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So I did something relatively rare for me and went to an honest-to-Christ MOTION PICTURE, in a CINEMA. Madness! Eighteen dollars for a flick and a bag of Skittles -- part of my brain is just like, "!!!!!" but at the same time, there's something about the experience that's wired deep, deep into my DNA and yes, I will pay money for it, fine. Life costs money, and there you are.
And you know, like the last two times I remember doing this (Pan's Labyrinth and The Simpsons), I don't begrudge it, because God, I thought it was great -- and it's one that you *should* see on a big screen, for both the cinematography and the sound, and also the way that scary movies are less scary in your living room. (I wouldn't call IAL a horror flick, really -- it's a psychological drama as much as or more than anything -- but there were some undeniable OH HOLY SHIT kind of moments that made me really, really glad I wasn't alone in the house afterward.) Full disclosure, the ending is kind of, eh, standard, which is a little bit of a letdown after the rest of the movie was so intense, but by then I was really already sold on the whole thing and in the mood for forgiveness. Also full disclosure, I *love* Will Smith and add an automatic ten points in my head to any movie he's in (although in some cases, that only elevates the movie from *oh, Jesus, my eyes* to *well, at least it had Will Smith...*) I realize this puts me kind of outside the critical mainstream; there's this cadre of actors of my generation who -- I don't know, because they're youngish? because they're pretty? because they had/have heartthrob status? -- I always feel like are not really getting the cred they deserve. Will Smith and Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio particularly, their reviews are always like, "ah, he was pretty good," and I'm left going "Seriously? Pretty good -- seriously?!?" Cast what aspersions you will on me, cinemaphiles, but I truly don't see what it is that guys like Brando and DeNiro have that these guys don't. (Admittedly, it's really hard to judge genius in a field that's outside your own. A friend once took me to see Itzaak Perlman in concert, and you know, I thought it sounded really nice, but I felt like I didn't appreciate it the way I should have, because I know fuckall about the violin, and I'm quite sure that if she'd taken me to see the twenty-fifth best violinist alive, it would've sounded really nice to me, too. The difference between Will Smith and Robert DeNiro is probably something like that.) All that said -- Will Smith is really fucking good in this movie. And also totally fucking adorable holding a puppy. I mean, many people are. But still, he really brings holding-an-adorable-puppy-adorably the next level.
Okay, that's...more than I thought I'd have to say before getting into the actual movie in a spoilery sense. But from here on out, MANY, MANY SPOILERS.
SPOILERS!!! Spoilers ahead for I Am Legend!
If any part of your brain is dedicated to Ronon, you cannot *possibly* watch this movie without thinking about Ronon. (I feel pretty confident saying this, even though I'm not in a position to know. I can't really watch the Weather Channel without thinking about Ronon -- but I think I'm right here about the general principle!) The question I had -- and I still haven't really made up my mind -- is whether this is a movie that Ronon would like or not.
I mean, in essence, this is as close as Ronon will probably ever see, on Team Movie Night (you can tell me there's no such thing, but it's a DAMN DIRTY LIE and you know it), to his life story. Yeah, the Darkseekers aren't Wraith, but they're vicious, deadly humanoid monsters who don't care a thing about you except how you'll taste for dinner. And Ronon never thought he was the last man on Earth; he always knew there *were* other people, he just couldn't have any contact with them. Ronon also never had to deal with the guilt that Neville had: he was never in any position to eradicate the Wraith, before or after the end of his world, so he doesn't have to carry that sense that he personally failed to prevent all this (though I think on the small-scale he does blame himself for failing to save Melena's life, and Team Tyre's back when he thought the Wraith had killed them, and the village he revisits in "Sateda." But while that's bad, it's not quite as bad as blaming yourself for the existence of the Wraith in the way that Neville does for the existence of the KV virus.)
