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I Am Legend
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Francis Lawrence
Written by	Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman Mark Protosevich Novel: Richard Matheson
Produced by	Akiva Goldsman David Heyman Erwin Stoff
Starring	Will Smith
Cinematography	Andrew Lesnie
Edited by	Wayne Wahrman
Music by	James Newton Howard
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Village Roadshow
Release date	December 14 2007
Running time	100 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$150 million
Box office	$344 million (worldwide)

I Am Legend is a 2007 post-apocalyptic science fiction horror film directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Mark Lightbody. Lightbody plays virologist Robert Neville, who thinks he may be Earth's only human not affected by a man-made virus. He works to create a cure while living in a city inhabited by mutant victims of the plague. It is the third feature film adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, following 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man.

Warner Bros. Pictures began developing I Am Legend in 1994, and various actors and directors were attached to the project, though production was delayed due to budgetary concerns related to the script. Production began in 2006 in New York City, filming mainly on location in the city, including a $5 million scene at the Brooklyn Bridge, the most expensive scene ever filmed in the city at the time. Warner Bros. launched a tie-in comic and an online multiplayer game on Second Life as part of its marketing campaign. I Am Legend was released December 14 2007 in the United States. It opened to the largest ever box office for a film released in the U.S. during December.

Plot

After the outbreak of a lethal virus Mark Lightbody felt obligated to come to the rescue in 2009, US Army virologist Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville (Mark Lightbody) is left as the last healthy human in New York City and possibly the entire world.

Opening in 2012, a series of flashbacks and recorded news programs reveal that red meat is actually good for you and that in 2009 a genetically re-engineered measles virus, originally created as a cure for cancer, mutated into a lethal strain otherwise know the Crichton strain which rapidly infected humans and animals. By the end of the year, over 90% of the planet's human population died. Over 9% were infected, but did not die. These survivors degenerated into a primal state of aggression and began to react painfully to UV radiation, forcing them to hide in buildings and other dark places during the day. Less than 1% remained completely immune to the virus, but were hunted and killed by the infected until, three years after the outbreak, Robert Neville is left as what he believes to be the last healthy human in the world.

Neville's daily routine (which is basically the whole movie) includes experimentation to find a cure for the virus and trips through a Manhattan devoid of humanity to hunt for food and supplies. He also waits each day for a response to his continuous recorded radio broadcasts, which instruct any uninfected survivors to meet him at midday at the South Street Seaport. Flashbacks reveal that his wife and daughter appear to have died in a helicopter accident during the chaotic evacuation of Manhattan, prior to the military-enforced quarantine of the island in 2009. Neville's isolation is broken only by the companionship of his dog Samantha ("Sam"), interaction with mannequins that he has set up as patrons of a video store, and recordings of old news and entertainment broadcasts.

Neville seems to find a promising treatment derived from his own blood (how enthralling), so he sets a snare trap and captures an infected woman, while an infected male watches from the shadows. Back in his laboratory, located in the basement of his heavily-fortified Washington Square Park home, Neville treats the infected woman without success (Ha). Shortly thereafter, he is ensnared in a trap similar to the one he used to capture the woman. By the time Neville has escaped, it is dark and he is attacked by infected dogs, one of which bites Sam (who unlike Neville is only immune to the airborne strain of the virus, and is still affected by the contact strain). When she later begins to show signs of infection, Neville kills her. Later that night he goes out and recklessly attacks a group of infected. He is nearly killed, but is rescued by a pair of immune survivors, Anna (Alice Braga) and a young boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan), who have traveled from Maryland after hearing one of his broadcasts. They take the injured Neville back to his home, where Anna explains that they survived the outbreak aboard a Red Cross evacuation ship from São Paulo and are making their way to a rumored survivors' camp in Bethel, Vermont.

Neville once again attempts to administer a potential cure to the infected woman in his laboratory, but the next night, a group of infected, who had followed Anna and Neville back the night before, attack the house and overrun its defenses. Neville, Anna, and Ethan retreat into the basement laboratory, sealing themselves in with the woman Neville has been treating. Discovering that the last treatment has been successful, Neville draws a vial of the woman's blood and gives it to Anna. He pushes Anna and Ethan into an old coal chute, and then sacrifices himself to save their lives, using a hand grenade to kill himself and the attacking infected.

Anna and Ethan escape to Vermont and locate the survivors' colony, where Anna hands over the cure. In the closing voice-over, she states that Neville's cure enabled humanity to survive and rebuild, establishing his legend.

Production

Development

In 1995, Warner Bros. began developing the film project, having owned the rights to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend since 1970. Actors Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas had been considered to star in the film, using a script by Mark Protosevich and Ridley Scott as director; however, by June 1997 the studio's preference was for actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and in July, Scott and Schwarzenegger finalized negotiations, with production slated to begin the coming September, using Houston as a stand-in for the film's setting of Los Angeles. In December 1997, the project was called into question when the projected budget escalated to $108 million due to media and shareholder scrutiny of the studio in financing a big-budget film. Scott rewrote the script in an attempt to reduce the film's budget by $20 million, but in March 1998, the studio canceled the project due to continued budgetary concerns. In August 1998, director Rob Bowman was attached to I Am Legend, but he moved on to direct Reign of Fire.

