PAF goes to the Movies
Just back from seeing Will Smith in I am Legend. In some ways this film was well executed, thrilling and clever; in other ways it was anticlimactic, preachy and downright offensive.
The premise of the film is as follows: an attempt (by a female scientist) to genetically engineer a virus to kill cancer appears successful at first, but then kills 90 percent of those exposed to it as it spreads rapidly through New York where just about everyone is exposed, and then on to the rest of the world. One percent of people are resistant to the virus and do not get infected, including (miraculously) our hero, the Will Smith character, who happens to be both a combat-equipped army officer and a world-class scientist.
What about the other nine percent, you might wonder. Silly you. They're turned into light-fearing flesh-eating mutant zombies with superhuman strength who prowl the night sniffing out the blood of survivors to devour -- natch. While the uninfected one percent of the inhabitants of Manhattan might still have left some neighbors for Will, the zombies seem to have eaten everyone except Will and his dog. Partly horrified, I am also secretly cheered by the implication that Donald Trump has met his match.
So far I'm totally along for the ride. Perfectly happy to suspend disbelief this far. Partly because I grew up with movies like Omega Man which scared the shit out of me and thrilled me as a kid, partly because the scenes of a depopulated, dilapidated New York are so vivid and persuasive, and partly because Will Smith does a really fine job with the role of tormented, lonesome survivor (putting Omega Man's Charleton Heston to shame).
But then Jesus comes in through the back door. Will Smith's character has just lost his dog and only companion to the zombies, is losing the will to live and is about to be consumed by zombies when (miraculously) he is saved by a beautiful latin woman accompanied by a child. She appears to him in a scene in which the first thing Will sees after regaining consciousness is the cricifix hanging from her rearview mirror (hint, hint). Later, she tells Will that God has sent her to him for a reason, to save humanity from the viral zombie pestilence. Will tells her she's full of shit, that no loving God would tolerate anything so catastrophically cruel, but she persists. Ultimately, Will finds a cure for the zombie virus, but then sacrifices himself (hint, hint) to the zombie hordes so that the woman and child can escape to carry the cure to a colony of survivors in the mountains of Vermont and sustain decent, non-flesh-eating human life. But not before he tells her that she was right about God and must help humanity carry on without him.
So a halfway decent flesh-eating zombie flick turns into a Christian morality tale about the self-destructive hubris of human reason and science opening the gates of hell and bringing catastrophe upon it, only to be redeemed by divine intervention, a reassertion of faith and self-sacrifice to cleanse the sins of science. Add into the mix that the site of this modern Gomorrah was NYC, and that the symbol of secular hubris run amok was a prominent female scientist, and you have another adventure in Jesusland, cleverly packaged as a hyper-violent post-apocalyptic zombie tale.
Movie trivia: Spiritual advisor and necrophilia consultant was Mike Huckabee.
