I Am Legend

Story: 7
Action: 7
Acting: 9
FX: 9
Durability: 8
Special Features: 7

Just the idea of a sole human left in New York made I Am Legend an interesting story. How did it happen? What's he doing every day if there's no one left to save? How can this all possibly end positively? I Am Legend is an excellent balance between sci-fi, action and drama. The sci-fi element gives us a sense of reality because it takes place close to present day and the idea of a mass epidemic is something that has happened before in human history. This also wasn't a cheesey horror movie with a dark motif. The daytime scenes looked like regular sunny days with perfect weather, again adding to the realism. The special edition DVD contains 2 versions of the movie... the one we all saw in the theater and and alternate version with "controversial ending." I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that both stories are interesting. Only the ending is different, but it changed everything. I can't say which one is the better one without having read the original book.

The action consisted of exciting stunts involving cars (including a 2008 GT500), complex contraptions and fights between Robert Neville (Will Smith) and the darkseekers. The special fx were very clean in this movie... hard to tell between live action and CGI. Recreating NYC as if it was long abandoned was fun to see, especially since I live here. Some of the scenes were actual shots of NYC, dressed with lots of props. Those were blended with CG wild animals and darkseekers.

Naturally, the acting was great as Will Smith had to perform most of the movie by himself. As usual, he displayed a good variety of emotions. His character was both physically strong and scientifically sound. His co-star was the German Shepperd, Abbey, who played Sam. Sam acted as Neville's hunting partner, friend and balance in life. Abbey had similar challenges to Smith. She also had to display a variety of emotions in an empty world. There were action scenes where she had to fight CG creatures and growl at things that weren't really there.

The one odd thing about this DVD set was they didn't squeeze all of the media onto the 2 discs. nearly all of the special features are web links, so you need a broadband PC to access them. I enjoyed the informative "Making Of" videos... around 20 of them. There was one dedicated to Abbey as well. My special feature rating was a 7 because I would've preferred all of the videos to actually be on the media rather than Online. Also, this set didn't have an audio commentary, something that should be required for I Am Legend as every scene was detailed and interesting.