Film Friday: Concussion (2015)

For some time now, a cadre of hard-left journalists looking for a modern Civil Rights cause to claim as their own have been waging a war against the NFL. Joining this cause is the film Concussion. It tanked in theaters, earning only $48 million on its production budget of $57 million, and it did so for a reason: the film sucks, in addition to being pure propaganda.

Rather than outlining the plot, let me start by telling you why this film sucked. Putting aside the issue of it being pure propaganda, this is just not a good film. The film is morose at best – the direct thinks it’s ironically tense. There are no good moments. There are no moments of inspiration and no moments of genuine outrage. There are no exciting moments either; everything was dull. There are no peaks or valleys. The colors are dull. The acting of Will Smith was dull (his wife was full of bullship to claim he didn’t get an award because of racism). The story is dull. Every scene involves people standing or sitting in a room talking until they reach the conclusion you knew was coming all along. The film even deals with a couple suicides and yet presents those in about as dull a manner possible.

What I really want to talk about though is how biased this film was. This film turns you off quickly unless you are a true believer.

The film follows Dr. Bennet Omala (Will Smith), a forensic pathologist with the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh. Omala is a Nigerian American and he was the first to discover chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This is a medical condition which results in destructive proteins attacking the brain’s tissue after repeated traumatic blows to the head, i.e. concussions.

The film opens showing Omala testifying in court to save a wrongly convicted man from the death sentence. He begins by modestly listing his credentials. This goes on several minutes and is meant to get the audience to believe that (1) Omala is ultra-qualified in and beyond his field and (2) he is humble and should be liked. He then tells us why the convicted man could not have been the killer. His analysis is simple to grasp and demonstrates that Omala thinks about things others ignored and has a gift for seeing obvious things that people with a political interest, e.g. prosecutors, either intentionally or recklessly overlook. We also learn that his primary motivating trait in life is to save people.

In other words, he’s a saint.

Not convinced yet? Ok. In the next scene, a priest asks Omala to take in and look after a young woman who has just come from Africa and needs a home. He agrees, of course. And when he brings her to his home, he even takes her luggage from her so she need not carry it. He is a saint after all.

Still not sure? Ok. His boss at the hospital warns him that he needs to be more willing to go with the crowd and to stop being so gosh darn pure.

By this point, the film has cast Omala as the ultimate unimpeachable source. We’ve seen his noble, humble bearing. Everyone else in the film will slouch. We’ve heard his credentials which are absolutely nothing special, but which are presented as amazing. Of course, we will hear no one else’s credentials, as the film wants you to see him as the only expert. We’ve learned he acts only with the most selfless of motives. With every other character, we are constantly reminded of their economic interest. Even a man in the streets we are told doesn’t want his city’s investment in a football stadium wasted.

Next the film sets up the conflict, and it does so in the most strawman of manners. When Omala discovers CTE, his medical bosses immediately threaten to suspend him and deny him any chance to move forward to confirm his diagnosis. Why? They're scared. Everyone is on the NFL’s payroll and doctors are too terrified to go against the NFL – characters even whisper when discussing things the NFL won’t like. Indeed, we are assured that the NFL is so powerful that it “owns a day of the week.” Its stadiums are the heart of cities like Pittsburgh. To destroy football would bring the wrath of millions of fans. Of course, the fact that CTE wouldn’t destroy football at all is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that the players union is intensely contentious against the NFL and would happily use this against the NFL. In the story, they are beholden to the NFL.

Moreover, the world is dangerously pro-NFL. Everywhere Omala goes, he causally makes some mention of the Steelers only to have average citizens verbally attack him.

Fortunately, Omala is allowed to continue his research by his brave boss who warns him that they better win or the NFL will destroy them. Suddenly, Omala is being followed by cars. He’s being mocked in the press, getting hateful phone calls, and being told to leave America because he’s clearly not one of us. And then the FBI shows up to arrest his brave boss on trumped up charges that Omala lets us know wouldn’t even fly in corrupt Nigeria – never mind that his boss was really arrested on fraud charged three months before Omala goes public with the CTE issue.

