WE GOT A SITUATION

While reading the novel Oryx and crake I found a significant amount of similarities between the novel and the movie I am legend.  They both involve mass destruction of their somewhat corrupted futuristic society, and the characters just about have the same scenarios of survival. Another significant scenario was when Jimmy is witnessing the death of his mother. All his life he had been secretive about his mother, to keep her hidden from authority and after so much time, there he was watching her die through a TV screen. She had given him a pet named “killer” and it he would never forget it. In I am Legend, we witness how hard Robert tries to protect his family from the infected humans. He puts his wife and daughter in a helicopter out of New York, just as he tells them goodbye, his daughter gives him a baby German shepherd. As the helicopter goes up, a mass of mutants sabotage another helicopter which then collides with the helicopter that Roberts’s wife and daughter were put into. Robert finds himself gazing upon his family’s death with his daughter’s puppy in his arms.

     As I read through Margaret Atwood’s’ Oryx and Crake, pages 173-280, I had realized that I no longer attained the images of Margaret Atwood’s characters and scenarios, but the movie I am legend. In these sections of the novel, Jimmy is very much alone left with the carcass of many unknown beings surrounding him. Jimmy later on finds himself trapped in an establishment and he is being hunted by the notorious genetically modified “pigoons.” He tries every tactic to lure them away and escape their blood thirsty snarls. Jimmy shelters himself in a watch tower, finds a radio and tries to contact someone-anyone. In the movie, the character, Robert Neville, is the last human in the city. He goes out everyday to send out radio messages in search to find anyone else out there. He too shelters himself from the “infected” scientifically modified but corrupted beings. He walks up and down the destroyed streets of his city with nothing but death surrounding him. He dwells behind the darkness and emptiness of his home to protect himself from the mutants. He to begins to be hunted.

    The novel and the movie share similar ideas. They aware both settings of the future and science in society. What waits for us in the future? Will we be faced with mutants and devastation as well? Many novels and movies indicating “the future,” present only devastation, clones, and mutants. Is there ever truly a happy ending?