Legacy is set in the year 2030, when an alien spaceship picks up a radio wave from “the blue planet,” also known as Earth. The patrollers discover that humanity has been wiped out by a nuclear holocaust.
Writer-director Grzegorz Jonkajts is at it again, blowing up the world and making our sad demise look utterly beautiful. The film commences with a jaw-dropping shot of the alien ship approaching Earth. After touchdown, a searchlight illuminates a barren wasteland strewn with bodies that look like dismembered dolls. In the background, over the alien’s head, the mother ship glitters and winks.
Jonkajts is not only a formidable visual stylist. He’s also a serious student of sci-fi. The film’s ancestry can be traced at least as far back as Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with its friendly just-dropping-in-to-see-how-y’all-are-doing-down-here alien plot. But the film that Legacy most resembles is James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. They both use the same heavy blue color scheme, and Adam Skorupa’s music resembles the iconic score Brad Fiedel composed for T2. These are some pretty tough movies to emulate. Good thing Jonkajts is so talented.