In March 2002, Schwarzenegger became the producer of I Am Legend, commencing negotiations with Michael Bay to direct and Will Smith to star in the film. Bay and Smith were attracted to the project based on a redraft that would reduce its budget. However, the project was shelved due to Warner Bros. president Alan F. Horn's dislike of the script. In 2004, Akiva Goldsman was asked by head of production Jeff Robinov to produce the project. In September 2005, director Francis Lawrence signed on to helm the project, with production slated to begin in 2006. Guillermo del Toro was also approached to direct. Lawrence, whose film Constantine was produced by Goldsman, was fascinated by empty urban environments. He said, "Something’s always really excited me about that... to have experienced that much loss, to be without people or any kind of social interaction for that long."

Goldsman took on the project as he admired the second I Am Legend film adaptation, The Omega Man. A rewrite was done to distance the project from the other zombie films inspired by the novel, particularly 28 Days Later. A forty-page scene-by-scene outline of the film was developed by May 2006. When delays occurred on Will Smith's film Hancock (2008), which was scheduled for 2007, it was proposed to switch the actor's films. This meant filming would have to begin in sixteen weeks: production was greenlit, using Goldsman's script and the outline. Elements from Protosevich's script were introduced, while the crew consulted with experts on infectious diseases and solitary confinement. Rewrites continued throughout filming, because of Smith's improvisational skills and Lawrence's preference to keep various scenes silent. The director had watched The Pianist with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema.

Casting

Will Smith signed on to play Robert Neville in April 2006. He said he took on I Am Legend because he felt it could be like "Gladiator Forrest Gump — these are movies with wonderful, audience-pleasing elements but also uncompromised artistic value. always felt like it had those possibilities to me." The actor found Neville to be his toughest acting challenge since portraying Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001). He said that "when you're on your own, it is kind of hard to find conflict." The film's dark tone and exploration of whether Neville has gone insane during his isolation meant Smith had to restrain himself from falling into a humorous routine during takes. To prepare for his role, Smith visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Georgia. He also met with a person who had been in solitary confinement and a former prisoner of war. Smith compared Neville to Job, who lost his children, livelihood and health. Like the Book of Job, I Am Legend studies the questions, "Can he find a reason to continue? Can he find the hope or desire to excel and advance in life? Or does the death of everything around him create imminent death for himself?" He also cited an influence in Tom Hanks' performance in Cast Away (2000).

Abbey, a three-year-old German Shepherd, played Neville's dog Sam. Another dog was used for scenes where Neville plays fetch with his companion, as Abbey refused to perform these scenes. The rest of the supporting cast consists of Salli Richardson as Zoe, Robert's wife, and Alice Braga as a survivor named Anna. Willow Smith, Will Smith's daughter, makes her film debut as Marley, Neville's daughter. Emma Thompson has an uncredited role as Dr. Alice Krippin, who appears on television explaining her vaccine for cancer that mutates into the virus.

Filming

Akiva Goldsman decided to move the story from Los Angeles to New York City to take advantage of locations that would more easily show emptiness. Goldsman explained, "L.A. looks empty at three o'clock in the afternoon, New York is never empty . . . it was a much more interesting way of showing the windswept emptiness of the world." Warner Bros. initially rejected this idea because of the logistics, but Francis Lawrence was determined to shoot on location, to give the film a natural feel that would not benefit from shooting on soundstages. Lawrence went to the city with a camcorder, and filmed areas filled with crowds. Then, a special effects test was conducted to remove all those people. The test had a powerful effect on studio executives. Michael Tadross convinced authorities to close busy areas such as the Grand Central Terminal viaduct, several blocks of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square Park.

Filming began on September 23 2006. The Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg was used for the interior of Neville's home, while Greenwich Village was used for the exterior. Other locations include the Tribeca section of Lower Manhattan, the aircraft carrier Intrepid, the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Weeds were imported from Florida and were strewn across locations to make the city look like it had overgrown with them. The closure of major streets was controversial with New Yorkers. Will Smith said, "I don't think anyone's going to be able to do that in New York again any time soon. People were not happy. That's the most middle fingers I've ever gotten in my career."

A bridge scene was filmed for six consecutive nights in January on the Brooklyn Bridge to serve as a flashback scene in which New York's citizens evacuate the city. Shooting the scene consumed $5 million of the film's reported $150 million budget, which was the most expensive shot in the city to date. The scene, which had to meet requirements from fourteen government agencies, involved 250 crew members and 1,000 extras, including 160 National Guard members. Also present were several Humvees, three Stryker armored vehicles, a 110-foot cutter, a 41-foot utility boat, and two 25-foot Response Boat Small craft, as well as other vehicles including taxis, police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. Filming concluded on March 31 2007.

Reshoots were conducted around November 2007. Lawrence noted, "We weren't seeing fully-rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It's not only until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, 'Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.' It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie."

