Urban nature horror movie questions

[urbpan]

Possibly this post better belongs at soylent_screen , but since my questions have to do with urban nature, as represented in this film, I decided to ask them here.  My questions have to do with the most recent adaptation of I Am Legend starring Will Smith which came out last year.  I'm not planning on discussing how good it is as an adaptation of the novel (which seems to be a point of criticism) nor do I wish to compare it to other film adaptations (The Last Man on Earth 1964, Omega Man 1971, 28 Days Later 2002).  My questions are slightly spoilery, so I'm putting them behind a cut.


The first thing I noticed about post-virus New York City, is that there are weeds growing out of the roads.  I thought this was very cool, and then paid close attention to the timeline in the flashbacks.  The virus release happens about two and half years before the main action of the movie.  I found the level of weed growth to be plausible.  I was disappointed with the vagueness of the rendering of the weeds, but all the cgi in this movie was pretty vague--the weeds, the deer, the lions, the monsters, they all were about as detailed as the background of a Grand Theft Auto game.  Specifically, I wanted to see some Ailanthus saplings here and there, but I should be happy that there were weeds at all.  I haven't seen that done in any post apocalypse movie that I can think of .  Have you seen this done anywhere?  I'd gladly act as a weed consultant for any filmmaker planning on it.

Now then, the deer:  Also a cool detail.  One problem.  The movie takes place on Manhattan Island, which has been isolated by the army destroying the bridges to it.  Are there any deer on Manhattan island today?  A small herd in Central Park perhaps?  It seems unlikely, since New Yorkers act like it's a major event when a freaking hawk nests in the city, and they go ballistic when they find a coyote in town.  Deer would probably get them to send the National Guard in.  Maybe they are escaped zoo animals. 

Which brings me to the lions.  Our hero is frustrated in his deer hunt when a pair of lions capture his intended prey.  They never say so (which I appreciate) but we have to assume these lions escaped from Central Park Zoo sometime almost immediately after the virus release.  Assuming they ate some zoo animals, and some central park prey, I think it's plausible that two African lions could survive two years on Manhattan Island.  They would have suffered through the two winters, but hey, there used to be lions in Northern Europe, so it's not impossible.  Are the lions and the deer the only animals to escape from the zoo?  Probably.  For all I know there are extra stories written around what happened at the zoo after the virus release, in comic books or dvd extras or whatever.  Maybe the crazed human victims released the lions by throwing their nearly indestructible bodies against the exhibit glass until it broke.  Maybe a crazed zookeeper released them when they realized that they were trapped on the island, and wanted their beloved lions to survive (oops, better release the deer, too, so the lions don't starve to death).

Now then, when Will Smith is trying to commit zombie-induced suicide, and is saved by the lady and her son, I wasn't thinking at the time "hey, how the hell did she get on the island?"  But I'm thinking it now.  For that matter, how'd she get off the island and back on the expressway up to Vermont?  And do they really think those walls are zombie-proof?  Those things are like berzerk treefrogs, they can get anywhere (except into a coal chute). 

And yes, I'm calling them zombies, even though they can be asphixiated, shot, and poisoned to death, because that's what they basically are.  Let's not split hairs or make up new words for things we already have words for.

The reason I enjoyed this movie, despite these nagging questions, is that I wasn't thinking of the questions during the movie.  It had me in enough suspense that it didn't break the spell.  Will Smith being Will Smith broke the spell a little bit, but I expected that.

Comments

[buboniclou.livejournal.com]

Deer can swim, and there are populations both on Long Island (east of Brooklyn and Queens, anyway) and in Westchester--those ones occasionally wander into the Bronx. It's not impossible that some would make their way to Manhattan.

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I was thinking those things during the film. For the woman and her kid to be on Manhattan, we have to assume that the army failed to get around to all the bridges. There's certainly no plausible reason to make herculean efforts to get on the island. Perhaps they didn't get around to taking out the Lincoln tunnel before the troops panicked and broke ranks.

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

Deer in Manhattan at present are all tourists, as best as I know, but post-apocalypse I bet they could swim over from the Bronx and colonize without too much trouble.

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

See, this is what happens when my computer cashes in mid-reply, I get scooped by someone who says it better.

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

There are no deer running wild in Manhattan. As far as I know, there are no lions or deer in the Central Park Zoo. The only large predators I can recall in Central Park are the 2 polar bears. They have sea lions, penguins, puffins, an Arctic fox, a bunch of monkeys and assorted birds and reptiles, and red pandas.

