So I’m watching “I am Legend”, a moniker that will never apply to this film, and I can tell you when it loses me. Any guesses? Will Smith? Too easy? Changing the ending of the brilliant Richard Matheson novella? Nope. Adding a cute (white) kid? Nah. Changing the only other character in the novella’s backstory completely, and thus invalidating the need to call this film an “Adaptation”? Please!

CGI deer!

Forgive me for my late review on this, wife had a baby when this little gem came out and have only recently seen it (that is to say I saw it). To be honest, I was looking forward to seeing this as I had read the novella and the trailers had looked promising (don’t they always). I plopped down and started the film. And, about 3 minutes into it, I was done.

Somehow, the movie got swapped with “Big Game Hunter 6” as suddenly I’m watching a herd of crappy looking computer generated deer leap and lope all around Will Smith’s snazzy car as it careens down an empty Times Square. Will pulls out his high powered hunting rifle to get off a shot through the open window but dang it, if the deer don’t escape through the Holland tunnel or something. Will thinks about chasing after them but knows there’s a level boss down there and realizes he doesn’t have the magic tri-force for this level to fight him so stays above ground. That’s okay, because there’s a scripted event where a lone high-polygon count deer is grazing above ground still. Will goes into “crouch mode” and lines up a sniper head-shot worth at least 50 achievement points when WHAM! Some sort of pre-visualization creature, probably a lion when they do a final render, attacks the deer, making it crumple in an impressive display of “rag-doll” physics. Will Smith sights the wireframe beast, then thinks better of killing a creature which appears more deadly than he, and lowers his gun. Of course, all I can think of, looking at Will Smith is how amazingly real he looks. Oh, wait…

When did film makers get so damn lazy? This film cost a ton of money, they shut down parts of New York City and rather than get a real deer and lion they cheese out… rate effects. It took me out to the whole film because if I can’t believe in a lion and a herd of deer on screen, how the hell can I believe in the rest of this doomsday/vampire plotline?

I grew up in the age of the practical effect creatures. Stan Winston and Jim Henson ruled the world and rightly so. When an actor looked at ET, the Alien or Audrey 2, they were actually in the room, looking back at them. There was a three dimensional, articulated being that interacted with the actors in real time. Actors can, of course, act against something that is not there. It is done all the time and it’s a tenet of the acting experience. But there is, I believe, an additional physiological response on a subliminal level that actors exhibit when there is a physical presence in the room. When the queen alien in Aliens got way too close to Ripley in the finale of the film, you felt it, because Sigourney Weaver felt it deep inside on a primal level. The fear jumped the screen.

When the siren song of computers finally became too sophisticated to ignore, it was initially used to it’s utmost potential. In Terminator 2, James Cameron both threw the technology in our face with a shape shifting metallic monster that dominated the screen and subtly made practical effects more compelling by erasing safety wires on motorcycles during dangerous jumps. Spielberg also confronted the shift by placing the most audacious thing you could in front of an audience, dinosaurs, and surrounding it with a story to support their existence. In these early examples, CG was part of the story, a tool to accent the storytelling experience.

Now, however, we live in a time of fake lions eating fake deer while a real Will Smith seems out of place. Maybe the ASPCA said no to real animals, maybe ILM promised kick-ass deer, maybe they didn’t have enough time to make the fur look real. Most likely is that it would have cost an extra million dollars to shoot real deer on a sound stage and someone at Fox said “F#@k no! We’re paying Smith $25 million! Let him dress up as a deer or else we CGI!”

It really doesn’t matter. The CGI terrorist won — the movie made $500 million, billion dollars and before long they’ll simply remedy the deer versus Will Smith problem by eliminating the latter. They’ll figure out a way to get money out of real deer and make them see these movies and we’ll all be off the hook. Deers’ eyesight is worse than ours so it’s a perfect transition. Now all they need to do is teach them to blog and we’re set.