They threaten Omala and basically demand that he testify falsely against his boss or he will be charged as well. He refuses and instead agrees to resign and go away. They then threaten to deport him.

At this point, we also learn from an insider that the NFL knows about the CTE issue! Sacre bleu! In fact, they studied it, but their methods get mocked, even though their methods seem more thorough that Omala’s. The evil NFL wants people to die! And once again, the other doctors Omala tries to get to help him tell us how much the NFL provides to communities, so no one will go against it. They’re all complicit!

Here’s the thing. CTE could be real. It makes sense to me and I personally suspect it’s true. But this movie was so obnoxious that it had me wanting to see Omala fail. The film canonizes Omala at every turn. He has no flaws. It feels the need to make him unimpeachable as a professional, beyond biased, noble of heart, and nice to the point of meekness... a longtime indicator of propaganda is when the hero is meek.

At the same time, it not only demonizes those who oppose Omala, but it creates this bizarre world where average people act like they are going to hunt him in the streets if he reveals the dirty secret everyone knows but pretends isn’t real.

Now, again, I don’t doubt that the NFL was resistant to this idea. But the film goes further than that and essentially suggests that the NFL knows about CTE and is covering up by blackmailing every doctor, hospital, expert and politician in the country. This is bullship. It’s the kind of paranoid garbage leftists buy into when they are shocked to discover that people don’t accept their issues.

The film also presents a purely biased point of view. Obvious counter points get excluded. The credentials of competing experts are ignored and their supposed bias gets announced. In a rather dirty moment, they present David Duerson as an NFL hack who mocks the players with CTE until one kills himself, until Duerson kills himself when he too gets it. His family denies that Duerson ever did this.

They also never present contrary evidence. This film draws a connection between CTE and suicide, and dwells on several suicides... which it telescopes as if they all happen at once even though they are years apart. However, the CDC itself examined the health of NFL players. It found that NFL players are 42% less likely to die from cancer, 86% less likely to die from tuberculosis, and 59% less likely to die from suicide. And despite the film showing at least three and maybe more suicides as if they happened within weeks of each other, the CDC found that between 1959 and 1988, only nine former players killed themselves.

I’m not saying that advocacy films need to be unbiased, but there is a point where things go from being advocacy to being glaringly one-sided to being total smears. This film was a smear, and that hurt it tremendously. Having seen it, I am left wondering why this was even a film rather than a documentary. I am left wondering why the film was so shady too about a theory that seems to make sense and appears to be supported by lots of evidence. Are they hiding something?

That’s the problem. This is a propaganda piece for true believers and no one else. No wonder it failed. Thoughts?

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Film Friday: After Earth (2013)

After Earth came out in 2013 during the summer of bombs when a series of films with weak scripts and political agendas did their best to repel audiences. After Earth was one of these. But despite its weak script that does feel like a Scientology indoctrination film at times and some bizarre choices, this film was watchable. It didn’t suck.

Plot

After Earth starts with you the audience trying to figure out if Will Smith’s son is retarded: “Wow! Is that really how he talks?” I’m sure other things are happening, but that’s all you’ll notice. Within a few minutes, however, you realize that his dialect was intentional because Will Smith and some of the others speak the same way. Their speech pattern is best described as Foghorn Leghorn without the charm and minus about 40 IQ points. Apparently, the folks from Deliverance are the only ones who survive the robot holocaust.

Anyway, there are these monster things. And they are hunting humans because humans moved to their planet after we rich white Republicans destroyed the Earth with our factories and stuff. So humanity went multi-ethnic... minus the Asians who apparently all died of acceptable racism before this film takes place, and our little chocolate rainbow of inbreedery moved out into space to some alien world picked by these noble warriors, “the Power Rangers United Ranger Corps”, who are infallible... except that they picked this crappy monster planet and the fact they can’t really protect us from these monster thingies. But they are infallible.

