If a scientist created a virus that killed
and mutated everyone into Darkseekers except
you, the last surviving virologist, what would
you do?
In this How to Beat video, we’ll follow
Dr. Neville, see if we can make better decisions,
and ultimately attempt to beat the Darkseekers
in, I Am Legend.
If you think you have a better way, let me
know in the comments!
If you like these how to beat videos, consider
subscribing.
We start out following the news, with Dr.
Alice Krippin giving us the skinny on her
new bio-weapon against diseases.
Dr. Krippin mentions that her cancer-killing
virus was created by re-engineering the measles
virus, and that there have been 10,009 clinical
trials in humans so far, all of whom are cancer-free
now.
It seems crazy and reckless, but it’s not.
This is called oncolytic virotherapy, and,
get ready for it, clinical trials testing
a re-engineered measles virus as an experimental
cancer therapy is currently underway.
It’s not as dangerous as you might think
though.
The virus is attenuated to only be able to
replicate inside of cancer cells.
Once the cancer is gone, the virus dies off.
The measles virus is a good oncolytic platform
because it’s inherently more selective and
potent against cancer cells, the vast majority
of the world’s population has been vaccinated
for it’s dangerous effects, and it’s airborne
and bodily fluids transmission methods can
be restricted.
It isn’t without risks though, and one of
the main goals of OV creation is limiting
the spread and transmission of them.
They usually have containment measures, monitoring,
and contingency plans implemented.
But for viruses like measles where there’s
already a widespread population immunity,
it can be considered unnecessary.
While OV’s are generally repurposed from
genetically stable viruses, like measles,
mutations that cause viruses to gain new cell
tropisms or lose restriction factors is a
significant concern.
Due to this evolutionary capacity present
in OV’s, safety kill-switches that are engineered
into the virus’s genome are being developed.
These kill-switches aren’t reliable for
the same reason that caused us to create them
in the first place, mutations.
According to the FDA’s clinical trial phases,
this virus is in Phase 4, so it has completed
years of testing in humans.
They should know about any dangerous effects
of this OV by now, so how did everything go
wrong?
My best guess is that a black swan mutation
occurred, re-activating previously terminated
pathology and inactivating kill-switches.
A pre-existing viral immunity can seriously
hinder efficacy of the OV, which is the case
with measles vaccinations, so it’s possible
that Dr. Krippin and her team chose to alter
the OV to bypass this immunity, increasing
the risk of an epidemic spread.
This mutated virus could easily jump containment
because measle’s is one of the most infectious
diseases in the world.
The Krippin Virus outbreak wasn’t caused
by sheer recklessness, it was just insanely
unlucky.
Three years later, we see that the world was
ravaged by the virus, and nature is starting
to consume human civilization.
It would appear that containment and contingency
plans had failed, but hey, at least they cured
cancer.
Unless you were a part of a tribe living in
the Amazon rainforest, this virus would be
inescapable.
Since this is 3 years post outbreak, you,
or I should say, your corpse, would be decomposed
into a pile of bones by now, with maggots
having picked off the last remaining pieces
of flesh attached to your skeleton.
NYC is really peaceful now, and to think,
all we had to do was get rid of 8 million
people.
Speaking of, where are all the 8 million skeletons?
Oh right, the PG-13 god lifted them all to
Heaven.
I’d like to see an R-rated version where
Will Smith is trudging through thousands and
thousands of bones littered all throughout
the streets and buildings.
We start out following Dr. Robert Neville,
a military virologist who is tearing up the
streets in a Shelby Mustang with an AR15 in
his lap and German Shepherd in the side seat.
Yep, this is how I would envision myself in
the apocalypse if I ever made it that far.
If you watched my other I Am Legend video
where I talk about How to Beat Dr. Neville
as the Darkseekers, you’ll see why Neville
surviving this long is highly unlikely.
As we’ll later see, the Darkseekers, which
are the infected that turned rabid instead
of dead, well, surprisingly they like the
dark.
Knowing this, I'd try to swipe some NVG’s,
or better yet, Thermal goggles off the military.
The virus doesn’t seem to have infected
animals, which makes sense because measles
is not spread by animals.
