James Proclaims!

2007’s I Am Legend is, in many ways, a fairly run-of-the mill post-apocalyptic flic. It’s perfectly acceptable fare and there are worse ways to spend 101 minutes. However, for much of the movie, there is only one character on screen, which means the movie succeeds or fails on the strength of the leading performer. In this aspect, Will Smith delivers in spades. So much so, that the film is at its most compelling when it’s just Smith’s protagonist and his German Shepherd (played ably by two different dogs called Abbey and Kona in real life) on screen. I suppose the scenes with other actors are necessary additions to the plot, but they are the least interesting bits of the movie.

Certainly the antagonistic vampire/zombie things are far scarier when they are implicit threats than when they actually appear on screen and the denouement of the movie is largely disappointing all round.

But the first two thirds of the film, which center around one man and his dog surviving in an eerily empty New York are well worth a watch.

Score for Christmasishness

Although palpably not set at Christmas (as far as we can tell), the humanity-ending events which lead to the timeline of the movie did happen at, or around, Christmas. So we are left with a post apocalyptic New York, which is full of Christmas decorations. Plus there are some flashback scenes, which while dealing with the harrowing end of the human race, also show a lot of brightly lit Christmas trees. So fairly Christmassy, albeit in the bleakest of ways.