I Am Legend (film)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


They aren't talking about the dog.
The world is quieter now. You just have to listen. If you listen, you can hear God's plan.
—Anna

The 2007 film adaptation (and only one to bear the name) of Richard Matheson's novel.

A group of scientists tries to repurpose the measles virus to fight cancer. It goes horribly right: the virus cures cancer, and it kills people. Ninety-nine percent of the world's population dies, and the left are divided between the "vampires", cannibalistic hunters of their own kind, and the rare people who are immune, that are hunted down by the vampires to near-extinction.

Lieutenant-colonel and virologist Robert Neville is one of the the immune, and now lives on a deserted Manhattan along his dog Sam. He constantly tries to contact someone over radio while trying to hide from the vampires. He also has been slowly driven to madness by his isolation and a constant fear he is really the last man on Earth, and desperately tries to cure vampires he captures in the slight hope someday he will manage to cure them back to normal and end his isolation.

With its release came four short animated movies which tell unrelated side stories about the rest of the world.

Directed by Francis Lawrence, which also did the Constantine movie. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Tropes used in I Am Legend include:
  • Actor Allusion: Will Smith and his Marley, particularly "Three Little Birds", which he earlier mangled in Shark Tale.
  • The Aloner: Dr Neville.
  • And Then John Was a Zombie: The DVD short "Shelter".
  • Bat Family Crossover: Referenced by a billboard in the abandoned Times Square, which depicts the Batman films' symbol with the Superman "S" in the middle.[1].
  • Big Applesauce: As noted on that trope's page, the setting was moved because the visual impact of an empty New York is more effective than Los Angeles, the book's setting.
  • Booby Trap: Dr. Neville's zom... er, infection victim traps. The Darkseekers eventually learn to set traps themselves.
  • Catapult Nightmare: Averted; Neville wakes up from a nightmare by quietly opening his eyes, as a normal person would do.
  • Chewing the Scenery:

"FRED? WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT HERE, FRED?"

  • Contrived Coincidence: If Anna and Max had arrived just one day earlier, Neville don't would have fallen for the vampire's trap, Sam don't would be infected, and Neville don't would need to worry about vampires hunting down him because he would tell Anna about the trail of odor, and he would get his cure, and spreading the cure would be easier without a massive horde wanting to kill him just as he finds he created it..
  • Cozy Catastrophe: Robert Neville lives in relative peace and luxury in his house, even playing golf and browsing through video stores. Of course, that is only during the day. At night.
  • Crazy Prepared: Dr. Neville, going home at night and also blowing up his house. He also keeps a rifle in an umbrella stand, and hides weapons including the grenade in the finale in random drawers throughout his house.
  • Cure for Cancer: The start of the zombie apocalypse.
  • Different World, Different Movies: A poster in Times Square shows a Batman and Superman logo indicating a cross-over between those two properties was being planned for 2009.
  • Evil Brit: Averted; Dr. Krippen didn't mean to create a virus that nearly annihilates the human race.
  • Fatal Flaw: Sam is a dog, so of course it's Undying Loyalty. She ends up being infected trying to defend Neville from zombie dogs, despite the creatures never being actually interested on her.
  • Flashbacks: Tells how his family died.
  • Focus Group Ending: Infamously so, ruining most of the Foreshadowing and creating a few Plot Holes. Originally, Neville would have realised that the infected are intelligent, and just want to take back the flock member he has in his captivity in order to test his cure. A shocked Neville allows to them do this, after which the infected leaves without causing further trouble. The whole event makes Neville start to question his own morality, when the implications of what he has done to develop his cure dawns on him. In the final version of the ending the intelligence of the infected is just implicated, but ultimately ignored, and Neville makes a Heroic Sacrifice to help the others escape with his cure. The original ending was eventually included as bonus material on the DVD, where it was named the "controversial" ending.
  • Foreshadowing: The film demonstrates a bit of it, but the ending's change rendered the Foreshadowing null.
  • Ghost City: New York. The DVD extras show Hong Kong also became this.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Done more subtly than in the novel, the camera pans to the dozens of infected that Neville killed doing experimentations on when he does the same to the one he's currently working on. Anna even looks on with horror when she sees the failed experiments.
  • Hellish Copter: The fate of Neville's family, as they were being evacuated from the city no less.
  • Hollywood Atheist: Neville refuses to believe in God due to the events after the outbreak.
  • The Immune: Dr. Neville.
  • "It" Is Dehumanizing: Anna watches Neville experiment on a captured zombie, and asks whether what he's doing will "cure her." Neville responds "Actually, it will probably kill it," with the second "it" slightly emphasised.
  • Living Prop: Ethan. He has no lines and never does anything other than not die. Only thing that he's used for is Neville showing how much time he's had on his hands when reciting Shrek by heart. This trope is justified: he's very probably very shell-shocked thanks to all the horror he saw.
  • Mad Scientist Laboratory: Dr. Neville's basement lab, which requires several generators to power and is quite impressive for a post-Zombie Apocalypse lab.
  • Manly Tears: Neville sings Bob Marley's 'Three Little Birds to Samantha as he holds her in his arms. When she begins to attack him, he strangles her and weeps. The next day, he walks into the video store and breaks down when he finally talks to the girl-mannequin.