The similarities, though, are more than a little striking in a number of places. Seeing the ruins of New York is pretty much the same effect, just on a bigger screen and with a bigger budget, as seeing the ruins of Ronon's native city (I started to call it Yendikai, and then I remembered that I made that up. *g* That's not its name. I don't know its name.) Robert's proximity to Mrs. Neville and Marley when they die, in the midst of his big rescue plan for them, is roughly equivalent to Ronon's proximity to Melena in the midst of same. I think there's a similar sense of horror in the sense of unbroken, unvarying time -- in the three years of Neville's ordeal and the seven years of Ronon's, one of the scariest things to contemplate is the repetitiveness -- how they go through what they're going through EVERY DAY, over and over, and nothing ever changes, and the possibility that nothing ever can is lurking in the back of your mind minute by fucking minute. As well as hating the Wraith, Ronon has always genuinely, profoundly feared them (well, always within the course of the show -- I don't know if he once felt more cavalierly than he now does, though I'm guessing, yeah, probably), and I think the movie really gets that right, too -- in Neville's edginess when he tries to capture his test subjects, in the way the whole mood of the movie shifts at every dusk, in that perfect shot of Neville sleeping in his bathtub with his automatic gun while the Darkseekers howl in the distance. Then, of course, the big one is the solitude, the lack of basic human contact.
That's where the movie, and Smith, really deserve love -- making monster movies isn't rocket science, but the way they draw Neville as this character at the last remaining days of his sanity before the loneliness overwhelms him is really amazing. He protects himself the same way Ronon surely must have, with discipline, with routine, with the hard work of survival, and Neville has two additional advantages over Ronon: he has the hope that he can create an antidote to the KV, in a way that Ronon never had any real hope that he could exterminate the Wraith, and he has Sam. It's utterly fucking clear that he requires both of these things to hang on, and when Sam dies, it's pretty much over for Neville. That's exactly how the script plays it, too; they don't cheat at all on that. That's the point at which you know that, damaged as Neville already was, now there's no coming back for him at all. And Ronon never even had a dog, you know?
I know it's comparing apples to oranges, but IAL kind of renewed my regret that Ronon isn't a *more* fucked-up character than he is. I mean, you do see some of the legacy of his trauma here and there, particularly the way he makes bad decisions when it comes to the Wraith because he just can't be rational on the subject (well, except when he is -- and I still think he's OOC in "Allies," although I know reasonable fans who reasonably disagree with me on that). But overall -- and God bless him, you know?, but still -- he's just so fucking stable. That's part of what I love about him, but at the same time, it does feel like a dumb tv-logic cheat, because...wtf?
*Three years* with a beloved dog and a mission to save the world, and Robert Neville is two-thirds entirely unglued. And it's so believable -- it's that kind of ruthless, bear-trap believable where it's impossible to look at the situation in any remote detail and believe anything else is a possibility at all. So how in the hell am I supposed to take the notion that Ronon is pretty much just fine at all seriously?
There are two scenes from the movie in particular that are clearly supposed to be memorable, and that I will in fact probably remember vividly to my dying day. The first is the payoff to Neville's mildly crazy habit of placing mannequins all over town and chatting to them as if they were people he knows. After Sam dies, he approaches the pretty manequin in the video store that he's identified in his odd little LARP world as the Mystery Woman and had a conversation with his dog about whether or not he should introduce himself to her -- and he's a horrible mess by this point, he's devastated by this whole new level of alone he is now that Sam has died to save his life, and he says, "I promised my friend I'd say hello to you today. So...hello." And that's quite poignant. But then he starts to break down, in this perfectly silent, still video store, looking at this mannequin and crying, and *begging her* to say hello back to him, just in the most dire need you can possibly imagine to hear another human voice. It's gut-wrenching.
The second scene is even stranger and more brilliant, I think. It's after he has encountered two other human beings, and he's just barely gotten a grip on the idea that they're really *real* and not proof that he's gone totally around the bend. And he doesn't know what to say. He has no idea how to talk to people, how to tell them anything. But the kid is watching his DVD of Shrek, and it's the bit where the Donkey is arguing with Shrek about whether or not they should stay together and be adventuring buddies. And Neville has clearly seen it nine bazillion times by now, and he falls into reciting the dialogue along with the characters...only not like we normal people sometimes chirp along with the best lines of our favorite movies. He gets this peculiar, glazed look on his face and falls into this little trance, utterly caught up in every word and every beat and every inflection, fascinated by them, by what's being said about needing people and being together. And it's actually a funny scene in a sense -- I couldn't not laugh at it (especially since Will Smith's Eddie Murphy impression is so dead the fuck on that it's almost frightening) -- but it's also terrible, as you realize that Neville can't say this himself, he literally doesn't remember how and it's still too scary. All he can do is bury himself inside the safe zone of this fantasy movie and hope desperately that they hear him.
