The new movie I am Legend cries the catch phrase “The last man on Earth is not alone”. Matheson’s book on which the movie is based has Vampires and a rather pessimistic twist at the end, offering us interesting thoughts about xenophobia. The point to the new interpretation is much simpler. Will Smith’s character will be fine in a zombie-filled world because god is with him.

All the ridiculous suffering in that occurs in this movie is reduced to human ignorance. In trying to cure cancer, scientists unwittingly introduce an airborne virus that turns its hosts into zombies. It is this “playing god” (in inverted commas for many reasons) that leads to the destruction of the majority of the people in the world. Blatant cross-bearing and prayer seems tame after Will Smith’s character is given a Jesus-like sacrifice for the good mankind deal and the small human settlement that survives has a few buildings and a big fuck-off church.

Not only is the flimsy at best free will defence employed, but the movie fucks up its theology in trying to make a zombie film into a jesus story. For starters, it should be pointed out that it’s not a fucking sacrifice if the one who is being sacrificed tried to commit suicide a few hours beforehand and has no reason to live.

Most importantly for the bad theology, these types of “playing god” ideas are implicitly new-age environmentalist at heart. The logic runs something like this: god is good, what god made is good, if we interfere there is the possibility of making it bad. Maybe this is how environmental extremists sometimes value the natural world over humanity itself, relegating us to being simple groundsman here to serve the world’s bidding in some impossible communication with a pantheistic being. But in Genesis, Adam is given dominion over the world. The Christian analogy fails here too.

What’s worse is that the “playing god” scenario isn’t even a Christian idea - it was stolen from the Greeks and their silly ideas about fate. Oedipus tries to change the natural order of things, and being a mortal, eventually fails.

The idea of the wrongness of interfering is an impossible one, even if a god sat up in heaven stroking his beard in our general direction. Geneticists often get accused of “playing god” in manipulating DNA. But when it comes down to it, how could one not interfere? We have been genetically modifying animals for centuries, choosing which stock to keep, valuing those that are most ‘domesticated’. An analogy can be made with the larger picture: how could we tend to the world, living in it and manipulating it (even by sitting still), without interfering with it? Ways of knowing what’s best for the world involve living in the world and current religious zealousness conceives of us as mere visitors that should leave the place as we found it when we leave. Just as circumstance is going to affect genetics, every one of our actions will be interfering with the world and “playing god” because we’re part of it.

The movie closes on a shut-in compound, enclosed from the world and centering on the church. Now I think about it, it does seem fitting. Otherworldliness thinks itself to be clean and free from the dirt of our animal, worldly and finite behaviour. Truth is that no man is ever an island and anyone thinking themselves outside of the world is simply deluding themselves.