled after the boat was overwhelmed by the vampires when it put ashore for supplies.

Anna has made breakfast — powdered eggs, but real bacon — and she sits Neville down at the table so he can eat. He is about to, but pauses to ask why his guests are…we…alive and in his house. Anna explains their origins, and tells him that she has heard rumours of a “survivor’s colony” somewhere in Vermont, where the progress of the virus is hampered by the colder weather and the mountains. Neville doesn’t believe her, insisting that everyone is dead. He becomes enraged, to which Anna exclaims “My God!”. And in a second hint at his atheism, Neville corrects here, telling her God had nothing to do with KV. “We did this,” he mutters.

He then apologizes for his outburst, with the lame excuse that he had been “saving that bacon”. A short while later, Luke12: 18-20 came to mind: And he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’.

Neville later asks Anna why she has come, and Anna replies that God told her to come. This enrages Neville again, and (in keeping with my pet theory that atheists forget themselves when the talk turns to religion) he proceeds to arrogantly “tell” Anna “about her God” — he then lists the aforementioned statistics concerning the disease. “There is no God,” he concludes. She replies only that the world is much more empty now; it is easier to hear what God is calling her to do. She talks about how everyone has a purpose.

And then my premonition about Luke 12 came true.

Anna brought Neville home just as dawn was breaking, but one of the infected must have hung on long enough to see what hose they went to. As night falls, the vampires stage a full-on assault against the home, and Neville’s first-layer of defences — UV lights — are quickly dismantled. The second-layer defence — bombs he has rigged in cars along the street — is more effective, but unfortunately also too powerful; the house’s walls are breached, and some vampires manage to get inside. Neville is wounded as he struggles with one, but he is able to fight back, and spirits Anna and Ethan to temporary safety in his basement lab. The vampires break in, however, and soon the three protagonists are reduced to cowering behing a wall of plexiglass, which the lead vampire is cracking through with repeated charges.

The plexiglass wall is the partition in his lab behind which Neville keeps his infected human test subjects, and something incredible has happened — the girl has been cured, with all her symptoms gone. Initially, Neville tries to reason with the vampires, screaming that he can cure them. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he draws out a vial full of blood from the girl and hands it to Anna, whom he then ushers — along with Ethan — into a coal chute at the back of the room. He tells them to wait for dawn, and then takes a grenade from a drawer and dives into the crowd of vampires, engulfing the room in flame. His last words to Anna, before shutting her into the chute, are “I’m listening.”

The movie ends with Anna finding the Vermont colony; her voiceover tells of the eventual world-wide cure of the virus. The movie ends on a high note…but even still, I felt very rattled leaving the theatre. The movie is a marvelous example of technique, and is almost unrelenting in its tension-building. There are very few moments of levity to break up the tension, in fact — the funniest line of Will Smith’s dialogue is, I think “I like Shrek.” It took me to the edge of my seat, and kept me there.

It’s also hard not to be impressed with Will Smith after this performance; for most of the movie, he is the only one on screen, and he carries the movie by himself. Alice Braga is good as Anna, but this really is Smith’s show. It takes a talented actor to keep the audience interested for 100 minutes, let alone interested and sympathetic. While I Am Legend probably isn’t Oscar material, Smith deserves some kind of award for his performance in this one.

But even more importantly, it’s a movie that tries to say something important. Neville’s atheism and scientism are what get him killed; what makes him a legend is that he finally listens, both to Anna’s attempt to teach him about God’s plan, and to that plan itself. “I think this is what you were sent here for,” he tells her as he hands her the vial, just before sacrificing himself to save her and the young boy she’s travelling with. Anna is the picture of a young, faithful Catholic woman, compassionate but not overly soft.

And in a refreshing break from tradition, Anna and Neville don’t hop in the sack at any point, nor is there really an indication of romantic tension. Both are on a mission, and that higher purpose is all they are about. For Neville, the higher purpose begins as finding a cure, and ends as something more. For Anna, it begins as something more, and stays there; she is at once God’s messenger and His agent, sent to be the path by which Neville is able to get his cure out into the world, even in the face of his own life being demanded of him. Indeed, the ending almost makes me think of the fate of Moses, who leads his people to freedom but cannot, because of his sins, enter into the promised land. So too Neville — he brings into being the cure for the virus, but cannot, because of his sins, enter into the post-viral world. That is not his path, nor is it his calling. And it is in listening to that calling and accepting the sacrifice that must be made that be becomes Legend.