Vote Obama

Imagine if a movie could change the way a country thinks, that it could sway an election. I think I am Legend could be such a movie.
It is commonplace now to realise that America has long thought all its problems could be solved by a bit of bombing. Too much carbon dioxide in the air! Well, we must be able to attack something to solve it.
Military action, or the threat of it, won three wars, two hot, and one cold, no?
World War IV? Well, what about aliens?. There was Will Smith in Independence Day in 1996, when earth is attacked by a species of alien invaders in flying saucers with thirty mile diameters which destroy several cities and are impervious to aerial attack; The world rallies; America takes the lead, its. Stirring music, America’s armed forces scramble, apathetic allies await instructions. Fighters are launched pointlessly against impervious shields, but US Marine pilot. Smith saves the day when his captured alien fighter craft gains entry into the mothership; and (with the help of a mad scientist) destroys it from within causing appropriate pyrotechnic for the world’s grateful fourth of July celebrations, a hymnal to muscular American swagger.. I remember seeing the film with my wife: it was like having some walnut faced American footballer rearing his butt in your face for two hours. The BBC said the president’s battle speech was “the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie". While another reviewer said: its American jingoism.was.so over the top in its conceit that Independence Day would be a top-class farce if it didn't take itself so seriously.”
In contrast USA Today wrote:”A rousing state-of-the-art cartoon capped by an aerial-combat climax that, to its credit, isn't anti-climactic.” The solipsistic militarism that characterised the Bush era well predated it.
Fast forward twelve years, after a chastening Iraq war, and America’s biggest box office hit in the weeks running up to the big primaries features a greyer Will Smith , still under 40, starring in I am Legend.
It features a post-apocalyptic Manhattan three years after a deadly virus has killed every healthy human on the island, except one. Weeds poke up through the streets, piled with abandoned cars, there are no traffic sounds, only the singing of birds. There is an air of decay. Then, down one street, speeds a sports car driven by Robert Neville (Smith), who is trying to get a good shot at one of the deer roaming the city. A lioness beats him to it. .

Neville has only his dog to keep him company. Nights are spent barricaded inside a house in Greenwich Village, its doors and windows sealed by steel shutters to keep out the bands of pale cannibals that rule the streets after dark; they were once humans, turned into mute, savage killers by the virus, for which, during daytimes, Neville tries to find a cure in his basement laboratory. He tries out his cures on zombies he manages to capture in his daytime meanderings; manacling them to his lab gurney and injecting various serums from experimental rats. Note how the emphasis is on capture rather than killing.

Neville just tries to stay alive; setting up a routine of living alone in a deserted New York, making a point of returning his DVDs to a deserted DVD store, saying hello to store-browsing mannequins he relocated from fashion stores to give a simulacrum of human busyness, then,, one day, his dog is killed in a trap set up by these creatures. He runs amok, is almost killed himself and is rescued by an uninfected young woman who has heard his daily radio broadcast for anyone out there – he believes he is not only the last person in New York but perhaps the world.
Next night, just as a response to his test on one of his captured and manacled zombies promising, his house is overwhelmed by zombies – he retreats to the lab, draws of some life-saving serum from the woman, and, while the zombies bang on the plate glass window to the lab, offers it to them, saying “I can save you now” He could bring them back. When it’s clear they will pay no attention, he sends the girl and her son up into a hiding place with the serum sasmple, while he turns to face the zombies with a grenade. Huge conflagration follows. In the epilogue we see her turn up at a high steel walled survivors colony in autumnal Vermont – where else - and enters. A voiceover says that he died; his serum saved the world.

Notice how different this is from Independence Day, where the enemy was external and killable with military hardware. The virus stands in both for terrorism and pandemic flu (which could arise out of environmental degradation.) It changes humans to beasts who want to kill you – like terrorist ideas – or kills them, The virus represents an internal, insidious enemy, which, as ideas do, turn friends into foe. Neville realises he cannot "kill" all the zombies in the world. He must find a cure, a way to "turn" the zombies back.. Is this not America's coming to terms what everyone else has long realised is true of terrorism?

It’s also interesting that Neville is primarily a scientist, though this hyphen is an important one: the scientist-soldier. (He’s a colonel in the army.) Gone is the babe-repellent egghead in glasses. America needs scientists, hasn’t had enough of them since the space race.. America has been in the grip of faith-based solutions, of God, since 2001. But Beville makes a very strong statement to his girl: “There is no God. There were six billion people. All the people you knew are dead. Except you and me.” His solution is a science –based one: to find a cure for the vampirism. The film is a memo to Bush: faith-based solutions do not work. And we all know science is what is needed to fight global warming. .

There was a sympathy for opponents one has not often seen in hero movies; there was also a willingness of self sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. If I am Legend is reflective of America today , or is helping to change the national psychology as the top grossing movie of the month, then the country may be entering a new phase of its maturity. Vote for Barack Obama!. I left the film with a lump in my throat.