Everybody lies

posted on Wednesday, January, 16th, 2008 in moving pictures

I have mentioned before that I have a thing for dystopian fiction and of course I have heard of Richard Matheson’s book by the same name that inspired this movie. I haven’t got my hands on a copy so far, though, which is an oversight I plan to remedy soon.

So, instead of reading one of the classic science fiction books, I watched the movie a couple of days ago, not least because I loved the posters that hang all over town. Moreover, a movie starring Will Smith is never a hard sell on me. And did I mention the german shepherd?

Smith plays Robert Neville, the last man alive and sane in New York City after a man-made virus wiped out most of humankind. The people that weren’t killed by the virus have turned into very strange-looking, crazily aggressive creatures that only come out at night, because they are allergic to light. Neville used to be a military scientist and was in some way involved in the development of the allegedly cancer-curing virus. Well, I suppose killing everybody is one way to cure cancer. Now that everybody is dead or infected he is still trying to figure out what went wrong and trying to develop a cure for the cure. He lives with his dog Sam in a heavily fortified house, venturing out only during the day and hiding at night from the Dark Seekers, who are apparently out to kill everything that moves.

So what did I think of the movie?

To put it short: I liked big parts of it, especially the first hour or so. After that, when the woman and her son arrived, it went kinda downhill. The ending was not only way too cheesy for my taste, and as far as I gather from this book review it was also considerably altered from the book. Why do they always have to do that? But if you can live with the typically sweet Hollywood ending, I guess the movie is not too bad in many respects. It definitely is worth watching for the visuals of a deserted New York City. There is only one scene in the film that was decidedly hard for me to watch. If you see it you will probably know which one I mean.

Well, to get into a bit more detail, let me start with the good stuff:

1. As I said, Will Smith can hardly do anything wrong in my eyes. I loved him even in silly films, but here he was impressively intense. For the longest time he had to carry that movie all by himself, and he managed it admirably. During the first half of the movie we watch him battle with his lonely existence and his survivor’s guilt, trying to hold on to his sanity (with more or less success). The way he is hunting deer in the deserted city streets, or having a chat with some mannequins at a video store, not to mention the sight of him sitting at a desk on a pier, waiting for other survivors to show up, is just heartbreaking.

2. Always at Neville’s side is the beautiful german shepherd Sam. I loved that dog, not least because she can act better than a lot of human actors in Hollywood. (The downside to her part is that they go down the road each and every Hollywood movie takes when dogs are involved. I don’t have to actually spell it out, do I?)

3. Seeing New York City deserted was one of the most visually stunning images I have ever seen in any movie. Especially at the beginning it is really amazing to watch Neville drive through a completely people-free New York, with half overgrown streets, empty, sad buildings and destroyed bridges.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved these aspects of the movie, there were other parts that were just plain crap, namely almost all of the CGI effects. Holy cow, how could they botch that stuff so frickin’ completely? It looks like they gave those CGI-rendering programs to some high-school kid and let him run wild with it. They really should have asked somebody who actually knows what he is doing there.

It started with the CGI deer, which were actually not too bad. If you are not a biologist, that is. But then came the lions – Oh. My. God. Whoever CGIed those lions can only ever have heard of them by rough description. They were so bad I was starting to ask myself if this whole movie would turn into some cartoony spoof-fest or something. Completely spoiled the mood for a while. But luckily the things were on screen for only about 20 seconds or so.

Much, much worse were the CGIed Dark Seekers. They were truly craptastic. You would think CGI was invented only yesterday and nobody had really got the hang of it yet. What the fuck did they think? I haven’t read the book, but those things didn’t look like virus-infected people and they didn’t look like vampires either. Even for a respectable zombie they looked way too weird (and not in a good way). Can you remember the Borg Queen from the Star Trek movies? That’s the look they were going for, god knows why. Moreover they all kinda looked the same. Ridiculous, that is. And certainly not scary in the least. Which would have been not so bad, if they would have looked at least halfway believable.

Then there is the problem I always have with stories about crazy, excessively aggressive creatures like the Dark Seekers and that I call the “Reaver problem”. Reaver refers to one of my favorite movies, “Serenity”, but the basic problem here is exactly the same: How can these crazed creatures survive several years in that state? Supposedly in the three years since the deadly virus spread they must have killed every healthy survivor that was left (except Neville, of course) – so what do they eat? If they would turn against others of their own kind there probably wouldn’t be many of them left after such a long time. And somehow I can’t see them hunt deer, they don’t seem to have the skill for that. Plus, if they would do that on a regular basis, there probably wouldn’t be any deer left in Manhattan either. But if they do not turn against each other: why not? Considering their extremely aggressive behaviour towards everyone else that doesn’t make any sense.

But these are by far not the only questions this film raised for me. I will put the other ones below the cut, though, because if you haven’t seen the movie yet they contain spoilers.

So here goes:

• How come Neville still had running water in his house? I can understand the electricity (I think I saw generators somewhere), but the water?
• I have my doubts that, even though he is alone, the food supplies in the supermarkets he was apparently raiding would be enough for three years. But then, New York is a big city, so maybe he found some stores somewhere.
• Why exactly were he and Sam sleeping in the bathtub? I mean, the whole bloody house was a fortress, so why would the bathroom seem any safer to him than the bedrooms? I totally didn’t get that.
• Why weren’t Neville’s wife and kid not evacuated earlier? He was some kind of General or something in the army, and it seems totally unbelievable that the families of those hotshots weren’t evacuated as soon as the situation became dire. I can’t see that they would have had to wait until 10 minutes before the whole island was quarantined and then drive to the harbour where apparently all the rest of the general public was headed as well.
• What was that bullshit about the virus not being able to survive the cold in Vermont? Firstly, I doubt that winters in Vermont are so much colder than in New York, but mostly this is bull, because as long as the people who carry the virus survive, the virus inside them should be fine.
• Why did the people in the colony in Vermont let the woman and her son walk right in? Wouldn’t they have been a tiny bit suspicious of outsiders? Or a little bit paranoid about the infection risk?

But the thing I really didn’t get was: how did Fred get out of the video store and who set up the trap with the taxi cab? That totally threw me for a loop. Are they really telling us that the Dark Seekers caught on to Neville’s method of trapping some of them and turned the tables on him? Or was he so addle-brained by that time that he had set the trap himself and forgot about it? That was really just strange.

It’s sad that they didn’t really think things through to the end, because as it is the whole movie is a wasted opportunity. It started out so fantastic, but towards the end deteriorated so terribly into the same old Hollywood crap we have seen for decades. Shame, really. And they killed the dog, bloody bastards!