“Light up the darkness.”

     These three words mean everything to “I Am Legend,” the third such celluloid adaptation of a Richard Matheson ("What Dreams May Come," "The Incredible Shrinking Man," " A Stir of Echoes") novel of the same name (the first starring Vincent Price and the second Charlton Hesston, decades ago) – three words that underscore the real conflict of the movie, which is often misunderstood as “the Fresh Prince versus a bunch of fleet-footed zombies.”

     What I think we’re really supposed to hear is the power of God, a promotion of the idea of Divine (Christian) optimism – everything happens for a reason, there is no such thing as coincidence – in a pessimistic, cynical world. Faith lights up the darkness; it supercedes science and all the notions of Socratic determinism that serve as the foundation of modern society.

     Science is responsible for the end of the world, after all, for the zombies (vampires in the book), and we’re given the image of a cross swinging against a blanket of white when Neville is in that place between consciousness and dream after Anna saves him, presumably where he is closest to his spiritual center.

     When Robert and his family are being scanned for the virus at the bridge, his wife reads as infected. He panics and demands that they scan her again, and she comes up clean. Either technology is flawed or Robert’s hope-beyond-hope faith can work miracles.

     In any case, it is God who triumphs and the inadequacy of Science that fails.