And it's all so powerful and so fitting for what's become of this character's life and everything he ever knew that it makes me sort of frustrated that what we get on SGA is such a itty-bitty filament of that, the slightest intimation in a few early s2 episodes where Ronon is still very grim and awkward around people. I guess -- I mean, the needs of series tv are different, and I can see that doing a whole psychology of Ronon in the way that IAL does for Neville is not necessarily useful or possible, but...it still seems like a cop-out, now more than ever. And it continues to make my life as a fanfic writer harder, because -- which one do you privilege? Do you make Ronon really messed-up because you think that in a sensible universe with reality-based laws, he would be, or do you make him basically laid-back and pragmatic and friendly because canonically, he basically is? I mean, ideally, you hit a little bit of both. But it's still really hard to know how to fit them together in a story that's both a fair reflection of the canon character and takes basic human psychology at least a little bit seriously.
But that wasn't even the original point of this post! The original point was, I kept wondering how Ronon would react to seeing this movie. Would it be triggery, something that just cut way too close to the bone for him ever to view it as just a movie or entertaining on any level? Could he really watch Neville lose his family, watch Neville imprisoned in a universe empty of everything except him and his hunters? Or, conversely, would he FUCKING LOVE this movie for the catharsis of the very ending that I found kind of a yawn? Because Neville DOES IT, he cures the KV, he eliminates theWraith Darkseekers and leaves behind a new, fresh, safe world that will always remember him as the savior of the human race. Yeah, he dies doing it, and I know Ronon doesn't envy the dead, but at the same time -- wouldn't he go out like that, if he knew he could end the Wraith forever, save everyone else from what he's been through? I think he would. He's undeniably survival-oriented, but he'll still put himself in front of a bullet for someone else's sake -- God, he does it practically weekly for McKay (which I find sweet as hell, but I don't delude myself that it's per se a personal thing; Ronon protects non-combatants first and foremost, and he thinks of Rodney as a non-combatant). I think there might be something really powerful for him in watching Neville achieve what is, for Ronon, pretty much unachievable, even at the cost of his life.
But I don't know if he'd be able to get that far. I can't decide what the dominant experience of this movie would be -- whether it would be too close to being forced to relive things he only survives and functions by not looking at very closely, or whether it would be just exactly the fantasy wish-fulfillment he needs. I'm pretty sure it's either a movie that would be pure torture, or his favorite movie of all fucking time.
And you know, like the last two times I remember doing this (Pan's Labyrinth and The Simpsons), I don't begrudge it, because God, I thought it was great -- and it's one that you *should* see on a big screen, for both the cinematography and the sound, and also the way that scary movies are less scary in your living room. (I wouldn't call IAL a horror flick, really -- it's a psychological drama as much as or more than anything -- but there were some undeniable OH HOLY SHIT kind of moments that made me really, really glad I wasn't alone in the house afterward.) Full disclosure, the ending is kind of, eh, standard, which is a little bit of a letdown after the rest of the movie was so intense, but by then I was really already sold on the whole thing and in the mood for forgiveness. Also full disclosure, I *love* Will Smith and add an automatic ten points in my head to any movie he's in (although in some cases, that only elevates the movie from *oh, Jesus, my eyes* to *well, at least it had Will Smith...*) I realize this puts me kind of outside the critical mainstream; there's this cadre of actors of my generation who -- I don't know, because they're youngish? because they're pretty? because they had/have heartthrob status? -- I always feel like are not really getting the cred they deserve. Will Smith and Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio particularly, their reviews are always like, "ah, he was pretty good," and I'm left going "Seriously? Pretty good -- seriously?!?" Cast what aspersions you will on me, cinemaphiles, but I truly don't see what it is that guys like Brando and DeNiro have that these guys don't. (Admittedly, it's really hard to judge genius in a field that's outside your own. A friend once took me to see Itzaak Perlman in concert, and you know, I thought it sounded really nice, but I felt like I didn't appreciate it the way I should have, because I know fuckall about the violin, and I'm quite sure that if she'd taken me to see the twenty-fifth best violinist alive, it would've sounded really nice to me, too. The difference between Will Smith and Robert DeNiro is probably something like that.) All that said -- Will Smith is really fucking good in this movie. And also totally fucking adorable holding a puppy. I mean, many people are. But still, he really brings holding-an-adorable-puppy-adorably the next level.
