Serving Bread

I am Legend
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Based on a novel by Richard Matheson
Rating:

Summary:

What if disease wipes out every living being in the world and the only person left is you and your dog? In this adaptation from a Richard Matheson novel, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) finds himself the lone survivor of a deadly disease that wiped out most of humanity and rendered a disease upon the remnant that transformed them into zombies of sorts.By day, Neville is hunting for his food in the vast wasteland of Manhattan, and by night, he is holed up in his home in fear of the creatures who prowl at night. After three years of such routines, Neville is convinced that there are no other survivors and that there is no cure to heal these humans who have turned to monsters.

Neville is the scientist who was supposed to find a cure for this virus, but after years of trials, he has been unsuccessful. And after a battle with the darkseekers that scars him, Neville has lost all hope of remaining as the sole survivor.

What is fascinating about this movie are its religious overtone. On face value, this is a science fiction movie about zombies, but on a deeper level, it’s a movie rich with theological meaning.

Some Theological Insights:

• The dark seekers are afraid of the light. They prowl the streets at night, feeding on the darkness. They have lost their humanity and have become evil creatures. They are a fantastic visual illustration of sin. Sin lives in darkness. It feeds on darkness and cannot survive in the light. Killing sin requires us to bring it to the light.
• Neville concludes that God does not exist and that the death of the world was due to humanity. The truth is that the responsibility for destruction and disease in our world is not because of God, but because of humans.
• Ana finds Neville and tells him that God had sent her to him because she had heard God speak to her. God speaks to us in the midst of the chaos of life and death that we witness around us. Do we have ears to hear God speaking to us?
• Just as God sends Ana to Neville, God sends us to people and sends people to us. A significant way that God intervenes in the world is through people. Do we have eyes to see God sending people to us?
• There is a cure for the dark seekers, but they don’t want it. They do not know life apart from their state of being. They are blind to themselves. We can reject the cure for our sin—which is Jesus. We can find ourselves too content with our evil. John 1.10-11: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”
• Neville saves the cure and the world by martyring himself. The death of one would save the world. Jesus’s death would catalyze salvation in our world.

I am sure I missed a few other theological insights, but I’ve got enough for a powerful illustration in a future sermon. I am not much of a science fiction person, so I cannot critique the sci-fi of the movie. (I do have some questions whether the logic of the science fiction makes sense) but as a movie that illustrates life, death, sin, salvation, hope and belief, this movie does a great job.

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