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Post by Riren Voorhees on Dec 22, 2007 12:48:28 GMT -5
I have a question about the recent I Am Legend movie. DON'T READ IT IF YOU DON'T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED.
So towards the middle of the movie Robert sees a mannequin in the middle of a part of town he doesn't usually go to. He clearly does not remember moving it, flips out and winds up shooting it. This doesn't appear similar to any of the games he's played in pretending the dummies were real in his neighborhood.
He then steps into a trap that appears to have been set for him, as it is directly in line with the road on the way to the dummy. The trap is very similar to the traps he used on infected people.
Who set this up? It looks like somebody set the snare trap and used the dummy as bait. However, Robert's audio journals say the infected have lost all human behavior and are total wild animals with no forethought. We never meet a particularly smart infected person.
Were the infected people supposed to have set this trap? Did Robert do it and forget it due to psychosis? Did he set the snare for them, then moved the mannequin out of psychosis, and the two being near each other was coincidence? All three of these options really push disbelief, especially since Robert appeared very broken up about being isolated and extremely awkward around real people, but never so psychotic to have done all that and forget about it.
Thoughts? Theories? Don't care?
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Post by Neal on Dec 22, 2007 13:09:36 GMT -5
I thought it was pretty clear the main infected guy set the trap. He learned do it after the girl was caught. I think they could have went a little deeper into his character. I think it was meant to show they were starting to evolve, and he had feelings for the girl that Robert captured. When they came to the house, he was really trying to save the girl. In a way he wasn't really evil. Also, I thought when they showed the photos on the wall of the infected people Robert experimented on to find a cure, it would have been good to show how in a way he was the villain for doing human experiments in the eyes of the infected.
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Post by Riren Voorhees on Dec 23, 2007 19:35:38 GMT -5
If they were trying to depict Robert as some kind of villain, they failed horribly. The book does a great job of turning the tables, and I can understand projecting Matheson's material onto the movie, but it's 95% "poor strung out guy trying to survive."
The only comments we hear about the intelligence of the infected is that they've lost all culture and human intelligence. If they had him make a comment or two that some shreds of it was left, then I might have believed the infected could pull off that trap. But firstly, it's a really complicated trap for a supposedly completely "de-evolved" creature to figure out after seeing once. And secondly, none of the infected staked out the trap. There only a few dogs around. Maybe I missed the alpha male guy lurking in the shadows. If I'd seen him there I would have probably connected them. He never really showed much intelligence. Even in the final scene (I guessed it was supposed to be him, since he had that half-shirt thing) he didn't use any tools to break the shield, just kept headbutting it like a completely dumb animal.
I also didn't realize the girl on the operating table was the same one from before, since they all looked almost exactly identical. I guess she was supposed to have been brought back to life earlier and he just kept using her as a test subject, even though that's completely idiotic from a scientific standpoint. Why would you inject multiple serums into one patient? You'd never know if it was the current serum or a cocktail of all those in her system. No wonder he couldn't find a cure.
Don't mean to sound negative - I really enjoyed most of the movie. I just tripped over this. It would have been cool if they'd seriously dealt with the book's complex issue of them forming a new society and seeing him as evil, but that wouldn't fit with the model of them being borderline zombies.
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Post by Neal on Dec 23, 2007 20:45:14 GMT -5
I never read the book. I think it was sort of hinted at in the movie but not a lot, but then the very ending went against any idea of him being evil to the infected.
When the main infected stuck his head into the day light when he captured the female, Robert just said it was a mistake or something. I think he was supposed to be incorrect there, the guy was trying to get the captured girl even if it meant hurting himself. It showed some form of humanity. I agree the trap was kind of over the top for one of them to create, but I am positive that's what it was meant to be in the movie. The guy with the dogs, learned from Robert's trap and got the idea for the dogs from him. I think he was supposed to be the same infected zombie in each case.
I really enjoyed the movie but I think it should have been a lot longer. It seemed like once it got into the action what I thought was half way into the film it went right to the ending. It was only like 90 minutes, it could have easily been 2 and half hours or even 3. They did such a great job of building up the story and sense of lonliness etc, but it seemed rushed right when I was getting into it.
I felt the very ending was a little silly, and didn't make a lot of sense. If there was a commune why didn't they ever try and reach Robert ? It wasn't very far from him, and she heard his radio stuff why didn't they ? Why didn't they try to either physically get to him or try and contact him over the radio ?
It was a very good movie though, I just think if it was longer, explained or showed more of the zombies evolving and maybe didn't have a happy ending it could have been one of my favorites.
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Post by Riren Voorhees on Dec 24, 2007 10:55:11 GMT -5
A bunch of savage monsters who weren't smart enough to dodge a car were able to study Robert's behavior enough to move his mannequin as bait, collect wire to form a snare, and set a pressure-sensitive snare trap in a puddle of water, but weren't smart enough to hang out in the abundant shadows near it to kill him if he fell for it. Signs of their intelligence about physics and longterm planning included running into sunlight, which kills them, to save their girlfriend (an instinct which is not originally human at all - many non-human animals will risk themselves to save a mate). Shucks. I guess that's what the director intended.
The dog scene wasn't effective for me. I knew from the beginning that the dog was going to be bitten. It's a Hollywood movie - that's the sort of thing they do. But the whole scene where he stares sadly away while putting down his zombie dog felt too long and paint-by-numbers for me. I've seen this same tear-jerker situation in plenty of other movies. Maybe a better actor could have sucked me in, but I felt the overwhelming desire to fastforward through it.
I'm being too negative. The scene where he hunts deer from a sports car was bitchin'.
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