Hunting wild animals drive-by style with a
supercharged v8 muscle car seems impractical,
but this is 3 years into surviving alone and
looks fun as hell.
Neville failed to bag a deer in his car, so
he tries the stealth approach.
I’m not a hunter, but from what I've read,
I highly doubt you could sneak up within rock
throwing distance off a wild deer like that,
especially with his rifle parts clacking,
footsteps, smell, and his dog.
At least he’s not directly downwind.
Deer traps or just waiting for a deer to cross
your path would be more effective than chasing
it through the city.
Without humans around, the animal population
would explode so it shouldn’t be too hard
to catch one.
Looks like the lioness was the more effective
hunter this time.
Maybe this was his first encounter with the
lions, but knowing they are out here now,
I’d be more cautious roaming the streets
now.
Neville did decently well here, as you are
supposed to slowly back away with your front
toward the lion.
If you’re wondering where all the deer and
wild animals came from, New York City has
three major zoos that they could have come
from.
The zoo’s also house grizzly bears and snow
leopards, might be a good idea to stop by
the zoo and see what animals escaped or died.
His watch beeps, indicating sun-down is approaching.
And he knows they mostly come out at night,
mostly.
His alarm is set for 5:23, why not a nicer
number like 5:25, he’s clearly losing it
mentally.
Since the sun goes down at around 8pm in NYC,
he’s got 2.5 hours to get home before he
becomes the hunted.
2.5 hours is good, because if he hit a deer
or his car broke down, he could walk the entire
length of Manhattan before sun-down.
Neville returns to his home, which has IED’s
surrounding it for defense.
He uses vinegar to block his scent so that
the Dark Seekers can't track him down, which
is good because our human scent can linger
on the ground or things we touch for many
days.
What I'm confused about is how do the darkseekers
have that good of smell, and how did Neville
know about it.
He must've been lucky enough to witness their
capabilities early on, or else they’d have
found and killed him.
Neville’s got an excellent stock of food
and the canned food can pretty much last his
lifetime if stocked correctly.
In addition to bagging the occasional deer,
he won’t be in danger of starving.
According to the fridge poster, Neville was
a top military virologist working on the KV,
which could explain how he knew about a mutation
causing a heightened sense of smell.
During Sam’s bath, the second beep on his
watch happens, signaling lockdown.
How are you not going to get a neck crook
sleeping like that.
Sleeping in the bathtub right next to the
window isn’t a good idea.
Sound transmits through windows much more
than walls.
Brick wall has a sound transmission class
rating of around 50, which blocks most loud
noises, whereas single pane windows are around
20 which won’t even block a normal voice.
If Sam gets spooked and starts barking when
a darkseeker wanders close by, it’s over.
His primary defense is not being found.
Once they know his location, the Darkseekers
or any determined attacker could make entry
to his home with enough time, energy, and
some primitive tools.
Neville’s setup is basically a brick house,
armored windows, some traps outside, and various
guns placed around the house.
With his military knowledge, all the time
in the world, endless amounts of supplies,
I think he can do better.
Armored windows are good, but you’d also
want to armor the interior walls that joined
your house with the adjacent house, as well
as soundproof the house with acoustic sound
barriers.
What he’s missing is a dedicated safe room
if shit gets real.
He could repurpose one of his rooms and build
a reinforced concrete bunker with a door that
leads directly outside into the sunlight,
so if he is caught, he can safely exit at
sunrise.
With sunlight coming within 8 hours max, you
don’t really need much in the way of food,
water, supplies, plumbing, or power.
Neville has a PTSD flashback to the start
of the outbreak, where he is trying to get
his family out of NYC before the military
quarantine.
He remarks that the virus went airborne, suggesting
that they did originally restrict this transmission
method, but that the virus had mutated.
Yah, finding a cure, mass producing and distributing
it ain’t gonna happen in two weeks.
Staying in Manhattan because it’s ground
zero for the virus makes no sense either.
Finding the primary case, or patient zero,
is irrelevant.
You already know the cause of the disease,
how it came into existence, and how it broke
containment.
It won’t help you find a cure at all, but
even if it did, it’s going to be tough to
continue your research with most of the Manhattan
residents turning into zombies.