The leader of the Rangers is Will Smith, who plays General Writer-Producer Cypher Raige (yeah, seriously). Smith is the baddest of the bad because he has learned to wipe out his fear. See, the monsters hunt us by sniffing our pheromones, which we let out when we are afraid. //chuckle chuckle Just the tiniest bit of fear can kill you. But if you can learn to never fear anything, then you can do what is called “ghosting,” which makes you invisible to these monster thingies. Then you can kill them easily with your pointy stick, which is the height of military technology.

As our story opens, poor Will Jr. is failing out of Ranger school. He’s good in the books, but really weak in the field. His father does not understand this because old Will Sr. is emotionally dead and probably blames (in a non-emotional way) Will Jr. for not saving Mrs. Will Sr. when a monster attacked the home. “Sigh My son is a dud.”

After Will Jr. is told he sucks, he and his father hop on a space flight to somewhere. No, it doesn’t matter where, because that’s not the point. In the cargo hold of the spaceship is one of these monsters. They are transporting it for the sake of the movie. Of course, the Indian cabbie pilot flies too close to an asteroid storm and they get whacked. To save the ship, they wait for Will Sr. to tell them to hit the “travel” button which sounds like space jump technology. A moment later, they are hit, then they jump, then they crash.

Surprise, you’re back on Earth, sucka!

Now, as an interesting aside, Earth seems to have been turned back into a paradise, though this goes unremarked in the film. It’s lush and beautiful and visually stunning. Real estate is dirt cheap too. The only catch is that there are some bugs and animals who are dangerous to humans (unlike now) and Will Jr. can’t breathe the air without sucking on a pacifier.

Once on the Earth, we are told that Will Sr. has a broken leg so he needs to send his wuss kid 100 km away to light off a beacon. Of course, the monster survived the crash too and it’s hungry for chicken boy, who spews pheromones like an Italian army in full retreat. Still, they have no choice, so Will Jr. heads on out.

Ok, everything you’ve read up to now is the essentially backstory and set up. This has taken about 10 minutes of the film. The next ninety minutes or so involve Will Jr. running 100 km before his air runs out and before the monster eats him. Will he light the beacon? Will he save Will Sr.? Will he overcome his humanity and make himself emotionally dead so he can kill the creature? That’s your movie.

Huh

As strange as this may sound, this film doth not suck. M. Night Shyamalan directed this and he’s pretty good with things like pacing and images. The story itself is uber-simple, but not offensive or stupid. It’s just a boy racing through the woods as he’s hunted by a monster and runs into all kinds of obstacles. At that level, I can’t really complain. The film was pretty and it was just exciting enough to be watchable. It wasn’t ever truly exciting or all that interesting, but it was watchable.

Beyond this, they tried to inject a very standard “boy must reconcile with his father” story, but that part was very, very weak. Not only are Will Smith Jr. and Sr. not really up to the task of an emotionally serious task like this, but there are some flaws which made this an impossible task. The problem is this: the film posits that the highest state of being is to be emotionally dead. So to survive, Will Jr. needs to get off his lazy, incompetent butt and learn to surrender his emotions. That’s going to make it really hard to tell an emotionally strong story if the goal of his character is to become cardboard. Even worse, the guy he’s playing off of is already cardboard. So that’s a problem.

Then it gets worse. To inject the father-son drama, the film tells us that Will Sr. needs to stop being so distant and so (non-emotionally) angry at his son. This is a cliché father-son storyline, but it doesn’t make any sense here. Are we to believe that being emotionally dead is a good thing or a bad thing? It seems to be a good thing for Jr. but a bad thing for Sr. We’re told this is the ultimate goal of humanity, but it obviously has ruined two lives. So what is it? Even worse, why doesn’t the film recognize this problem and resolve the conflict? Worse yet, neither Will Sr. nor Will Jr. is up to handling this paradox. Consequently, their relationship sputters and stalls and jumps in multiple directions at once. Moreover, a low-dialog film like this requires the actors to project their emotions and thoughts more so the audience can understand them, yet neither actor is very good at that, especially with both trying to play emotionless drones, and with neither actor even in the same location. Each of these choices really undercuts the storyline and makes it uninteresting.

