I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Last Man Standing

Director Francis Lawrence's 2007 adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend has seen two Blu-ray releases, both in 2008 when the format was still relatively young. A single-disc edition appeared in March of that year, followed in December by an Ultimate Collector's Edition with additional extras and a digital copy. Now, eight years later, Warner has chosen to give the post-apocalyptic adventure a 4K makeover, and the result is a pleasant surprise.

Screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc. Watch for 4K screenshots at a later date.

I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: The included screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc. Watch for 4K screenshots at a later date.

Revisiting I Am Legend after some years reminded me of just how inventively Lawrence and his production team realized Robert Neville's decaying metropolis. The CG-enhanced vistas of Manhattan going to seed and overrun by wildlife look spectacularly detailed on this 4K presentation, with deep blacks, strong contrast and fine detail that enhances both long shots of wrecked vehicles and crumbling buildings, as well as closeups of Neville's anguished face and the makeshift fortress he has constructed in his downtown brownstone. Colors are rich, strong and vibrant, e.g., the greenery that is gradually taking over the street (and also Neville's cultivated fields), the bright red of Neville's vehicle (and also of the helicopter in which, in flashback, his family tries to escape), and the multi-colored costumes in which the lonely soul has dressed the mannequins he uses as company. The computer-generated "dark seekers" who are hunting Neville still look less than convincing, but that is a limitation of the original CG animation.

Now, the interesting question is how much of the video improvement in I Am Legend's 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD presentation is attributable to 4K and HDR and how much to improved authoring. Since the film was finished on a digital intermediate at 2K, the UHD is an up-conversion. However, the previous Blu-rays were early Warner releases, encoded with VC-1 at low average bitrates of under 17 Mbps, and it is possible (indeed, likely) that some degree of high frequency filtering was applied to those masters, as was all-too-common in the format's early years. Regardless of the reason, however, the UHD presentation of I Am Legend represents a notable upgrade over its previous Blu-ray iterations.

A final note, which I am borrowing from one of my esteemed colleagues: I'd caution against any comparison of my scores on this release with scores of the previous Blu-rays. There's no guarantee I would have scored those discs the same way Marty did, and conversely Marty might very well have scored this release differently than I have.

[Viewed on a system calibrated using a Klein K10-A Colorimeter with a custom profile created with a Colorimetry Research CR250 Spectraradiometer, powered by SpectraCal CalMAN 2016 5.7, using the Samsung Reference 2016 UHD HDR Blu-ray test disc authored by Florian Friedrich from AV Top in Munich, Germany. Calibration performed by Kevin Miller of ISFTV.]

I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The previous Blu-rays of I Am Legend featured a 5.1 soundtrack encoded in Dolby TrueHD. The same soundtrack appears on the 4K disc, but encoded in DTS-HD MA. Since both formats are lossless, the tracks should be identical, with the possible exception of overall volume levels. Please refer to Marty's evaluation of the soundtrack here and here.

I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The 4K disc contains the commentary by director Francis Lawrence and writer/producer Akiva Goldsman that was previously exclusive to the Ultimate Collector's Edition. The standard Blu-ray included in the package is a reissue of the original single-disc edition, which contains the extras previously discussed here, of which the most important is the alternate cut of the film with a very different ending.

I Am Legend 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It is unfortunate that Warner chose not to include the second disc of extras from the Ultimate Collector's Edition of I Am Legend, which would have made the 4K release a definitive package. Nevertheless, the commentary track is a welcome addition, and the improved video presentation is worth having. I Am Legend remains an effective and suspenseful sci-fi action thriller, anchored by a solidly understated performance by Will Smith. Recommended.