I am a chronic late-run-movie-watcher. That is, I wait until something is a new release on DVD, or else very late in the theater, before seeing it. I’ll maybe pick up one movie every few months in the theater; the rest, I wait until the furor has died down and enjoy watching at my leisure.
But before I break into my review of “I Am Legend”, I must first comment on the environment in which I watched this movie. Yesterday, our new Samsung 50-inch Plasma TV arrived*. I spent WAY too long monkeying with the thing, but I finally got the image pretty much where I wanted it for composite, VGA, and broadcast input. I need to buy a nice antenna, though, so I can pick up some of the several dozen HD TV stations in our area.
Suffice to say that watching a scary movie in the dark on such a large screen is transforming. It turned a movie that I’m sure would have just been “Ho-Hum, that’s fun” into a freaky experience that made me take two bathroom breaks due to the suspense.
So, my review of I Am Legend? Fun movie, pretty scary, watch it in the dark on a big screen with the sound turned up for maximum effect. Make sure your black levels are beautiful.
My ancient DVD player showed its age a bit on this film. There are several very dark scenes, and if I turned up the brightness enough to distinguish the dark colors from one another, the overall image was washed out. The black levels on this TV are BEAUTIFUL with an HD source like over-the-air or a Blu-Ray player, but a DVD player from 1999? Yeah, it doesn’t do the job right.
However, now that I have a big screen, I can see the difference in the mastering quality of releases. They did a fine job with the DVD release of I Am Legend. It’s much better than many among the sampling of DVDs I compared it against, and on-par with the latest Disney stuff (which seems to have some of the clearest mastering among anything I own).
So if you like scary movies, but aren’t big on gore, I Am Legend is probably right up your alley like it was mine. I liked the movie a lot, and am certainly going to watch it again before it goes back to Netflix.
And when I get a Blu-Ray player one day… this will probably be one of the first discs I test it against. Particularly the scene where Sam chases the deer into the building. That scene was intense and claustrophobic, I loved it!
(* Yes, I know this is a 720P Plasma screen, and people will tell me that I should have gone with 1080P, or LCD instead of plasma, or 120Hz, or projector. See my previous post on this topic. The viewing distance for this TV is 10-14 feet; for human eyes to see the benefit of 1080P, I would need to have had at least an 80″ screen in this room. That’s too rich for my blood unless I went with a projector, and in such a bright room during the day a projector’s just not an option. (With 720P and an average viewing distance of 3x screen size, I can get away with 40-52″ screen and still have a wonderful viewing experience for average content. One day, I may do a projector out in the garage or basement for a more THX-compliant experience. But for now this screen is so much better than my old 27″ CRT that there’s simply no comparison.)
I Am Legend
I liked I Am Legend. My daughter liked Will Smith without a shirt in his workout scene. My male siblings could only talk about how lame of a home defense system Will had put up after five years. Boys.
Interesting viewpoints
I love the fact that in the above comment, ‘conversing regarding the integrity of the home defense system’ is implied to be more of a roll-your-eyes and pointless topic than ‘what Will Smith looks like when working out.’
Must be a really different and interesting view from Venus than it is here on the red planet I call home…
Home Defense
Well, I mean, that brings up an entirely new line of thought I hadn’t considered before. If you had to set up the ultimate post-apocalyptic home security system to defend yourself from violent, incredibly-strong mutants in an urban setting, how would you do it?
Planning for defense of your home from a single thief is way different from figuring out how to beat down an invading horde by yourself. In the movie, New York’s population is around 8 million. The KU virus had a 90% kill rate. You’re down to 800,000 people left alive. A bit less than 1% had a natural immunity: 80,000 people. All of them died except Neville, leaving somewhere around 720,000 dark seekers in New York City, feeding on humans and god-knows-what.
It’s a tough job building a personal defense system to fend off nearly three-quarters of a million mutants who could tear you apart with their bare hands!
So, you have effectively an unlimited amount of gasoline to run your generators. You also have access to abundant explosives, lots of raw materials, plenty of food as long as it’s within a day’s driving distance in the still-snarled New York traffic, and you need to build all these defenses in a very subtle way so that the Dark Seekers can’t tell that you live there if they walk past during the night.
That last bit is why I empathize with Neville’s pitiful defense plans. We see the walls and ceilings of our homes as part of our castle wall, when in fact they are little more than tissue paper and sticks.
If I were Robert Neville, I think I would have holed up in the aircraft carrier instead. But I’m less attached to my house than he was.
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Matthew P. Barnson