Anyway, as with Oblivion, this film was better than you would expect given its 11% rating from the critics. Also like Oblivion, this feels like an adult science fiction story in many ways, for which I’m always thankful. But unlike Oblivion, this one isn’t. This is just a "chased by hillbillies monster" movie combined with a flat "father-son reconciliation" story. There’s really no science fiction to it except as the setting. Still, the end result was surprisingly watchable, though I wouldn’t call it interesting. Ultimately, I would say that if you watch it, it will hold your attention, but you won’t remember a thing about it the moment the credits start.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Film Friday: Men in Black (1997)

Men in Black is an excellent film. It was such an excellent film that it made a fortune, spawned a franchise, and has proved to have very strong staying power. What’s interesting about this film though, is that it is the perfect marriage of a tent-pole film with a cult film. Seriously.

The Plot

Although it appears to have a complex story, Men in Black is really just a superhero origin-story centered around Agent J (Will Smith). Smith is a New York City cop who gets recruited by Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) to work for a shadow organization known as M.I.B. (Men In Black). Located in New York City, M.I.B. polices all the extraterrestrials who live secretly among the human population of the Earth. Their job is to make sure that the aliens behave and that the humans never discover the aliens. They also protect the Earth from various threats.

J’s first case involves tracking down a bug (Vincent D’Onofrio), who has come to Earth to kill an Arquillian prince. The prince lives in Brooklyn and his people are at war with the bugs. As J and K track down the bug, they are given an ultimatum from an Arquillian battle cruiser, which threatens to destroy the planet unless something stolen from the prince (“the galaxy”) is returned within a few hours. Simple.

What Makes This Movie Work

So what makes this film work? Well, in a sense, everything. The actors have a strong screen presence and excellent chemistry. Will Smith was a rising, bankable star at this point, having just come off of Independence Day. His presence in what appears to be a lighthearted summer film all but guaranteed success. Adding to that, Smith gets teamed with the cranky, quasi-redneck Tommy Lee Jones, also a bankable star at the time, which evokes memories of prior successful opposites-attract buddy-cop films like Lethal Weapon. Barry Sonnenfeld had cache as a direct as well, having just directed Get Shorty and the Addams Family films. Sonnenfeld did a great job too: solid pacing, clean visuals, memorable scenes and great effects. The film also had the right feel. It came across as lighthearted, funny, and easy to enjoy.

Those are the perfect tent-pole traits and are guaranteed to put butts into seats.

What kept them there, however, and what has kept people enjoying this film so many years later, is the thing almost all tent-pole films lack: intelligence. In fact, at its core, this is one heck of a smart film. That intelligence, however, was hidden within a ton of ambiguity, just like a cult film.

As I’ve said before, what makes a film into a cult film seems to be that the film is highly intelligent, but lacks the clarity most general audience require. Thus, the film finds an audience because of its intelligence, but it is a limited audience because of its ambiguity. You would think Men in Black would suffer the same fate because of its ambiguity, but it doesn’t. Consider this:

● Unexplained Jokes: This film is crawling with jokes general audience will never get on their own. I saw this film in the theaters and it was fascinating to watch the audience. When Will Smith calls K’s car a “Ford POS,” about ten people laughed. The rest waited for the joke. When Z tells the smug guys who just brutally bombed the test to become members of M.I.B., “You’re everything we’ve come to expect from years of government training,” the same ten people burst out laughing. The rest didn’t see the joke. Oh, they laughed a moment later when Will Smith said, “Yo, yo, with the thing,” but they didn’t see the joke about government training leading to hopelessly rigid thinking.

