Movies I Watched

I watched a couple of new movies recently. The first one was I Am Legend, which I watched together with Nageb and Ayob- both of whom came all the way from Kangar and Tanjung Malim respectively to give me a surprise visit merely two days after my arrival- while the second one was National Treasure 2. I watched National Treasure 2 with two primary schoolmate buddies. Browsing through my blog archive, I realized that there has been only one entry on movie so far– that was Do You Remember the 20th Day of September, not even a commercial one- so I thought why not I share my personal reviews on these two new Hollywood flicks.

Let’s give it a kick start with I Am Legend, directed and played by Will Smith. I think overall the movie is OK, end of story. I was quite surprised to be frank that critics from the newspaper I read gave two thumbs up to this movie, categorizing it as a well-presented one. I have always thought that while lack in dialogue can be easily replaced by excellent play-acting and growth in plot, the same case for characters and scenes, which is happening in I Am Legend, is not quite acceptable and only makes a perfect recipe for disaster. Nevertheless as I look back, the story depicted in the movie itself- about the last man left in the New York City- is what makes it a movie and there is certainly no way to have it rectified to give ways for the two components I mentioned above. Probably by looking at it this way only we start to appreciate the works done by Will Smith and his crews; since there is simply no room left for them to improve.

Anyway as I mentioned earlier, the movie revolves around a doctor/scientist played by Will Smith who happened to be the only man left in New York trying to find a cure for a human-plagued disease sweeping over the entire human lives. Contrary to the movie tagline, there were actually other human beings on other part of the planet- a point which I found later into the movie but let’s forgive the director for that for the time being for that is not the main point. There were only five percent of people of the earth found to be immune to the disease, but the bad news was a large proportion of the five percent turned into Dark Seekers, brutal creatures who crawled out at night in search of human flesh. The doctor embarked on his journey with his dog into the empty street of the Big Apple on the day, sent out a moving radio message to the entire world by noon in search of anyone still alive, and came back home at sunset to continue his research for the cure in his underground laboratory as well as to hide from Dark Seekers. Perhaps this film scores a good point at portraying New York City without its people, as well as the occasional tense felt by the main character for being the only man left made worse by the pressure to save other human beings whom he believed were still alive. Now, if any of you are planning to go watch I Am Legend soon but do not want me to spoil the whole plot, perhaps it is a good idea to stop reading now. I could not help but being left frustrated by the ending- the doctor managed to find the cure just in time before he was attacked by the Dark Seekers, a complete cliché.

All in all it was a decent 2-hour entertainment I would say, go and watch it if you have an extra RM10 to bury but just do not set the bar too high for this movie, it certainly does not belong to potential Oscar Award Winners group.

Moving on, now let’s have a say at National Treasure 2 starring Nicolas Cage and Diane Kruger amongst all. First and foremost, I am not really into this treasure-hunting, Sherlock Holmes type of movie, so my review might not be of doubtable credibility to its fans out there. I also did not watch the prequel to make matters worse but thankfully, from my judgment one could easily grasp the idea brought by this second movie sans watching the previous one since you cannot really say they are mutually related.

The story centralizes around this one guy, played by Cage, who is desperate to clean up his family name who was accused as responsible for the famous murder of former US President Abraham Lincoln. His journey brought him to Paris, Buckingham Palace at London and The White House among them, and eventually he and a few others managed to find a secret place dubbed as The City of Gold, left by an ancient civilization once occupying the American continent. As always, the twist and turn here and there make the journey far from easy, but in the end he managed to reach his goal as many of you might have expected.

What I found most upsetting in this kind of flick though, is the way the director kind of forced the audience into thinking about his main character as someone close to perfect, by means of getting him to solve brain-teasing puzzles and problems in a matter of second, with a right answer. Alright, so the main character is an experienced treasure hunter/investigator, but there is nothing wrong with the director trying to instill a little sense of logic in the first place. Just let the hero make one or two mistake along the search, that will make the story a lot more interesting and more importantly, plausible. Apart from that I think National Treasure 2 deserves a B grade; good, but again is unlikely to land one or two awards. Oh yeah, I also do not really quite like the idea of the US President easily fooled into being kidnapped, though if you ask me, I cannot actually think of an alternative way of improving that scene.

So that is it, I guess between the two, I prefer I Am Legend for it offers something different to the viewers but then again as I look back, it must be down to my lack of interest to the theme offered by National Treasure 2 as I claimed earlier. Here I am leaving it to you to make your own choice, and whichever it is I am wishing you a good time.