*Recently, I returned to my local multi-screen movie complex to see "I Am Legend," which is the latest and possibly the best movie adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 science fiction novel about the life of the world's last surviving human being, who is a scientist who is working hard to find a cure for the killer disease that has devastated the rest of human race by killing off a large portion of the population and by turning the few survivors into a ravenous bunch of increasing desperate and therefore increasingly aggressive vampires who are fighting to survive...by trying to eat any and everything that they can get their hands on...including each other...and including the human scientist who is still trying to save them...in a world that is offering them all fewer and fewer opportunities to have any kind of a future at all, much less one that is free of this killer disease that is going to take them all unless a miracle of some kind comes along and saves them.
*As a movie, I Am Legend deserves top marks all around and especially for being something more than a self serving promotional vehicle for its star, Will Smith, who very ably plays the role of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville, who is the military scientist who seems to be immune from the killer disease, and who is trying to use that fact to come up with a cure that will save them all, at the same time that he and the vampires are waging a war of survival on the island of Manhattan, where they are isolated from the rest of the world, until near the end of the movie when Colonel Neville is joined by an apparently uninfected young woman and a small boy who are from Brazil, and who have been guided there by some kind of higher power who seemingly wants them to stop by and pick up Neville on their way to a previously unknown colony of human survivors that is located so high in the mountains of New England that the cold weather will protect them from the killer disease, at least until Neville or someone else can find a cure, which would have made a nice enough ending to what had been up until that point a very exciting movie, but which was made even more exciting by Neville refusing to go with them and to instead choose to stay behind and continue his efforts to find a cure there in Manhattan, where he is eventually forced to confront the vampires and their leader in a climatic battle during which he sacrifices himself in order to destroy the vampires and their leader...and in order to send the young woman and the small boy safely on their way to New England with a vial of his uninfected blood, which the human scientists who have survived in the mountains can then use to create some kind of permanent cure for the killer disease.
*As a small criticism, I do have to mention that even though I am a fan of animation in the movies, and even though the animated vampires in this movie were obviously very well done, there was so much difference between them and the live actors (Will Smith, etc) that I found it to be distracting whenever they appeared on the screen together.
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