Throughout this film, there are jokes that don’t pay off until a scene or two down the line. There are jokes that require you to grasp that what the characters say isn’t what they mean. There are jokes that require you to have some understanding of the outside world to get the joke. The general audience I sat with didn’t get those. Those other ten people got each one. Fortunately, there were enough other simple jokes that the general audience didn’t miss them. In effect, both groups laughed, they just laughed at different things.

● Unexplained Background: So who are the M.I.B.? You never really find out. You get a lot of words thrown at you, but in the end there’s little in the way of clarity. In fact, it’s a running joke that Tommy Lee Jones avoids answering those questions. Then they toss out ideas like the nature of “the galaxy,” but they never clearly answer it, unless you are smart enough to connect the ending of the film to that answer -- it turns out the Earth is in a “galaxy” of its own, which is in a bus station locker, which is itself in a marble being played with by some kids.

Throughout this film, we are introduced to characters whose fates we never learn. We run into subplots that go nowhere. We get no answers to basic questions. This is the sort of stuff that excites cult-film fans because it leaves it up to the viewer to debate the answers and fill in the movie... this is the stuff a thousand web pages are made of. But general audiences don’t normally like this. So why did they like it here? The reason is that every time something ambiguous happens, the scene finishes with Will Smith distracting the audience... “Look, shiny!” That way, both audiences get what they want.

● Hidden Depth: The film is crawling with hidden depth too. A good chunk of the jokes involve scientific principles or theories. The film constantly makes hilarious analogies, always without telling you. For example, the film starts with border patrol agents rounding up illegal aliens. That is exactly what M.I.B. are, which makes that scene rich with irony. But no one points this out. The bug is driving around in a truck belonging to an exterminator. The fact that “superior” aliens view coffee and cigarettes as our highest achievement is hilarious too.

Then there’s philosophical depth. Throughout the film, you are constantly being bombarded with ethical, moral and philosophical questions. Is it immoral to change someone’s memories? Does it make it less immoral to give them a happy memory? Would you want to be able to block out memories? What is the nature of the human race? One of the most insightful comments ever in film was this:

J: “People are smart. They can handle it.”
K: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

There was also this: “The only way these people get on with their lives is they don’t know the truth.” That’s very true of humans. Do our prejudices blind us to truth:

“Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”

These are not only intensely complex questions, but the film frames them in amazingly clever ways to allow those who “get it” to think about it and to allow those who don’t to just see dialog.

So what does all this mean? Well, on the one hand, I think the intelligence is what has given this film its longevity. Tent-pole audiences are remarkably fickle, but cult-fans tend to be the ones who watch movies over and over. It also tells us that you can make a film that appeals to both audience. This film provides a guidepost on how.

Think about this. Here is a film that actually satisfies both groups, groups who rarely see eye to eye: “It was mindless and stupid” v. “It was confusing and stupid.” The reason it did was that it let each audience see what they wanted. People who are looking for smarter films got deep, philosophical points, jokes that trusted the audience, and rich depth throughout. Then people who are looking for something mindless got The Big Shiny from Will Smith to punctuate each joke or close out each philosophical moment.

I would call this a model for successful filmmaking.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Film Friday: I, Robot (2004)

I was pretty psyched when I heard that I, Robot was coming to the big screen. It was (very, very loosely) based on an iconic book. It starred Will Smith, an actor I like a good deal. It was directed by Alex Proyas, the fantastic director who gave us the incredible Dark City. What could go wrong? Uh, yeah. Was I ever disappointed when the film hit theaters. In hindsight, however, I’ve come to like this film as just mindless fun.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

The year is 2035 and anthropomorphic robots are everywhere. They do all the dangerous and dirty jobs humanity won’t. Everyone except the really poor have robot servants. But robots are faster, stronger and smarter than humans, and if they were so inclined, they could take over in a heartbeat. Fortunately, robots can’t do that because they’re programmed with three laws which require them to protect human beings and to follow the orders of human beings, except when those orders would involve hurting another person. So everything is fine.