"Don't worry... 'bout a thing... 'cause every little thing, is gonna be alright..."

    • Also:

"I... I promised a friend I would say hello to you today... Please say hello to me... Please say hello to me..."

  • Mayor of a Ghost Town: Neville, more or less.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: Used to make sure the audience would have the maximum emotional impact to "Samantha's" death. Apparently this trope even applies to male dogs.
  • Mind Screw: Fred the Dummy. Neville is less than pleased to see him outside the store.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Similar to the He Who Fights Monsters entry, it's rather subtle in the original ending; after returning the mate to the alpha male, Neville looks over at the wall containing pictures of past infected who died in his experimentation.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: The commercials suggested the film was an action thriller instead of the slow horror-drama it is.
  • One-Scene Wonder: She has about 1 minute and a half of screen time at the beginning of the film (and isn't listed in the credits), but Emma Thompson as Alice Krippin is so delightful you desperately want to know more about the women who inadvertantly created The Virus.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: The infected creatures. They display characteristics that are a cross between vampires and zombies.
  • Race Lift: Neville is black in the film.
  • Ridiculous Future Inflation: Gas costing $5.95 a gallon.
  • Sanity Slippage: Mostly happens before the "current" time of the movie, though it gets really sliding after Neville is forced to mercy-kill his only companion, the dog. Talking to your pet? That's fairly normal even now. Talking to a mannequin? A little odd. Expecting, nay, begging it to talk back? (See Manly Tears) Yeah you're pretty far gone. Spending three years as the only uninfected human in New York City, hell the entire world, or so he thinks, will probably make you a little unstable. There's also the fact that even when reunited with other humans he still seems a little broken. Among which being the refusal to think that other humans even could be out there or that the infected aren't the mindless beasts he thinks, despite ever-growing mountains of evidence otherwise, and going blank as he spoke along with the movie Shrek in a way that would make Pavlov proud.
  • Samus Is a Girl: Sam the dog is actually Samantha
  • Scenery Gorn: Much of the movie dwells on the spectacle of New York returning to nature and the traces of the desperate last days e.g. the blown bridges. The portrayal of the vegetation, contrary to popular belief, is actually quite conservative. In reality it's likely that the speed of New York's reclamation by nature would be much more thorough by three years later. As one example, if such an extinction were to occur there would be no one to man the water pipes underneath the city, the subways would flood within a week and almost all of the surface streets would cave in from the erosion. As a rich pool of nature right in the middle of Manhattan, Central Park would also increase the rate of reclamation.
  • Science Is Bad: The vampire/zombie plague began as a cure for cancer.

Neville: God didn't do this, we did!

  1. ↑ A "World's Finest" or Batman Vs. Superman film was in talks at the same time as this film, but fell through, so this reference was all we got.
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