With the severity of the pandemic, he should
have been evacuated to a nearby Navy ship,
like the Arleigh-Burke class destroyer which
is stationed in Norfolk, Virginia where he
could meet up with Doctor Rachel Scott.
There they can either set up a makeshift lab
to continue research, or just get the hell
out of there and start a new society.
Damn Will Smith was jacked.
Treadmills indoors are actually smart.
You don't want to be at the last round of
your sprints when shit hits the fan.
You need all the energy, alertness, and prowess
possible, especially with fucking lions using
Manhattan as a hunting ground during the day.
Normally I'd say get out into the countryside
and only make occasional trips into the city
for supplies, but he's trying to use his own
innate immunity to find a cure in his basement
virology lab.
I think it’s important to make the distinction
of prophylactic vs therapeutic vaccines.
Prophylactic is used to bolster the immune
system with antibodies ready to fight a potential
threat.
Therapeutic is more synonymous with cure,
as they are used to treat those already infected
with a virus by enhancing the immune system’s
targeting or response abilities.
He is not working on a prophylactic vaccine
because it’s impossible.
To produce a vaccine from someone’s blood
a person needs to have the correct antibodies
in their system, which know how to fight the
infection.
Because Neville has innate genetic immunity,
he will never have had an adaptive immune
response to the virus which would’ve produced
Krippin antibodies in his blood.
Also there’s no point - As Neville points
out later, you could count with your fingers
the amount of uninfected people without an
innate immunity.
Even if you could create a vaccine, a highly
mutable disease like KV will have a very low
efficacy rate.
If that wasn’t a problem, how would you
even get the vaccine to these people?
If for some reason if he stumbled into a large
group of survivors that didn’t have a genetic
immunity, he should start with studying Darkseeker
blood and work to find or develop a weakened
form of the virus that could be used as an
immunological trigger, which coincidentally
is how the measles vaccine was created.
Neville is instead trying to reverse the Darkseekers
condition by creating a therapeutic vaccine
based on his own innate immunity.
This is also impossible, as the immunity is
based on his genetics.
You could theoretically create a cure by enhancing
everyone’s innate immune system, but that’s
not what Neville is talking about.
Funnily enough, oncolytic viruses fall under
the therapeutic vaccine umbrella, so he could
create another Neville OV which would destroy
the existing Krippin OV everyone’s infected
with.
Like fighting fire with fire.
Why not give it a shot, it’s not like you
can mess up and kill 7 billion people again.
Neville is not using the proper methods to
create a cure, but it doesn’t matter if
he was.
The proper methods for creating a cure for
this disease would be in the realm of bleeding
edge research.
Considering this movie was in 2007 as well,
I don’t think Neville will be making any
breakthroughs by himself in a basement lab
with no internet to research from or colleagues
to work with.
Even if he did develop a magical cure that
worked, there’s the massive problem of mass
manufacturing it and forcibly distributing
it to the darkseekers who want to murder and
eat you.
These aren’t your sickly people on hospital
beds.
You can’t just dart them with the cure either,
because the other darkseekers will just brutally
murder them.
You need to bring them back to a hospital
to restrain, monitor, and keep them safe from
other darkseekers.
As impossible as it is, working to find a
cure may be the only thing keeping Neville
sane in this post-apocalyptic world.
Since the cure idea is ludicrous, it’s probably
time to load the truck with supplies and head
out into the countryside.
With how easy it is to find Neville as a Darkseeker,
even without making a mistake it's just a
matter of time before they find him.
Neville is too stubborn and determined though.
Locking the door makes sense, it would ensure
that no darkseekers were hiding or sleeping
in the store somewhere, because they'd have
had to break down the windows or door.
I've always thought that the most underestimated
thing in the apocalypse was entertainment
so you don't go crazy.
He's lucky these physical stores still exist,
in the future when it's all Netflix and digital,
there won't be much physical movies, music,
or games available.
If you’re planning on making a doomsday
shelter, you might want to get a 100 terabyte
storage device and load up movies, games,
and music.
You could put enough movies on it to last
you a literal lifetime, or you might be able
to fit call of duty modern warfare on it.
He’s got his map, crossing off locations
he’s looted already.
I don’t see any pie slicing.
Ideally you’d want to clear the entire house
before letting your guard down.