But all of that changes when Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell). Cromwell is the founder of US Robotics and is, basically, the inventor of the robot. Spooner soon suspects that a robot killed Lanning, but no one believes him because everyone assumes robots can’t hurt people because of the three laws. They dismiss Spooner’s claims because he’s the one guy on the planet who doesn’t like robots because of an incident when he was younger. So they write this off as paranoia. Nevertheless, Spooner continues and soon he uncovers a plot by robots to take over the planet.

The Good And The Bad

When I first saw this film, I was disappointed. By and large, it’s nothing more than a generic action film using robots instead of aliens or hired thugs. The thing is awash in product placements too. Moreover, for a science fiction film, the plot lacks depth.

The story is about robots trying to take over the world. The robots aren’t actually malicious, they’ve just misinterpreted their orders. Basically, like liberals, they think that humans are self-destructive and they want to save us from ourselves. And the best way to do that would be to enslave us and then take care of us.

That actually opens the door to several ideas. For example, you could use the robots as an metaphor for liberals and point out that saving us from ourselves is a bad thing. . . “Welcome to Obama-Clinton 2035!” But the film never really shows why people would be unhappy or why the human spirit would die in such conditions. Alternatively, you could point out how we are already dependent on machines, and how that’s getting worse, and you could ask what would happen if we suddenly found ourselves without our machines. But the film doesn’t do that either. To the contrary, it makes no real references to the present. Instead, the film just sticks with the top line idea of “what if we had robots everywhere and they took over!” That’s not particularly satisfying.

The film also seems to rely on a premise that is, at best, naive. Everyone except for Will Smith seems to genuinely believe that robots somehow could never harm a human being. Indeed, we are told constantly, that they are all programmed with these three laws which prevent it. And it comes as a total shock to the humans when they discover that someone found a way around this. Give me a break. Are we really to believe there no hackers who could reprogram a robot? That their software never goes wrong... blue screen of murderous death? That China isn’t turning out knock-off robots with 2.5 laws? Or that some evil company isn’t selling robots without the laws or an after-market kit to remove them? This is just not credible. Heck, US Robotics itself is said to have military contracts, do robot soldiers follow the three laws as well or did everyone somehow just forget about those whenever they think about how robots could never harm us?

And once again, it is the flaw of the shortcut that exposes the problem with the rest of the movie. If the writers have not used this bit of fakery as a shortcut to explaining why people would be surprised by robots, they might have had to deal with the question of the missing point to the film. In other words, if they hadn’t use this crutch about making everyone hopelessly naive, then they would have needed to explain why people would willing allow their potential murders into their lives. That would have raised all the issues that get ignored in this film about human laziness and dependence.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this and I think it’s starting to highlight a very valid point – when you gloss over something in writing your story, you often end up cutting out the need to discuss the things that make the movie interesting. Short cuts make for uninteresting stories.

Now, despite what I’ve said above, I have to admit that I’ve really come to enjoy this film. Will Smith is his usual self. He’s charismatic, funny and very likable. He’s someone you definitely want to know. The story is well paced and doesn’t reveal its plot points too quickly. There are a couple interesting mysteries that help drive the plot – who killed Dr. Lanning, who made Sonny, why is he different, did Sonny kill Dr. Lanning, who is behind the robot conspiracy? The film uses smart foreshadowing too, where the director actually waits to let things pay off later in the film, which always makes a story feel smarter, e.g. Sonny blinking. There are some insightful moments too, like when we’re told the internet destroyed the libraries and a very brief statement (far too undeveloped) about machinery destroying jobs. That’s enough to like the film if you weren’t expecting more.

Ultimately, this film is fun and I like it, I’m just disappointed that the film wasn’t any more than it was.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Film Friday: I Am Legend (2007)

I Am Legend is anything but legendary. Yes, it made a lot of money, Will Smith always does. And yes, it is an enjoyable, if forgettable, way to waste an afternoon. But it should have been so much more. The sad truth about I Am Legend is the filmmakers missed no opportunity to miss an opportunity. They stripped every interesting element from the film, until all that was left was a bland zombie movie. The always-likable Will Smith, who does an excellent job, deserved more from the script than the filmmakers gave him.

