Case Study - I am Legend

Chris Ashwell

I Am Legend


Information:
Directed by Francis Lawrence, I Am Legend was released in 2007 in the United States and was a big hit with the public. It managed to reach the largest box office for a non Christmas film ever in December. The film is set in New York 2012 where Robert Neville (Will Smith), who is immune to a virus that’s turning everyone within New York into zombies. Three years prior to the event a cure to cancer was made by a doctor called Alice Krippin (Emma Thompson) but the virus quickly mutated and became airborne this then began a huge worldwide infection that killed 5.4 billion people which was 90% of the world’s population.
There were 600 million survivors but only 12 million were completely immune to the virus and the rest were turned into zombies with the appearance of baldness and paleness with traits such as over aggressiveness, they were called ‘Darkseekers’. Robert Neville (Will Smith) stays in New York after the evacuation of Manhattan to try and find a cure for the virus. As his wife and daughter enter a helicopter to be evacuated, chaos breaks out and people begin to jump onto another helicopter that rears out of control and smashes into the helicopter with his wife and daughter on with a huge explosion.
Then throughout the film you see many different signs of loneliness, for example; when he goes into the video shop, he’s set up all the manikins to look like a real life situation and he even talks to them as if they were real. When he kills his dog after she gets bitten and infected by another zombie dog he goes to the video store and begins to cry and begs for the manikin to talk to him showing desperation and loneliness.
With help from Warner Bros., I Am Legend began development in 1994 and then started the production in 2006 in New York. Most filming was done in New York and with a $5 million scene of Brooklyn Bridge and was the most expensive scene ever made at that time. I Am Legend quickly became a massive hit and produce a lot of money, earning $256 million in the US and $329 million internationally, making a grand total of $585 million.
The reason why I Am Legend manage to earn so much money was the fact that it appealed to a vast array of audiences, it wasn’t a gory bloody film so it wasn’t classed as an 18 but a big enough thrill to be classed as a 15. When I saw this film in the cinema I notice there were higher aged people than I first anticipated and as I watched the film by the end I could see how it appealed to everyone! This film showed a lot of emotion; that between him and his dog, the zombies and if you’ve seen the alternative ending the zombies even show the emotion called love. There was also a book which this film was based around and it was called ‘The Omega Man’. Many people may have already read the book and this could have also lead to the success, a prime example of this is Lord of the Rings the books were a huge success and thus was the film.

Audience:
This film is appeals to many but I feel that the films main target audience comes from a range of 15-45. This is because when I saw the film I was 15 and really enjoyed it and when my father saw the film he was around the 40’s and he said that he enjoyed it. Also I get the idea of who was in the cinema when I was there and as I mentioned before there were ages there I didn’t expect.

Quotes from IMDB.com
6*/10*
This film could easily have filled 2.5 hours of content. Why did it only last 1.5? I want more back story. I want more character development, especially toward the end. I want to know more about what happened, and how Will Smith's character is dealing with it. In short, I just want MORE.

All in all, this film left me feeling a lot like I did in Spider-Man 3: A lot happened, but none of it was really EXPLAINED.

It's a shame, really, because the concept is golden... and Will Smith's films usually feel quite epic and full. I'll definitely pick up the novel... hopefully it will give me the depth that I want.






As you can see from this review the author liked the film but he felt they could have added a lot more to it. Personally I feel that 2.5 hours would have been to long however I agree that they could have gone into a lot more detail. The storyline for this was very rich and I agree with this author and it is “golden”. A few things just scraped the surface like the emotion he showed to the manikins, they could have shown a lot more at these and shown more meaning behind his loneliness
Basically this film changes the main character COMPLETELY, deletes EVERY OTHER character from the novel, ends with Neville being a hero rather than an ANTIHERO, contains a dog in a completely changed way from the novel, and ADDS all other characters completely NOT in the book. Also, Neville's family is killed in a helicopter crash in the film. In the book, his wife returns from the dead as a vampire and Neville visits her in the mausoleum nearly every day. He longs to be with her. His daughter too dies from the plague of the disease.

