FlickMan
Joined Dec 2001
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FlickMan's rating
I just saw this a few hours ago, and while I enjoyed it, I don't think it's up there with the all-time greats. Yes, the special effects are top-notch, but the story line is unnecessarily convoluted and the movie is too derivative to win any prizes for conceptual breakthroughs. If you've seen The Matrix, Dark City, Eternal Sunshine, and Blade Runner you'll feel like you've covered a lot of this territory before. And having three (four? five?) levels of dream/reality/whatever eventually becomes more distracting than intriguing. The process of "kicking" between different levels - why and how it works, or doesn't - is not explained convincingly or consistently.
All that aside, however, the main problem for me was that there's little reason to care much about Cobb, the main character. For all the talk of emotions and psyche, we learn surprisingly little about Cobb. We are told that he is driven by the hope of "going home," and the scenes with him and his lost wife are meant to evoke empathy, but for me they fell surprisingly flat. And finally, I just couldn't buy into Ellen Page as the "architect." She's too young to be the designer of dreamworlds, and I kept wishing that they'd cast an older, wiser actor in that role. Yeah, I know, they wanted at least one young/cute female in the movie, but ... Ellen Page? Sooo ... 8/10 is all I can give this movie. Worth seeing on the big screen, maybe even more than once, but not Nolan's best.
All that aside, however, the main problem for me was that there's little reason to care much about Cobb, the main character. For all the talk of emotions and psyche, we learn surprisingly little about Cobb. We are told that he is driven by the hope of "going home," and the scenes with him and his lost wife are meant to evoke empathy, but for me they fell surprisingly flat. And finally, I just couldn't buy into Ellen Page as the "architect." She's too young to be the designer of dreamworlds, and I kept wishing that they'd cast an older, wiser actor in that role. Yeah, I know, they wanted at least one young/cute female in the movie, but ... Ellen Page? Sooo ... 8/10 is all I can give this movie. Worth seeing on the big screen, maybe even more than once, but not Nolan's best.
This movie is better than I expected it to be. The first half is very well done, effectively creating the atmosphere of an abandoned New York City, but it goes downhill at the end. When it becomes "Will Smith vs. 500 CGI monsters," it's just not very believable. And the tacked-on happy ending seems out of place.
If you've seen The Omega Man, this movie will feel very familiar, with scene after scene essentially replicated. (If you stay through the screen credits, you'll see that the 1971 script by the Corringtons is credited as a source for the movie, along with Richard Matheson's 1954 novel.) I wish they had not made the Dark Seekers so primitive and savage in this version; the dialog and adversarial relationship between Neville and Mathis in Omega Man gave that movie more depth and substance than the horde of CGI monsters in this new version.
Still, I Am Legend is a pretty good movie, better than about 80% of the stuff they're turning out these days.
If you've seen The Omega Man, this movie will feel very familiar, with scene after scene essentially replicated. (If you stay through the screen credits, you'll see that the 1971 script by the Corringtons is credited as a source for the movie, along with Richard Matheson's 1954 novel.) I wish they had not made the Dark Seekers so primitive and savage in this version; the dialog and adversarial relationship between Neville and Mathis in Omega Man gave that movie more depth and substance than the horde of CGI monsters in this new version.
Still, I Am Legend is a pretty good movie, better than about 80% of the stuff they're turning out these days.