I Am Legend
Jesus, this is even more religious than Jurassic Park. Not only do they praise the Lord before going away on the chopper, everyone hangs around with massive crucifix pendants, and the whole plot is just a crisis of faith.
The protagonist is actually a religious Anthony Fauci, if his alma mater was Seal Team 6. Being played by Will Smith, you know this is gonna be like I, Robot, the “character” is his persona (with medical traits).
After pulling a Contagion and trying to evacuate his family first, and their helicopter gets blown up by people trying to skip the line on another helicopter, he stays in Ground Zero, raising the German Shepard that dodged a bomb.
After a thousand days of meticulously trialling vaccine candidates and shit, his dog nearly dies when chasing a deer and he manages to catch an infected girl by baiting her with his immune blood. Like any vampire zombie, she is useful for human experiments on the vaccines, but it’s a dud, another compound that fails.
The next day he’s still pissed about yet another failure, so he gets drunk, falls into one of his own traps, and nearly dies, managing to get home in the nick of time. The dog, last lifeline to his family, is infected and he needs to strangle it personally. Good thing he’s training a lot, it’s not easy to choke a German Shepard.
After all that, he just about had it with the motherfucking Night Seekers on this motherfucking City, so he drives recklessly at night until being rescued by a girl and a child. They are also survivors like him, but their faith remains unbreakable, they are on track to some Vermont utopia (Let’s Go Bernie!).
She says it straight, God made her do it, she knows it’s real because God said so. At least He did not tell her to kill the kid. But the zombie vampires smelled blood and launch a coordinated attack into their residence, managing to break him.
After running for a while, they trap themselves in the basement, and continue the religious talk after finding the zombie vampire girl is recovering, that compound was indeed the cure!
He is faithless, so gives her the cure, so she can spread the good word towards the survivors. Our protagonist redeems himself by blowing up a grenade on an enclosed space, he and the vampire zombies must have all be sweating a lot.
At the start he says the vampire zombies are just mindless killing machines, but during the film they reveal themselves an actual society, where the flock is trying to recover the female member kidnapped by the protagonist. Their leader exposes himself to sunlight on purpose, and launches coordinated attacks by screaming. This subplot is dropped to include more religious content.
What was showing on Broadway? Batman vs Superman, Wicked, Legally Blonde the Musical. Nothing really changed in all these years.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.