** spoiler alert **

The Premise

I Am Legend is the story of Robert Neville (Will Smith), the last man alive. It is based on the 1954 novel of the same name by Richard Matheson. This novel has twice before been brought to the screen, first by Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth (1964) and then by Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (1971). The premise is straight forward. A man-made virus, intended to cure cancer, quickly spreads around the world. The virus kills 90% of the population, leaving around 600 million survivors. But the virus warps all but 12 million of the survivors into mindless, murderous creatures called “dark seekers,” which look a bit like the CGI Gollum from Lord of the Rings. These creatures have the mental capacity and desires of the infected humans (zombies) from 28 Days Later, but cannot stand exposure to direct sunlight. They kill off the remaining humans in short order, apart from Will Smith.

Smith happens to be a virologist who is trying to determine why he was naturally immune to the virus, and to convert that immunity into an antidote, which he hopes will return the dark seekers back to their prior human state. During the days he and his German shepherd Sam hunt for food in a New York City that has become overgrown with nature. At night he works in his lab, which is constructed inside his house. The premise is all well and good, but it offers nothing more than your average zombie movie. And sadly, neither does the rest of the film.

What Makes Us Human? Who Cares?

The primary issue one would expect to be addressed by a film like I Am Legend is the question of what makes us human. Indeed, consider for a moment what made the book so interesting that it’s been brought to the screen three times. In the book, Neville spends his days killing the creatures and his nights locked in his home. One day, he stumbles upon a young woman who appears to be a survivor. He soon learns, however, that she is part of a group that is infected, but have begun to overcome their disease. They are slowly rebuilding society. But, from their perspective, every day, Neville comes along and kills their friends while they sleep. When Neville learns this, he finally understands the reversal that has taken place. Whereas vampires had been the legend that terrified humanity, he is now the creature that terrorizes this new race. He has become their bogeyman, their legend. Indeed, they eventually catch him, and before they execute him, Neville states that he has become “a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.” In this manner, the book deals with questions like what makes us human and at what point does another creature become so close to being human that we should treat it as such.

Will Smith’s movie repeats these elements individually, but without connecting the dots and without the intellectual curiosity. Smith tells us the dark seekers are purely evil, animalistic creatures. But we soon see they have moved beyond instinct and are showing human-level intelligence. For example, they have become protective of their fellows. They also show intelligence by using a dummy to trap Smith in an identical manner in which he trapped one of them. This shows not only a level of sophistication that denotes significant intelligence, but also that they have been observing him and planning how to handle him.

Moreover, Smith meets a young woman with a child, and we are instantly suspicious of her. Indeed, we first meet her after she saves Smith from a situation where it doesn't appear a person could have saved him, unless the creatures let her save him. She also seems too calm for someone who has survived the brutal murder of 12 million people by “fast-twitch” zombies of the type found in 28 Days Later, and has supposedly been on the run across the country. She also demonstrates a lack of cultural awareness that is highly suspicious, in that she’s never even heard of Bob Marley, nor does she recognize his music. Not to mention that her story of survival seems false.

So are you putting together the clues? Well, don’t bother. They don’t mean anything. The woman is human, and the creatures aren’t getting smarter -- or at least the filmmakers don’t care that they are. Indeed, the creatures aren’t building a new society, it’s not wrong to kill them, and Smith is nobody’s bogeyman. In fact, the only way the title makes sense is if you assume that he becomes a “legend” for saving humanity. . . oh, did I forget to mention there is a nonsensical happy ending tacked onto the movie with the woman making it to a safe city in Vermont, which sits behind a huge metal wall that puts the great wall of China to shame. How they avoided the disease is never explained, but then who cares. . . the filmmakers certainly didn’t.

By ignoring the obvious question of whether or not the creatures have become sentient to the point that it is wrong for Smith to treat them as lab subjects, the filmmakers short change the film considerably. But that’s not all that they ignore.