I also think he should’ve rigged a UV light
attachment for his weapon.
Having a gun is still necessary for putting
them down fast, from a distance, or through
barriers, but the lamps would be a good close
range mob deterrent.
There’s another newspaper saying that infected
dogs can come out at dusk, probably because
their fur gives them some protection against
UV rays.
I guess KV can be transmitted to animals.
Neville is broadcasting a sos message on all
am frequencies.
This is a good call.
AM is used instead of FM because the lower
frequency band means the signal can travel
longer distances and penetrate better through
barriers like buildings.
He’s broadcasting at midday everyday, but
he should also try to have the radio automatically
broadcast a message at night.
In daytime, the AM signal can travel maybe
100 miles, but at nighttime the signal can
travel hundreds of miles by reflection from
the ionosphere, a phenomenon called "skywave"
propagation.
This would at least triple or quadruple the
radius of his SOS message.
Like we saw earlier, there’s no need to
chase down a deer, nor would you even be able
to physically.
Neville’s dog, Sam, chases the buck into
a dark building that likely has darkseekers
napping inside.
Honestly, if he didn’t go after Sam and
Sam got killed, Neville would lose it mentally
and die.
Chronic loneliness can lead to a 15 year shorter
lifespan on average, and this is based on
a study where human civilization hasn’t
been wiped out with you being the last man
on Earth.
It’s safe to say that his dog is the only
thing holding him together, and his survival
literally depends on Sam’s survival.
This would be a good time to have the Thermal
goggles with UV lights on your weapon.
Or if you could rig something together like
in Riddick Pitch Black but with UV light tubs.
In some cases, you can see recent footprints
with thermal goggles, which could indicate
where darkseekers are or where your dog went.
Hopefully that was the deer, and not Sam.
The hand over the light seems to add some
suspense I guess, but the Pentagon MD3R laser
light he has can be activated with a pressure
pad on the foregrip.
He’s using a 4x sight called an ACOG, which
isn’t ideal for urban environments where
you’re room clearing most of the time.
Adding a canted red dot or swapping it for
an eotech with 3x magnifier would be a better
option, and should've been accessible to him.
Fuck that tension when he see’s the deer.
In his pursuit of Sam, he runs into a group
of darkseekers in a huddle, sleeping while
standing to hibernate supposedly.
Like with the zombies in Cargo, why not lie
down instead?
He finds Sam and manages to not run into a
dead end in this dark maze of a building.
Neville jumps from the second or third story
with a darkseeker jumping out after him.
The darkseeker’s body breaks his fall and
burns to death within seconds.
Neville lays a trap to get another specimen
for his clinical trials, and one takes the
bait.
Seems like snaring a darkseeker pissed off
the other members of the hive.
Well that’s fucking terrifying.
I’d have blasted that dude right there.
The Alpha retreats back into the shadows and
Neville transports the subject back to his
lab.
He injects her with his breakthrough therapeutic
vaccine, which fails, like the many cure’s
he’s tried in the past.
Neville remarks in his logs that recent blood
tests confirm he’s still immune to the Krippin
Virus, while canines are immune to the airborne
strain only.
That’s a good move, with how mutable KV
is it’s important to continuously test your
immunity to it, but you might also want to
be wearing better PPE in case the airborne
virus becomes infectious to you.
It also doesn’t seem like a good idea to
have been petting your dog after your close
encounter earlier though.
He also says that behaviorally he thinks the
darkseekers are ignoring basic survival instincts
due to declining brain function and food scarcity.
Or maybe they have a social structure, and
got pissed when you snared one of their people.
Sounds human-ish to me.
Neville has another flashback to their escape
in the initial outbreak.
I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again.
If you live in NYC and something like this
happens, you’re dead.
If I was living in NYC, I'd get a paramotor.
If shit goes down, you can go to the roof
and fly off it and out of the city.
It's a pro survivor move you’ll only hear
about here.
Going for the bridge gates like the other
8 million infected and panicking people isn’t
a good idea, but Neville has a military escort.
At the evacuation points they are using eye
scanners to detect capillary damage in the
eye’s.
Wow, what an effective testing tool.
By now the virus is spreading like wildfire,
people are turning into darkseekers, and the
military is blowing up bridges with missiles.
