I don’t really like admitting that I’m excited to see I Am Legend since people tend t give me strange looks or just shake their heads in disappointment. Listen: I know there are a lot of good movies out there to see right now. I know I could probably better spend my time seeing No Country for Old Men for the third time. But sometimes, when the holidays draw nearer and the days get darker, you just need to spend quality time with Will Smith. Preferably Will Smith killing zombies and shouting “Aw hell naw!” once or twice.
When rumors came up recently about the movie going into reshoots, it didn’t bother me too much, since I figured they weren’t taking out the zombies or anything. And recently director Francis Lawrence spoke to ShockTillYouDrop.com and said he enjoyed the reshoot process, especially since it gave him a chance to tweak some of the many CGI-heavy shots in the movie. Because of the CGI, he told them, "we weren't seeing fully-rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It's not only until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, 'Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.' It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie."
Of course, Lawrence also pointed out his work on the critically eviscerated Constantine, which kind of diminishes whatever point he has to make about good filmmaking. Still, he makes a good point about CGI-- how are you really supposed to know exactly how it’s going to turn out when all you can see is a green screen? The special effects in I Am Legend promise to be spectacular, and personally I want the image of Times Square overrun by animals to be as pitch-perfect as possible.
I Am Legend opens next Friday, December 14. Let the countdown begin!
