This is an hour of an excellent film, then 30-odd minutes of rubbish.

since the mid ‘90s, with various talent attached, including Ridley Scott and Michael Bay as directors and Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star.Īt its release the movie was praised for Smith’s performance but criticised for an overuse of CGI and a weak third act, but rewatching against the backdrop of 2021 what really sticks is how much of a wasted opportunity I Am Legend was. Directed by Francis Lawrence, who would go on to make the Hunger Games sequels, a new adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel had been in the works at Warner Bros. Robert Neville, who thinks he’s the last man on Earth after a virus has wiped out most of the population. A year on and another pandemic movie has made it into Netflix’s top 10 – 2007’s I Am Legend, a horror sci-fi starring Will Smith as Dr.

Whether out of morbid fascination or as a guideline to what we might see in the future it quickly topped charts on streaming services. Last March, confronted with a pandemic none of us had expected or understood, many people found themselves rewatching Steven Soderberg’s Contagion.