Fall 2007
I Am Legend
Will Smith plays Charlton Heston, presumably the last man alive, living in New York City. With his pet dog they drive around in various Ford products hunting, looting, golfing, and farming. Oh, and a contingent of people are actually still alive (sort of) but have to are semi-mindless psychotic killers with super strength that can't come out in sunlight. Zompires? Vambies? Something like that.
In the movie, Will Smith's character is a scientist --oh, and a soldier-- that was responsible all on his lonesome for developing a cure to a horrible virus that of course was caused by man curing cancer. Of course he didn't, and then New York was quarantined, and then the rest of the world died anyway because polio became airborne, like it does. As Hollywood is constantly reminding us, messing with science always leads to the destruction of mankind. Hear that kids? Don't do your homework, you'll kill the world.
Undaunted by the death of everyone on Earth, Will Smith continues to work to develop a cure in his basement, only now the cure is for the Zompires, not for the 99% of people who are already dead. Most all of this you can glean from the trailer, so I don't feel I'm spoiling much here if you haven't seen the movie, or the movie this is a remake of, or the book they are based on. Despite the way I've characterized the movie thus far, it wasn't actually a bad movie. It's just one of those movies you have to go into knowing certain things have to be accepted. It plays out with some jump out of the dark spookiness like 28 Days Later, with a plot that reminds me more of 28 Weeks Later. I enjoyed it with the above as some caveats, and I would recommend it to most people that like this kind of movie, which I think is a decent number.
The Golden Compass
I'm usually not one to pass up a big-budget fantasy movie, but I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this. The books are antithetical to Narnia, in that the Chronicles of Narnia is a Christian mythos and His Dark Materials is anti-religion. However, I've never read the books, so all I had to go on was the trailer.
The movie never really escapes from the confines of being a kids movies, which is fair given that it's based on a children's book, but certain things that I imagine are explained in the book just sort of happen in the movie. For example, characters kind of show up and join the main characters quest, somehow knowing where to find her and what they were doing, or with somewhat flimsy explanations.
In any case, I didn't realize going in that this was the first movie of a trilogy. Given the dismal box office returns it will probably be a standalone movie, which makes it rather weak. The plot is never really explained, in that we never find out how the evil-doer's actions will lead to their desired outcome. Several other things are left unexplained as well, presumably for the sequels. While they did wrap up the main arc, too much was left fuzzy to build a truly convincing world. The movie could have been made perhaps ten minutes longer and a lot of holes could have been plugged.
On the measure, it wasn't bad. There were some new ideas, like armored bears, which were pretty cool. The main character isn't really flawed which makes it difficult to have any kind of development, but overall I still thought the movie was good, just that it could have been a lot better.