The beginning is one man and one dog, and the ending is nothing.
In 2012, humans were infected by an unknown virus, and New York became an empty city. The male protagonist is a scientist serving the military and a survivor of immunity to the virus. During the day, he takes his dog to the streets in search of food, uses the radio to look for survivors, and researches a cure for the virus in the laboratory; at night, he hides in a closed house, away from the "night devils" infected with the virus, who lose their minds and attack all people.
The first 2/3 of the film gives me the greatest feeling, although the scenes where the heroine appears in the back and the male protagonist and the night devil fight are also wonderful, but for me, when I see the male protagonist driving his dog to the empty street every day, repeating the broadcast by the lake, the loneliness of the world overflowed from the screen and poured into my surroundings.
I used to think that living alone outside and living a life of two o'clock and one line every day was already a great loneliness. Not long ago, I watched a Korean movie about a few children smashing an egg, and then they are trapped in time, and the few days that outsiders experience are long decades for those children.
At first, the children felt that the world was very fresh, and compared to them, everything in the world was frozen in that moment. The birds in the sky stop in the air, the fallen leaves in the trees are half a foot off the ground, and the foot of the pedestrian on the road has not yet fallen... And they can also do things that they dare not do in their daily lives, either eating things that do not cost money unscrupulously, or they can go anywhere they want. But soon, they got tired of it, and they tried desperately to make the people around them move, but in vain, and then a child could not stand this loneliness and chose to commit suicide.
Back to this film, the content tells that the male protagonist is an extremely self-disciplined person, and for the past 1,000 days, he has been exercising, going out, cooking, and sleeping every day according to the plan. What's more, while living a life of one man and one dog, he also caught night devils to do experiments and try to study the virus serum. But he is still a lonely person, he will feel lonely, so he will put dolls in the store, he will treat them as real people, he will chat with the dolls...
Especially when his dog died, the feeling of powerlessness in his eyes made my heart beat a few points faster, which was too contagious. Zombies besieged the city, how lonely it is when there is only one person left, only cans to eat, only one house is safe, think about it, think about it, it is better to live than to die.
At the end of the movie, I learned that "I am a legend" has two meanings, on the one hand, it refers to the story of the male protagonist's lonely survival in New York, which is dangerous; on the other hand, it also refers to the male protagonist hunting the night devil during the day when the night devils cannot appear, which is a legend in the perspective of the night devil.
The film is very profound, thinking about the grand proposition of the alternation of new and old species, when a new species reaches a greater number and strength than humans, does human beings become "alien" to new species?
I heard that the movie made two endings, and there is also an ending that the male protagonist committed suicide. I might be more inclined to that ending, because it fits into the saying that loneliness only makes people stronger, not kills a person, and despair can.