It is 2012 in New York City where one man is trying hard to stay alive and not be devoured by vampire-like beings who are afraid of the light and only come out at night. Three years ago, Robert Neville (Will Smith) was a military scientist living in a Washington Square townhouse with his wife and young child. Then a deadly virus swept like wildfire through the population resulting in an order to evacuate the city. Neville sent his loved ones to safety while he stayed behind to try and find a cure for this scourge in his state-of-the-art laboratory. Now most of the world's population has been wiped out, and he may be the last hope for the human race.

Neville's only companion is Sam, his German Shepherd, who accompanies him in his Mustang on daily forays to find food. Although his apartment is well-stocked, he likes to hunt deer among the herds of animals that run through the streets packed with empty cars, trash, and waist-high grass. He carries on conversations with mannequins in a DVD store, picks corn in Central Park, breaks into empty apartments to find canned goods, and returns home at sundown to watch his favorite videos, such as Shrek. Each day he broadcasts radio messages asking any other survivors to meet him at noon at the South Street Seaport, but so far nobody has come. Then one day a young woman (Alice Braga) and a boy (Charlie Tahan) show up. She says that God has spoken to her about a community of survivors in Vermont and wants Neville to go there with her. But he insists on carrying on his experiments to find a cure.

Francis Lawrence directs this story based on Richard Matheson's classic 1954 sci-fi novel. We found it incredibly scary, perhaps because one of the first scenes in the film shows a corner near where we live covered with quarantine signs, and later in the film, Neville walks into the same building where we were screening the film. Just a little too close for casual film-viewing! Will Smith puts in a stellar performance as the hard-pressed scientist. For most viewers, the fascination will come from contemplating what it would be like if a plague hit that couldn't be stopped and identifying familiar New York landmarks transformed into a jungle of rubble, junk, grass and wild animals.


Special DVD features include 4 animated comics: "Death as a Gift", "Isolation", "Sacrificing the Few for the Many", and "Shelter".