If the threat is that severe, you wouldn’t
be using a low accuracy testing tool which
is letting the infected slip out of the city,
you would quarantine it immediately.
Nobody out.
For VIP’s like Neville who’s a top military
virologist, you don’t have them run for
the border like everyone else, you evacuate
them immediately and then quarantine them
at the secure destination, like the Navy ship
I mentioned earlier.
Neville’s driving home at sundown per usual,
but he sees Fred in a place he’s not supposed
to be at.
Fred's head turning is just Neville’s hallucination
from personifying them so much.
A sane mind would recognize this as a trap,
but Neville not only is underestimating their
intelligence, but has clearly lost it mentally.
Getting snared, banging his head knocking
him unconscious, the fall, getting shived
by his own knife, this evening isn’t going
well.
He needs to get his ass moving though.
He tries to pull the knife out, but actually
it's better to leave the knife in because
pulling it out could allow cut blood vessels
that are being squeezed or blocked by the
knife to begin bleeding profusely.
With this Darkseeker utilizing dogs to get
him, it’s clear Neville seriously underestimated
them in his behavioral assessments.
He almost gets his throat ripped out but Sam
fights off another dog and tackles the one
attacking Neville.
Unfortunately, Sam got bit.
God damn this is hard to watch.
Neville quickly brings Sam back to his home
and injects her with the potential cure that
appeared successful on a test rat, but the
compound is unsurprisingly ineffective.
Seconds later, Sam becomes fiercely aggressive
and attempts to bite Neville.
To save himself and spare Sam the pain and
suffering of being a canine darkseeker, Neville
is forced to strangle her.
I’m gonna go hug my dog now.
Sure, Neville could have restrained Sam until
he found his fictional cure, but I think he
wanted to spare his dog the agony.
The emptiness, loneliness, the irreversibility,
is just crushing.
I don’t know how much willpower he has left
to survive at this point.
Neville goes full suicidal rage mode trying
to take as many down with him as possible,
before he’s killed by the Alpha, he’s
rescued by another survivor who heard his
call on the radio.
If only she came a day earlier.
Before slipping into unconsciousness, he manages
to tell her his house address and that she
needs to keep driving until dawn so the darkseekers
can’t track them home.
Flashback and his wife and son are killed
in a helicopter crash because another heli
flew into them.
Thanks brain, for that lovely dream.
He wakes up, and his rescuer had patched up
his knife wound, given him some antibiotics,
and fixed him breakfast.
This woman is a god damn angel.
Neville gets pissed when Anna gives him what
he thinks is false hope, that there’s a
survivor colony in Vermont.
Anna says that the virus can’t survive the
cold up there, which is misguided.
Cold temperatures can decrease the viral activity,
but inversely can increase the survivability
of measle’s like viruses, but the virus
will persist if it’s inside a host regardless
of weather.
The incidence of the KV disease is more likely
to be affected by the amount of sunlight exposure
in an area, as well as human behavior and
density.
Anna is really quick on the draw, that was
actually impressive.
Ethan was quick to draw a knife too, good
to see he’s not a typical useless or rebellious
child.
Neville starts the nightly lockdown procedure,
and Anna tells him that the next morning they
are heading to the survivor colony.
Yah the 
numbers don’t look good, but there could
be a survivor colony.
It’s only a 4 hour drive to Vermont - at
least check it out.
Even if you stupidly wanted to continue research
at your ground zero, you could cooperate with
them, and cure your loneliness.
Going to Vermont is off the table anyways,
because the darkseekers managed to track them
back home.
Based on the numbers, you’re potentially
dealing with thousands of darkseekers.
Those window barriers are probably meant to
prevent darkseekers from randomly breaking
in, not for stopping a determined attack.
His setup was bound to fail.
If you did want to do exterior light setups,
you’d want the light to have 360 degrees
of coverage so they couldn’t just walk up
behind the pole and take it down.
His IED looked like C4 attached to fuel drums.
It would have been much more effective to
tape ball bearings or nails on the outside
of the container to increase fragmentation.
The blast killed a lot of them, but the Alpha
survived and tackles him to the ground.
Instead of immediately snapping Neville’s
neck with his superhuman strength, he just
throws him around which gives Neville an opportunity
to fight back.
