Anticipated movie release - I am Legend

Being one of the first hip hop artists to cross over into tv and film, I suppose I've been a Will Smith fan for at least half of my life.  Besides "Wild, Wild West", I can't think of anything he's done that I haven't enjoyed (I still haven't seen Six Degrees of Separation but i heard it was good too).  I liked the "Pursuit of Happyness" a lot so to see him tank a plunge at a serious and dark thriller now is right up my alley.  Especially since i'm big fans of the first two movie adaptations "The Last Man on Earth" and "The Omega Man". 

Here's information taken from NY Times.  Sounds like it should be pretty interesting. 

...

He’d saved the human race from aliens in “Independence Day” and the “Men in Black” movies, from its cyborg Frankensteins in the sci-fi thriller “I, Robot.” He’d even helped some of the nerdiest humans have a shot at perpetuating the species, as a dating coach in the romantic comedy “Hitch.”

So perhaps Will Smith was due for a serious and seriously dark role in which the apocalypse has already come and gone, despite all his heroic attempts to prevent it.

In “I Am Legend” (Dec. 14), a lean and lonely Mr. Smith grapples with the isolation of being the last healthy man on earth, three years after a deadly virus — meant to cure cancer — has all but wiped the planet clean of people. A studly military man as well as a scientist, he hangs on in a Manhattan that has gone back to nature in a big way — gathering vegetables in a Central Park that will give new meaning to “green market,” stalking deer in the high grass of Times Square — while simultaneously searching for a cure and steering clear of the rampaging, nocturnal ex-humans who have transformed into bloodthirsty predators, and who know where he lives.

That Warner Brothers is releasing “I Am Legend” next month is itself something of a survivalist feat. Mr. Smith and his collaborators — the writer-producer Akiva Goldsman, the director Francis Lawrence and Mr. Smith’s producing partner James Lassiter — have achieved what other filmmakers and stars like Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger could not, despite more than a decade of trying. Getting the $150 million-plus movie made took nearly two years of planning, months of rewriting, a studio boss’s green light without a script, and — a week into the nine-month shoot — a complete overhaul of the method for rendering the creatures terrorizing Mr. Smith’s character.

All that, and only the biggest and longest-lasting moviemaking disruption of the daily lives of many New Yorkers since “The French Connection.”

“I Am Legend” is the third film based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella of the same title, with its cold war allegory of Us and Them. Vincent Price starred in the first, “The Last Man on Earth” (1964), and Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man” (1971). Warner Brothers had long wanted to remake it again, and Mr. Smith, who said he had been seeking projects involving the most basic urges and emotions (as in his last movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness”), said he had nearly made an R-rated, darker version, written by Mark Protosevich, with the director Michael Bay before “28 Days Later” (2002) seemed to “snatch the concept.”

More at:  New York Times - I am Legend