Oops, sorry. I forgot -- we can't call them vampires. Maybe some copyright issue with 30 Days of Night or something. The closest they come to getting a collective name is the "Night Seekers," which sounds, apart from ridiculous, like a paperback by R. L. Stine.
Anyway, Neville roams the impressively rendered abandoned city streets, scrounging for food in scary dark buildings, broadcasting his distress signal on AM stations, walking through a lot of tall grass, and working on his various Apple computers with their "six redundant hard drives." He must be a pretty busy guy, since he found time to make enough money to own an apartment on Washington Square North, become an Army Lieutenant Colonel, study immunology, train to be a survival expert, and still had a few hours left over to somehow spread the deadly virus.
About 33% of this move is flat-out awesome; that accounts for half of the first two acts. The scenes of deserted New York are simply stunning. Long show-off shots of grassy streets -- abandoned Humvees barricading evacuation routes, forgotten Christmas decorations glinting eerily in the summer sun, crickets dominating the silent cityscape -- are the coolest ever put to film.
Add to that source material by Richard Matheson (writer of some of the best Twilight Zone episodes) and some superb acting by Smith, whose portrayal of a man as burnt-out as the cars lining his street dominates the potentially overpowering computer-created scenery and drives the film forward, and you've got one hell of a formula for a successful movie.
Nonetheless, the night-time sequences, and pretty much all of the final act, resemble a jam sandwich dropped into the body cavity during open-heart surgery: a bloody unfortunate mess. The pale, all-CG vamp� Night Seekers are more silly than scary, and their rendering somehow resembles that of cut-scene bad guys from 90s PC shooters. They are about as unrealistic and unneccesary as the wolves from The Day After Tomorrow, and serve much the same purpose: to jump out and scare you without causing any real harm to anyone.
After a tense sequence with infected hounds (who are conveniently allowed out earlier than infected people are, although I'd be more worried about squirrels, personally -- there are a lot more of them, and they are already evil enough), Smith hits an emotional high point that only serves to show how crappy the rest of the movie will be by comparison.
The addition of two new survivors is a pointless move, as one of them does nothing but gets scared and hide, necessitating his rescue. It's a cheap move to motivate a flagging script and, like a jab of adrenaline to the heart of a dead hooker, fails to resuscitate it.
By this point the previously small plot holes are ripped open into gaping bloody wounds by digital fangs. Where did they get all of these shiny Ford trucks, outfitted with winches and brushbars and KC lights? How does Anna drive into and out of Manhattan when all of the bridges and tunnels have been destroyed? Why can't the Infected figure out how to kill deer or work a can-opener, if they can set an elaborate trap? Why can't they just swim off the island? How can they bust through a steel door in 10 seconds but take 10 minutes to break one made of Plexiglass?
I guess none of this really matters. The central message of the film, as painfully apparent as the "butterfly" theme, is delivered via an unnecessary end-credit voice-over: Light Up The Darkness. This is very good advice: the daylight sequences of this movie were so spectacular, and the dark ones with the vampires so sucky, director Francis Lawrence should have just taken the Infected as read and stuck with answering the film's deeper questions, like couldn't Neville have just thrown the damn hand-grenade? How can a Mustang, with a solid rear-axle and no traction control, corner so well? How could Batman and Superman ever have a crossover?
If only they had listened to Bob Marley.
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