Before you read this review of I Am Legend be forewarned that their are some spoilers.  So, don’t read this review if knowing some of a movie before hand ruins it for you. In short, it’s a good movie and entertaining, but not the smash blockbuster some say it is.

For those of you who don’t know I AM LEGEND is the third remake of this movie, which was originally a book.

The first one stared Vincent Price and the second one stared Charleton Heston.

The basic premise is the same, a virus has turned almost all humans on the planet into vampire like creatures, and the hero is one of the last normal men on earth.

In this version will smith is a scientist, he hides in a fortress like apartment by night and by day catches the monsters and uses them as experiments to try to make a cure for the illness.  

Will Smith really made this movie, if it wasn’t for his acting a lesser actor would have made this a flop regardless of the CGI.   

You really felt for him as you watched him lose it from loneliness and losing his family and then his dog, his last companion.

While I enjoyed the movie I don’t think it’s as huge as reviewers say it is.  Once you’ve seen it once you’ve seen it all.

One thing that could have been done better, in my opinion, was the vampire like humans.  They were mostly done with CGI.   Why?  Sure for certain action scenes where they crawl up buildings and jump around I can see that.  But, every face shot was CGI.  What they looked like could have been done with makeup very easily, and it would have given the movie a more realistic look.  Don’t get me wrong they were scary and looked good, but CGI ing everything really wasn’t needed.  It made some of the movie look more like a video game.

Another thing that I didn’t like was that, although the vampires were in the movie the focus the whole time was on will smith, from his perspective. 

In the vincent price version the vampires were hunting him, but what he did not know was that some of the vampires were civilized now and forming communities, they no longer killed people for blood.   In an ironic twist vincent price became the monster, he was the boogey man to the vampires, killing them while they slept during the day.  The only reason they hunted his was so he would quit killing them.

They alluded to this in the movie but unless you saw the other movies or were paying close attention you wouldn’t catch it.   It could have been a much more interesting movie if they developed the vampires more.

Also, I thought the ending was very boring and anti-climatic.

Essentially they took an old film/book and took some of the best plot elements out of it and made it look better with CGI and up to date film production techniques.

It was an enjoyable movie though.  The vampires were scary and will smith made the movie with his acting, but a huge blockbuster?  No, it does not deserve that title.