Technically a zombie movie, I am Legend smartly keeps its zombies out of sight until well into the movie, which serves to focus on the existential plight of its protagonist. Robert Neville, played with revealing sensitivity by Will Smith, is apparently New York City's sole surviving human-or at least the sole surviving human not turned into a sunlight-allergic zombie by a virus engineered to cure cancer.

We witness the affection he showers on his dog and conversations with mannequins that keep together his fragile sanity and strained psyche. His solitariness in an urban landscape that is slowly turning feral provides some unique pursuits for Robert, such as hunting deer in a racing car through New York's deserted streets, and generates some truly mesmerising cinema.

His isolation ends with the appearance of Anna, who rescues Robert when he suffers a bout of self-destructiveness. Anna, in her faith that there is a colony of survivors somewhere, quickly emerges as the spiritual foil to the rational-minded Robert, a military scientist who is still intent on finding a cure. It is evident that faith in god and science serve to sustain Anna and Robert respectively, and the film is recast along that tension, which is ultimately poorly resolved by a Shyamalan-esque epiphany.

I won't ruin it by telling you who, if anyone, gets out alive, but the ending, an image of a strange and perverse utopia, a diametric reflection of derelict New York City seems like an odd cop-out: heavy gates open to an idyllic town guarded by soldiers with an American flag drowsily whipping in the air and a church steeple in the distance. Then the camera is above to deliver an airplane's view of the habitation surrounded by impenetrable high-walls. It's a fantasy of a refugee camp, a mirage of tranquil wholesomeness that has a whiff of sanctimonious piety, and ultimately an act of Hollywood self-sabotage.

In Charlie Wilson's War, refugee camps provide the few sombre scenes in a movie that is almost too incredibly jocular (if sardonic) about one American congressman's instrumental efforts to fund the Afghans in their 10-year conflict against the Soviet Union. This is a film that manages a bubbly glaze over international arms-dealing, CIA political engineering, and even helicopters firing upon villages. Tom Hanks is the eponymous Charlie Wilson, a liberal Texan Democrat and a veritable libertine who emerges as the impious conscience of the film. He is nudged by Julia Robert's character, Joanne Herring-a right-wing Christian, staunch anti-communist, very rich socialite-into taking up the cause of the Afghan mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviets. The pair are rounded off by the brilliant Philip Seymore Hoffman as the blunt and brazen CIA operative Gust Arvakotos.

Like I Am Legend, the tension between religion and secularism comes to dominate the film. Sometimes delicately, sometimes inelegantly, it attempts to foreshadow the rising religiosity that will mark the so-called 'Clash of Civilisations'. When our trio brings another American Congressman to visit an Afghan refugee camp, his promise of American arms and training in a speech evokes a dangerous edge of fanaticism on both sides of the equation. At one point Wilson warns wanly: "I think what's got Gus worried is that sooner or later, God will be on both sides."
Charlie Wilson's War is undoubtedly entertaining, in no small part because of the zippy conversations that mix humor, ideological debate and political bargaining, all with a lilt of levity by its cast of charismatic characters. However, considering what came next, it leaves something of a bitter aftertaste that doesn't sit comfortably in the mind. And perhaps it is all the better for that.

I AM LEGEND
Director: Francis Lawrence.
Cast: Will Smith, Alice Braga.
2007. 100 min.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR
Director: Mike Nichols
Cast: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymore Hoffman, Amy Adams, Om Puri.
2007. 97 min.