About 20 years ago, someone in the National Puzzlers' League wrote a puzzle in which you drop the first 2 letters in Iceland to get eland, and the puzzle was set up as taking place in a zoo in Reykjavik. It was discovered soon thereafter that there were no zoos in Iceland, and verse puzzles that set a plausible but yet impossible scenario were named "Icelandic zoos." I guess the lions and deer came from the Icelandic zoo.

The movie would have been a lot better if the zombies didn't have superpowers.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I see that the Bronx Zoo has African lions, which could have followed the deer over to Manhattan, I suppose. They also have African wild dogs, which could have supported a horror movie of their own.

Iceland has a zoo, now. Time to redo the puzzle (I don't think they have any eland, though--too damn cold too much of the time).
http://www.randburg.com/is/reykjavik_family_park/

[mellawyrden.livejournal.com]

I always look for this kind of accuracy in films too. I haven't seen the Will Smith film (but don't mind the spoilers!)

What superpowers did the zombies have in I AM LEGEND? were they at least in keeping with some exaggeration of a dead body (stiff limbs, & emitting strange gaseous noises) or at least, with some depiction of the "disease" that made them zombies in the first place (as in 28 DAYS LATER which is, by far, one of the scariest movies I have ever seen!)

I see deer swimming across our river sometimes, maybe they swam to Manhattan? or drifted over on a piece of flotsam?

Zombie superpowers

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

They were all extremely athletic, fast, and almost acrobatic. They could climb buildings quickly (not like spiderman, but almost). They are shown several times breaking bulletproof glass by repeatedly running full speed into it. They were definitely not dead (Will Smith has captured dozens of them to test cures on them, and they have all died from his cures). His dog catches the disease, and he's able to strangle it to death.

Re: Zombie superpowers

[mellawyrden.livejournal.com]

The contradictions sound similar to the vampires in FROM DUSK TO DAWN... where the vampires were super-strong, but at the same time, people could also walk up to them and rip their arms off in a fight. It didn't make sense, and I stopped trusting the movie.

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

Re: weeds: If I'm not misremembering (which I may be), I think both Forrest Gump and Slingblade indicated neglect by showing weeds. In Forrest Gump, when they went back and visited the house in which Jenny grew up and she started throwing rocks at it, the house had some weeds grown up around it. They didn't seem big enough, though. Maybe it was just dead shrubbery. Then in Slingblade, I thought (can't find the scene online) when Karl went to visit his father, there were weeds all grown up around the outside.

As others have noted, deer swim.

I was wondering whether lions swim, and, not being all that familiar with the geography of New York City, I wondered if there might have been ice they could have crossed. Since I didn't know, I looked at a map, and it appears that the only thing that makes Manhatten Island an island at all is the Harlem River.
By the looks of it, I'm not sure it could keep a hungry, enterprising cat from getting on the island. Especially around either the Madison Ave. Bridge or the 145th Street Bridge, there are big foundations for the bridge supports that stick up just a little above the water in the middle of the river. Particularly at the Madison Ave. Bridge, the river is pretty narrow. I went to street view on Google Maps right on the shore at that point, and it looks like, especially with a collapsed bridge in the water, it could ice up enough to cross. If so, the lions could have come from anywhere in the eastern US or Canada.

I'd imagine the lady and her son (was it her son?) got on and off the island the way humans usually do when there aren't bridges: find something that floats. Of course, that makes me question the value of destroying the bridges in the first place, assuming the zombies could have made rafts. Since they managed to duplicate Will Smith's snare, it would seem they'd be capable.

[buboniclou.livejournal.com]

The East River must be poison to zombies as well as humans. This is clearly the only answer.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I like the ice bridge idea--that makes a lot of sense, especially if industry and auto pollution had abated enough. We have water in Boston that doesn't freeze because of storm run-off and (presumably) oil and salt from the road.

Alexis says "no, it wasn't her son."

[lavenderjones.livejournal.com]

Lions do not like water, and do not swim. Tigers are the only large cat that will swim. ...

Yeah, crawling back into my crevice now.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

I don't know what weeds grow in New York so the vagueness of them didn't bother me in the film. If people get the plants wrong in films set where I know what kinds of the plants to expect it really annoys me though. There's a film called The Wind that Shakes the Barley and all I could think about all the way through it was the absurdity of the coniferous plantations they had all around the place. We didn't have those back in those days!

I enjoyed abandoned New York in the film though. I love that kind of stuff, so I don't really require that much accuracy when I'm enjoying myself. Lovely dog too.