Okay, that's...more than I thought I'd have to say before getting into the actual movie in a spoilery sense. But from here on out, MANY, MANY SPOILERS.
SPOILERS!!! Spoilers ahead for I Am Legend!
If any part of your brain is dedicated to Ronon, you cannot *possibly* watch this movie without thinking about Ronon. (I feel pretty confident saying this, even though I'm not in a position to know. I can't really watch the Weather Channel without thinking about Ronon -- but I think I'm right here about the general principle!) The question I had -- and I still haven't really made up my mind -- is whether this is a movie that Ronon would like or not.
I mean, in essence, this is as close as Ronon will probably ever see, on Team Movie Night (you can tell me there's no such thing, but it's a DAMN DIRTY LIE and you know it), to his life story. Yeah, the Darkseekers aren't Wraith, but they're vicious, deadly humanoid monsters who don't care a thing about you except how you'll taste for dinner. And Ronon never thought he was the last man on Earth; he always knew there *were* other people, he just couldn't have any contact with them. Ronon also never had to deal with the guilt that Neville had: he was never in any position to eradicate the Wraith, before or after the end of his world, so he doesn't have to carry that sense that he personally failed to prevent all this (though I think on the small-scale he does blame himself for failing to save Melena's life, and Team Tyre's back when he thought the Wraith had killed them, and the village he revisits in "Sateda." But while that's bad, it's not quite as bad as blaming yourself for the existence of the Wraith in the way that Neville does for the existence of the KV virus.)
The similarities, though, are more than a little striking in a number of places. Seeing the ruins of New York is pretty much the same effect, just on a bigger screen and with a bigger budget, as seeing the ruins of Ronon's native city (I started to call it Yendikai, and then I remembered that I made that up. *g* That's not its name. I don't know its name.) Robert's proximity to Mrs. Neville and Marley when they die, in the midst of his big rescue plan for them, is roughly equivalent to Ronon's proximity to Melena in the midst of same. I think there's a similar sense of horror in the sense of unbroken, unvarying time -- in the three years of Neville's ordeal and the seven years of Ronon's, one of the scariest things to contemplate is the repetitiveness -- how they go through what they're going through EVERY DAY, over and over, and nothing ever changes, and the possibility that nothing ever can is lurking in the back of your mind minute by fucking minute. As well as hating the Wraith, Ronon has always genuinely, profoundly feared them (well, always within the course of the show -- I don't know if he once felt more cavalierly than he now does, though I'm guessing, yeah, probably), and I think the movie really gets that right, too -- in Neville's edginess when he tries to capture his test subjects, in the way the whole mood of the movie shifts at every dusk, in that perfect shot of Neville sleeping in his bathtub with his automatic gun while the Darkseekers howl in the distance. Then, of course, the big one is the solitude, the lack of basic human contact.
That's where the movie, and Smith, really deserve love -- making monster movies isn't rocket science, but the way they draw Neville as this character at the last remaining days of his sanity before the loneliness overwhelms him is really amazing. He protects himself the same way Ronon surely must have, with discipline, with routine, with the hard work of survival, and Neville has two additional advantages over Ronon: he has the hope that he can create an antidote to the KV, in a way that Ronon never had any real hope that he could exterminate the Wraith, and he has Sam. It's utterly fucking clear that he requires both of these things to hang on, and when Sam dies, it's pretty much over for Neville. That's exactly how the script plays it, too; they don't cheat at all on that. That's the point at which you know that, damaged as Neville already was, now there's no coming back for him at all. And Ronon never even had a dog, you know?
I know it's comparing apples to oranges, but IAL kind of renewed my regret that Ronon isn't a *more* fucked-up character than he is. I mean, you do see some of the legacy of his trauma here and there, particularly the way he makes bad decisions when it comes to the Wraith because he just can't be rational on the subject (well, except when he is -- and I still think he's OOC in "Allies," although I know reasonable fans who reasonably disagree with me on that). But overall -- and God bless him, you know?, but still -- he's just so fucking stable. That's part of what I love about him, but at the same time, it does feel like a dumb tv-logic cheat, because...wtf?
