I Am Legend Film Analysis

Brenton Tozer

English 102

10/5/15

How Hollywood Portrays Dystopian Futures

People have always feared apocalyptic scenarios that lead to dystopian futures ever since we have been able of conscience thought, some of the earliest fears people had was that of a supernatural being descending upon the Earth and destroying everything and everyone who that being though was unworthy. An example of this was in Ancient Rome when Mount Vesuvius erupted and decimated the city of Pompeii everyone believed that this was caused by not appeasing Vulcan, the God of Fire. During the Cold War people feared that the USSR and the USA would launch their entire nuclear arsenal at each other, which would lead to the complete annihilation of the world, with very few

Every day Will Smith’s character travels around New York City with his dog, Sam, looking for supplies and broadcasting a radio message as a call to survivors to come and find him. He must return to his secure house before nightfall so as to escape from the mutants. One day as Robert Neville is hunting a deer he follows the deer into a dark building where he runs into a nest of mutants, which wake up and chase him out, all the way into the sun where many of them die except for the alpha of the group who manages to stay within the shadows. On the way back to their safe house Neville gets caught in a trap and is knocked unconscious, waking up just as the light is beginning to dim he struggles to free himself before he is attacked by the mutants, Sam the dog is then attacked by two mutant dogs while Neville is freeing himself Sam gets bitten and since dogs can also be infected then she gets the virus, Neville shoots the two mutants and takes Sam home to try and cure her. He ultimately fails and has to kill her, this pushes him to the brink of insanity causing him to go out during the night and lure a bunch of mutants and kill them and himself in a suicidal attack. He lures the

Set in 2019, the movie stars Ewan McGregor as Lincoln Six Echo and Scarlett Johansson as Jordan Two Delta, both characters live in a highly-structured compound being told that they have survived a devastating ‘plague’ that has wiped out humanity and contaminated the rest of the world making it unsafe to leave the compound. Every week there is a lottery in which a person in the compound is selected to go to the ‘Island,’ the last uncontaminated area left in the world. Lincoln Six Echo cannot seem to fit into the structured life that he lives at the compound and sometimes enters off-limit areas to see a friend that works at the compound; during a visit to his friend he finds a live moth from which he deduces that the world must not be contaminated and safe to live outside the compound. Lincoln later on follows the moth up to the surface where he comes to ‘hospital’ like structure in which he finds that he and everyone else within the compound are actually clones of rich people living in the real world, so that they can have organ transplants or babies without having to wait and the parts are genetically identical. After Lincoln returns to the compound, Jordan gets ‘chosen’ to go to the Island, Lincoln rescues her and they escape the compound and reach the outer world. The two of them go on the run and try to find the people that paid for them, their sponsors, meanwhile the company that grows the