Neville finds Anna hiding under the bed from
a darkseeker, grabs a pistol and pumps it
full of lead.
A normal person can shrug off 9mm rounds in
the heat of battle through adrenaline if they
aren’t hit in critical locations.
So these darkseekers aren’t going to be
phased until you hit something like the heart,
brain, or spine which will stop them instantly.
This is when a dedicated safe room would come
in handy, just sayin.
They just now realize the cure was working,
but they’re cornered in the basement so
production and distribution is going to be
tough.
I don’t blame the darkseekers with not wanting
to be injected with another oncolytic virus.
All hope is shattered with the plexiglass
barrier between them and the darkseekers being
broken down.
It looks like he used an acrylic plexiglass
sheet for this containment room with how easily
it broke and how it shattered.
Using this for containment of his darkseeker
patients was dumb considering how easily it
was broken by a few headbutts.
He should’ve used 12mm thick polycarbonate
sheets instead, which are hundreds of times
stronger than glass and thin acrylic panes.
The polycarbonate sheets flex, rebound, and
pretty much can’t be broken or shattered
with blunt objects.
The darkseekers dropping their shoulder into
it, head butting it, punching it, or throwing
shit at it will have zero effect.
Neville, Anna, and Ethan would still be trapped
in there, but at least they wouldn’t be
dead.
Since he’s unable to reach the cure compound,
he pulls the blood of the cured darkseeker
which contains the antibodies, and tucks Anna
and Ethan into a coal chute.
At dawn, they can crawl to the other end of
the chute which leads outside, and escape
to Vermont with the cure.
There’s room for Neville, but he knows that
the darkseekers won’t stop unless he kills
them.
Apparently he keeps a grenade stashed in a
medical drawer next to a picture of his family.
He says his goodbyes, pulls the pin, releases
the lever, and bombs the darkseekers.
An M67 grenade wouldn’t create that fireball,
and with a kill radius of 5 meters it wouldn’t
kill all of the darkseekers in that room either.
Killing the alpha may be enough though.
I really think he could’ve tossed the grenade
through a broken area of the barrier and then
gotten into the coal chute in the 4-5 seconds
before the grenade went off.
Anna and Ethan make it to the survivor colony
the next day, and hand off the cure.
I looked up whether or not antibodies in a
blood sample would survive Anna and Ethan’s
journey, and it does seem like it would.
Letting her in without running any tests is
dangerous, how do they know she’s not infected
or a carrier for the disease.
The cure hand off seems like an achievement,
but it’s not.
With the only living virologist and functioning
virology lab getting blown up, they don’t
have the means to store, study, or replicate
the cure.
Let alone mass produce, distribute, and sustainably
incorporate the cured into your society.
Also, that wall is ridiculous.
There’s no way they got enough concrete
for it, or erected the walls without huge
cranes and trucks.
The movie ends.
Let’s recap how things could have gone down
differently.
The cure for cancer that Dr. Alice Krippin
created wasn’t reckless or crazy, they just
got extremely unlucky the virus mutated enough.
The Navy should’ve secured a ship for Neville
to safely continue his research on, but with
how fast the outbreak spread, maybe they couldn’t.
Neville’s family’s death wasn’t really
preventable.
With how impossible it was for Neville to
create a cure, it’d be entirely reasonable
to head into the countryside to start a new
life, and who knows, he might run into the
survivor colony.
Doing so would’ve prevented Sam and Neville’s
death, and all the darkseekers, not that we
care about them though.
If he did want to continue pursuing a cure,
building a dedicated safe house would’ve
prevented the situation where Neville was
forced to frag himself.
This means Neville would’ve survived, though
Sam still would’ve died.
With Neville alive, the cure would have a
much better chance at being replicated and
distributed than in the hands of the common
folk at the colony.
I still doubt that the cure could be effectively
utilized.
It’s more likely that the immune human population
will grow, and the darkseekers, like other
less intelligent species, will be rolled packed
into a parking lot for the humans.
I’d say that the tragic events that unfolded
in this movie could have been prevented, so
this movie is beaten.
Thanks for watching, and remember, there is
no greater danger than underestimating your
opponent.
