(2007) In September 2012 New York City during the daylight hours appears to be vacant, except for one man and his German shepherd dog, racing through the deserted streets in a fast car or roaming about among the vegetation and wildlife with an assault rifle. Robert Neville (Will Smith), a virologist and formerly lieutenant colonel, resides in a fortress shelter at 11 Washington Square, equipped with generators and scientific lab, with his pet Samantha at ground zero of the KV epidemic, a virus that three years earlier Dr Alice Kippin had been reverse engineered from a measles virus to cure cancer.

Unfortunately, the miracle cure turned into a virus that produced two strains, one airborne and the other by contact - initial symptoms similar to rabies - with nearly no immunity among humans and some animals (including canines), who soon became food for the ravenous. Once infected - of the planet's six billion-plus human inhabitants, an estimated 12 million were immune to the virus - people were transformed into hemocytes, ravenous monsters in need of human blood, preying on the remaining meager population; but the darkseekers cannot withstand exposure to ultraviolet radiation such as sunlight.

Director Francis Lawrence's sci-fi thriller, adapted from Richard Matheson's novel, flashes back through Robert's memory to the December night when Manhattan was quarantined as his wife Zoe and daughter Marley were evacuated along with others not yet infected; Robert remained behind taking responsibility for the outbreak, determined to develop a cure: "I can still fix this." A thin theme of religion versus science ("God didn't do this … we did") - first appearing when Zoe and Marley share a prayer with Robert as they are about to be lifted away by helicopter - can't compete with the action and horror, possibly an afterthought (or the recrement of an earlier primary motif) of injecting a weak (ineffective) serum of spiritual hope into the plot or perhaps just a coincidence with another book titled Mister God, This Is Anna.

In his lab Robert uses caged sewer rats to test compounds derived from his immunity-bearing blood, hoping to discover a vaccine that will kill the virus but not the victim; GA compound 391, #6, looks promising, requiring another hemocyte subject for the next test. Daily on all AM frequencies he broadcasts a message of his existence, beckoning any other survivors to meet him at a fixed location where he waits futilely at the same time each day. He talks to Sam as if she were a human companion, warning her: "You can still get infected (by contact), and I can't." Having captured a female hemocyte, he tries the new antidote without positive result, though she doesn't die; he keeps her heavily sedated in hopes of finding another antitoxin.

For solace and inspiration Robert plays Bob Marley's reggae music; the artist, after whom Robert named his daughter, had believed he could cure people of hate and fascism by injecting his songs into their lives: "light up the darkness." After multiple times watching Shrek, he knows the dialogue by heart. Feeling lonely, guilty, and desperate, convinced there is no one else and no God, he gets reckless at night, crashing a car into the darkseekers who are not without cunning.

After getting a leg up early on, this movie has a disappointing end. A posthumous collection of Bob Marley's songs was entitled Legend on which the songs on the soundtrack can be found.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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