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(NaturalNews) Will Smith's latest blockbuster hit, I Am Legend, opens with the premise that medical researchers engineered a cure for cancer that required injecting (or "infecting") patients with a genetically-modified virus that blocks the growth of cancer tumors. Early human trials were extremely successful (a 100 percent cure rate), but the virus quickly mutated into a rabies-like strain, causing subjects to rapidly (and rabidly) devolve into beasts of aggression and superhuman strength who fear ultraviolet radiation from sunlight.

The epidemic begins in New York, and in order to contain the outbreak, U.S. military officials seal off the island, destroy the bridges and impose a strict quarantine. It is from this backdrop that Will Smith plays the role of a lone hero-survivor who must survive the violent aggression of the mutated human beasts while desperately searching for a medical cure that might reverse the disease.

The film is part horror, part action and part drama. The CG scenes of an abandoned, weed-overgrown New York City are nothing less than astonishing. The CG animation of the infected human beasts is also spectacular. In terms of photography, sound design, special effects and screenplay, the movie delivers everything you might expect. Will Smith's acting, as expected, is also superb. He plays the emotional range of his character with heart-wrenching dynamism. He even nails the devolving psychological state of his character who, living in isolation from all other humans, begins to talk to mannequins as if they were his friends.

Not everything is perfect with the film, of course. The idea that Smith's character could be both an Army Lieutenant Colonel, a super fit athletic-looking workout junkie and a medical researcher working on a cure for the viral infection is a bit hard to swallow. The film is also a bit flat in its unwillingness to venture past the mere surface on issues like bioethics and the dangers that modern medicine's hubris poses to the future of humankind.

I believe that's because the filmmakers believe this movie to be nothing more than fiction. Most members of the public -- and most members of the modern medical community -- believe the same thing. Injecting humans with genetically-modified viruses could never cause a global pandemic, could it? Especially not if all the medical researchers only intended to help people, right? But as Smith's character says at one point in the movie, when talking about the loss of over 90 percent of the human beings on Earth, "God didn't do this. WE did."

Why I Am Legend Echoes a Dangerous Truth in Modern Medicine

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