*Three years* with a beloved dog and a mission to save the world, and Robert Neville is two-thirds entirely unglued. And it's so believable -- it's that kind of ruthless, bear-trap believable where it's impossible to look at the situation in any remote detail and believe anything else is a possibility at all. So how in the hell am I supposed to take the notion that Ronon is pretty much just fine at all seriously?
There are two scenes from the movie in particular that are clearly supposed to be memorable, and that I will in fact probably remember vividly to my dying day. The first is the payoff to Neville's mildly crazy habit of placing mannequins all over town and chatting to them as if they were people he knows. After Sam dies, he approaches the pretty manequin in the video store that he's identified in his odd little LARP world as the Mystery Woman and had a conversation with his dog about whether or not he should introduce himself to her -- and he's a horrible mess by this point, he's devastated by this whole new level of alone he is now that Sam has died to save his life, and he says, "I promised my friend I'd say hello to you today. So...hello." And that's quite poignant. But then he starts to break down, in this perfectly silent, still video store, looking at this mannequin and crying, and *begging her* to say hello back to him, just in the most dire need you can possibly imagine to hear another human voice. It's gut-wrenching.
The second scene is even stranger and more brilliant, I think. It's after he has encountered two other human beings, and he's just barely gotten a grip on the idea that they're really *real* and not proof that he's gone totally around the bend. And he doesn't know what to say. He has no idea how to talk to people, how to tell them anything. But the kid is watching his DVD of Shrek, and it's the bit where the Donkey is arguing with Shrek about whether or not they should stay together and be adventuring buddies. And Neville has clearly seen it nine bazillion times by now, and he falls into reciting the dialogue along with the characters...only not like we normal people sometimes chirp along with the best lines of our favorite movies. He gets this peculiar, glazed look on his face and falls into this little trance, utterly caught up in every word and every beat and every inflection, fascinated by them, by what's being said about needing people and being together. And it's actually a funny scene in a sense -- I couldn't not laugh at it (especially since Will Smith's Eddie Murphy impression is so dead the fuck on that it's almost frightening) -- but it's also terrible, as you realize that Neville can't say this himself, he literally doesn't remember how and it's still too scary. All he can do is bury himself inside the safe zone of this fantasy movie and hope desperately that they hear him.
And it's all so powerful and so fitting for what's become of this character's life and everything he ever knew that it makes me sort of frustrated that what we get on SGA is such a itty-bitty filament of that, the slightest intimation in a few early s2 episodes where Ronon is still very grim and awkward around people. I guess -- I mean, the needs of series tv are different, and I can see that doing a whole psychology of Ronon in the way that IAL does for Neville is not necessarily useful or possible, but...it still seems like a cop-out, now more than ever. And it continues to make my life as a fanfic writer harder, because -- which one do you privilege? Do you make Ronon really messed-up because you think that in a sensible universe with reality-based laws, he would be, or do you make him basically laid-back and pragmatic and friendly because canonically, he basically is? I mean, ideally, you hit a little bit of both. But it's still really hard to know how to fit them together in a story that's both a fair reflection of the canon character and takes basic human psychology at least a little bit seriously.
But that wasn't even the original point of this post! The original point was, I kept wondering how Ronon would react to seeing this movie. Would it be triggery, something that just cut way too close to the bone for him ever to view it as just a movie or entertaining on any level? Could he really watch Neville lose his family, watch Neville imprisoned in a universe empty of everything except him and his hunters? Or, conversely, would he FUCKING LOVE this movie for the catharsis of the very ending that I found kind of a yawn? Because Neville DOES IT, he cures the KV, he eliminates the
But I don't know if he'd be able to get that far. I can't decide what the dominant experience of this movie would be -- whether it would be too close to being forced to relive things he only survives and functions by not looking at very closely, or whether it would be just exactly the fantasy wish-fulfillment he needs. I'm pretty sure it's either a movie that would be pure torture, or his favorite movie of all fucking time.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-04 11:23 pm (UTC)From:I also loved how you drew the parallel's between Ronon and Neville and I'd also like to see what Ronon's reaction would be to watching this movie.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-05 02:05 am (UTC)From:It really is a great movie!