** The DVD has an alternate ending in the extras, in which Smith and the alpha creature reach a peace agreement, when Smith turns over the female creature he’s been experimenting on. But this ending is not integrated into the film and comes across like a sudden add-on, as if the filmmakers said, “oh yeah, we forgot to mention this, here. . . roll credits.”

Is There A God? No, um yes.

A film like I Am Legend, with its apocalyptic themes, obviously raises religious questions. Is man truly alone? Do we make our own destiny? Can we count on God to watch over us, even in such a dark hour? Or is it possible this virus represents divine judgment? This is fertile ground for filmmakers to speculate about God -- either pro or con. Yet, I Am Legend essentially tosses these issues aside, only bringing them back out of the blue for a surprise ending. It is like they banned these issues, only to reach for them when they needed an ending.

The film first mentions religion when Smith queries the woman about how she survived and how she knows about the safe city in Vermont. She explains that God protected her and advised her. Smith ridicules this idea in the type of shallow speech one would expect from a Hollywood movie with little interest in addressing questions of religion (he gives the standard “your God did this, so don’t talk to me about God” speech). The issue is then dropped entirely. . . until the very end of the film, when Smith suddenly decides to sacrifice himself to save the woman because he has an epiphany. With no prior hint to the audience, Smith connects a series of butterfly images from his daughter, from the creature he’s been testing, and from the young woman, just as the creatures break into his lab. He then hands the cure to the woman, telling her that he will die to give her a chance to escape because “I think this is why you are here” -- with the implication being that she was sent as part of a divine plan.

But this ending comes from out of the blue. The only hint the viewer has prior to Smith's epiphany that religion is an issue is Smith’s 20 second anti-religion rant half an hour before. So even though the issue of faith is technically addressed, it adds no depth to the film because it is never integrated into the story in such a way to let the audience consider its implications.

Why Would An Audience Want An Emotional Attachment?

But even leaving aside the intellectual questions, this film repeatedly misses opportunities to connect the audience to the film on an emotional level. For example, the filmmakers choose to kill Smith’s family. But they don’t make Smith face the difficult question of either watching them turn into the creatures or of killing them to save them. Instead, Smith is given the easy way out, they are killed instantly in a helicopter accident. Thus, we never connect with his personal suffering. In fact, the closest we come is when he must kill his dog Sam, which is one of the only emotional moments of the film.

Nor are we allowed to connect with the lives that were lost. The creatures retain no traces of who they were, so we cannot see ourselves in them. There are no bodies. Smith even scavenges through apartments, looking for food and medicine, but finds no real traces of people's personal lives. How can we mourn people we do not know?

The film even passes up fantastic opportunities to frighten us. For example, Smith walks with impunity through the abandoned apartments. But even worse, the filmmakers set up a fantastic pay off in a DVD store that Smith visits every day, but never make it pay off: to give his world some semblance of humanity, Smith has populated this DVD store with mannequins as if they were other shoppers. He even pretends to hit on one of the mannequins and he regularly speaks to the clerk (Fred). The sense of terror that could be generated in such an environment, if mannequins were moved or replaced by creatures, could be phenomenally powerful in pulling people into this world. You could scare people with the prospect that Smith was being stalked or even show that Smith had gone slightly insane. But nothing happens in the store. Even after the creatures use the store clerk to bait their trap, by moving it to another street -- which means they must have been watching Smith in the store -- there are no flashbacks to show us that we simply failed to observe the danger. And thus, the opportunity to get us invested in the story by giving us a sense of fear for Smith's surroundings is squandered.

Conclusion

Thus, we do not see Smith’s humanity or the humanity of the creatures, nor do we feel the need to mourn the dead, nor do we feel the need to fear the creatures unless Smith seeks them out. In effect, we are left with nothing to connect us to Smith’s world. Add to this the utter lack of intellectual curiosity of this film and we are left with a bland blockbuster that does nothing more than give us just another meaningless zombie movie. And that is a shame because this film could have been so much more.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...