The conceptualization of being alone in New York attains a layered realism which will impress an audience: the eerie silence, except for the wind, blowing leaves and debris down deserted streets; the weeds surfacing stoically through cracked tarmac; the ribboned road repairs to surface cracks which seem ironically and poignantly irrelevant; the herds of dead cars, which the accumulated dust turns into yet more debris. The opening sequences of an inner city, devoid of people, is eerie, no less so because the sky continues to be jauntily blue and cheerful clumps of cirrus cumuli practically dance across the tops of skyscrapers. The skyscrapers themselves are beautiful, immaculate, and faceless: they are dead things.
The prospect of watching one actor stagger through 90 minutes of a feature film may appear daunting. It did to me. However, this film raises some interesting ideas – about being the last human being on the planet…or, at least, thinking that one is the last. There is so much of the material that is awash around Neville and yet it is worthless. Under a highway bridge, money lies in droves, driven into corners, symbolically lying in the dark next to a dead buck. Smith enters apartments laden with luxury goods but desires none of them. Wild life, in the form of lion (arouses some skepticism) and buck have re-entered the city; they prowl and bound between parked cars and prance across parking lots. They remain elusive, though; our hero, Neville, demonstrates a remarkable lack of skill or inclination to shoot them. He tries, but his dog, Sam, still ends up with a vegetable bake for dinner.
Another idea to grip the gut is the loneliness, of being deprived of human company. Neville fares well, remaining optimistic while he has the company of man’s best friend, his dog. However, when his mutt leaps to his defence in a battle with ‘The Dark Seekers’, a euphemism for those WASP people, naked and hairless, who prowl the streets at night, desirous of meat and blood, rabid as a result of an infection of KV Virus, a mutation of an alleged cancer-cure gone wrong. Neville visits his Video shop, talks to shop dummies and his dog, and takes out news films which portend to promise other people on the planet. The TV is a nocturnal comfort and we suspend realism about a continued water supply and the convenience of a personal generator. When the dog, Sam, succumbs to the virus and Neville is forced to strangle it, Neville’s psychological state deteriorates thereafter until a nocturnal car dash at a group of ‘Dark Seekers’ is interpreted as a suicide attempt.