Read the novel. Skip the movie.

If this had been called anything other than "I Am Legend" I would have given it maybe 3 stars to begin with...but since it stole he namesake of a great, great novel only to let me down more than The Lost World did... 1 star. Rent it if you are THAT bored sometime...








As for this author you can see he is very strong with his opinion and feels that the movie is rubbish. I haven’t read the novel but by this review I feel that I want to read it because it sounds very different to the movie when he says “Also, Neville's family is killed in a helicopter crash in the film. In the book, his wife returns from the dead as a vampire and Neville visits her in the mausoleum nearly every day.” This author though is very biased towards the novel rather than the film and it is his own opinion.

Technological Advancements:
Back in the 1920’s the first TV was made but TV’s were a rare thing to have in your house unless you were really rich and could afford one but compared recent years, now just about everyone has a television and has become somewhat a mandatory element to have within your home. Trailers are being broadcast on our TV’s to get people aware of the most recent and upcoming films. Cinema’s themselves advertise new films before the actual feature is shown and cinema is now a lot cheaper than it used to be so more people are going to watch a new film they saw advertised on TV.

I remember first seeing the film advertised on TV and when I saw it I knew I had to go see it. There was also a lot of talk about it at school which gave me even more reason to see the film so we could all talk about it the next day. Billboards placed around Norwich also advertised the film and created a lot of hype for it. Also the internet played a huge part of the advertisement, seeing as I spend a lot of my time using the internet I noticed a lot of adverts for the film on various different website such as YouTube.
The internet has been a huge technological advancement over the past years, video streaming has become a huge success with all the new speeds offered by you ISP (Internet Service Provider). Everything used to be ‘Dial Up’ which deals with perhaps tops 1MB/s speed but now we have ‘Broadband’ and top at the moment is around 20MB/s which is a huge difference between Dial Up and Broadband. It has allowed the live streaming of videos and there’s no need to leave your computer on for a certain amount of time whilst you wait for your video to buffer, you can now just go to the video click play and watch it right away from the comfort of your sofa.
There are many websites out there that are purely set up so you can see the latest trailer for an upcoming feature film. A very popular website which most people will have heard of is YouTube, YouTube is a video sharing website where you can upload your own videos for your friends and everyone around the world to see. You don’t need to register in order to watch videos so you can just navigate to the page, search for what you want and then watch it. Organizations can set up their own ‘channels’ where they can upload there latest trailers or music videos, allowing and extremely easy way to gain some knowledge of the latest films.
However the internet brings a catastrophic downfall for the film industry. There’s a vast array of illegal pirated films out there on the internet. These illegal websites are slowly but surely sapping the economy from the film industries. It’s too easy to just Google search a film you wish to see and with no more than five minutes you can find the film online.
With less and less people deciding to go to their nearest cinema to watch the film it’s having a big impact on film industries. They need the film to do well so they can earn enough profit to cover all the initial cost of making the film and paying all the actors, but pirated movies are stealing all this money from the industries. If you think for every person who watches the pirated movie instead of the official movie they are losing around £5 for every person. One in five UK internet users claims to have downloaded a pirated copy of a movie, according to research by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Along with all these pirated films instead of live streaming them we can now also download these films with the improved ISP speed as I said before. There’s no need to go out and by the DVD anymore because people can just download them for free. This is seriously affecting DVD sales all over the world. This is another way of which piracy is affecting the industry, less DVD sales = less money and the future of films is slowly but surely fading away.
According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ‘nearly half of downloader’s consider it acceptable to download movies before they are released on DVD or video, and the vast majority have no objection to downloading a movie after it is released on DVD or video. Downloader’s also said that they would download more movies if it took less time, something likely to happen with the wider adoption of broadband’.