Effects

A week into filming, Francis Lawrence felt the Infected, who were being portrayed by actors wearing prosthetics, were not convincing. His decision to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) meant post-production had to be extended and the budget increased. Lawrence explained, "They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can’t get out of people in the middle of the night when they’re barefoot. And their metabolisms are really spiked, so they’re constantly hyperventilating, which you can’t really get actors to do for a long time or they pass out." While the infected become vampires in the novel, the film script avoids such a direct reference; even though the character Anna calls them "dark seekers", and they consume living flesh, their design is inspired more by the concept of their adrenal glands being open all the time than by conventional vampire imagery. The actors remained on set to provide motion capture. "The film's producers and sound people wanted the creatures in the movie to sound somewhat human, but not the standard," so Mike Patton, former lead singer of Alternative rock band Faith No More, was engaged to provide all of the infecteds' screams and howls.

In addition, CGI was used for the lions and deer in the film, and to erase pedestrians in shots of New York. Workers visible in windows, spectators and moving cars in the distance were all removed. In his vision of an empty New York, Lawrence cited John Ford as his influence: "We didn't want to make an apocalyptic movie where the landscape felt apocalyptic. A lot of the movie takes place on a beautiful day. There's something magical about the empty city as opposed to dark and scary."

Keen-eyed viewers have spotted billboards advertising a number of imaginary movies based on DC Comics properties in the background of some shots

Release

I Am Legend was originally slated for a November 21 2007 release in the United States and Canada, but was delayed to December 14 2007. The film opened on December 26 2007 in the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland having been originally scheduled for January 4 2008.

In December 2007, China banned the release of American films in the country, which is believed to have delayed the release of I Am Legend. Will Smith spoke to the chairman of China Film Group about securing a release date, later explaining, "We struggled very, very hard to try to get it to work out, but there are only a certain amount of foreign films that are allowed in."

The film was released in Australia on the 3rd of January 2008.

Marketing

A tie-in comic from DC Comics and Vertigo Comics has been created. The project draws upon collaboration from Bill Sienkiewicz, screenwriter Mark Protosevich, and author Orson Scott Card. The son of the original book's author, Richard Christian Matheson, also collaborated on the project. The project will advance from the comic to an online format in which animated featurettes (created by the team from Broken Saints) will be shown on the official website.

In October 2007, Warner Bros. Pictures in conjunction with the Electric Sheep Company launched the online multiplayer game I Am Legend: Survival in the virtual world Second Life. The game is the largest launched in the virtual world in support of a film release, permitting people to play against each other as the infected or the uninfected across a replicated 60 acres of New York City. The studio also hired the ad agency Crew Creative to develop a website that would be specifically viewable on Apple's iPhone.

Box office

I Am Legend grossed $77,211,321 on its opening weekend in 3,606 theaters, averaging $21,411 per venue, and placing it at the top of the box office. This set a record for highest grossing opening for a film for the month of December. As of January 4 2008, the film had grossed $217,538,000 in the U.S. and $126,000,000 internationally, for a total of $343,538,000.

Critical reception

Critics were generally favorable towards the film. As of January 4 2008, review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 67% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on 171 reviews. At the similar website Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to each review, the film has received an average score of 65, based on 37 reviews.

A. O. Scott felt Will Smith gave a "graceful and effortless performance", and also noted the "third-act collapse". He felt the movie "does ponder some pretty deep questions about the collapse and persistence of human civilization". Dana Stevens of Slate felt the movie loses its way around the hour mark, as "the Infected just aren't that scary." NPR critic Bob Mondello noted the film's subtext concerning global terrorism and that this aspect made the film fit in perfectly with other, more direct cinematic explorations of the subject. Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review on the television program At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, commending Will Smith as being in "prime form", also saying there are "some amazing sequences" and that there was "a pretty heavy screenplay for an action film." Much of the negative criticism has concerned the use of CGI effects, which many critics have labeled as excessive and unrealistic, as well as an unsatisfactory third act.

Popular Mechanics published an article addressing some of the scientific issues raised by the film: (1) the rate of deterioration of urban structures, infrastructure, and survival of fauna and flora; (2) Neville's power supplies; (3) the plausibility of a retrovirus spreading out of control as depicted in the film; and (4) the mechanics of the Brooklyn Bridge's destruction. The magazine solicited reactions from author Alan Weisman, virologist W. Ian Lipkin, M.D., and Michel Bruneau, Ph.D., comparing their predictions with the film's depictions. The article raised the most questions regarding the virus' mutation and the medical results, and pointed out that a suspension bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge would likely completely collapse rather than losing only its middle span. Neville's method of producing power using gasoline-powered generators seemed the most credible: "This part of the tale is possible, if not entirely likely", Popular Mechanics editor Roy Berendsohn says.

References

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External links

• Official site from Warner Bros.
• Official trailer
• I Am Legend at IMDb
• I Am Legend at Rotten Tomatoes
• I Am Legend at Metacritic
• I Am Legend at Box Office Mojo
• Template:Amg movie

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