A review of I Am Legend

One of the guys from my small group and I went to see I Am Legend last night. I had read the book, and my friend had not read the book. Objectively speaking, it's a good movie. The script is reasonably close to the book, and Will Smith did a great job portraying Robert Neville, the last man alive on Earth. Well, he's supposed to be the last man alive on Earth, but that is one of the departures from the book.

If you are a purist, you will be kinda disappointed by how Hollywood departed from the story. Stop reading now if you don't want to know because I will spoil the plot for you. Don't read past the kitten, if you don't want to find out how Hollywood screwed up the story, especially the ending.

Are you sure you want to keep reading?

I mean, really sure?

OK, I guess you really do want to see what happened. In the book, you find out the hard way toward the end that there are two types of survivors. The true blood-sucking monsters that, while still humanish, are just blood-crazed feeders. There are others who are essentially humans who have a vampire-like vulnerability to sunlight, and that's about it. In the end, the latter group reveals to him that he must die because he has been killing both sides, and they're terrified of him. The long and short of it is that he says "I Am Legend" in the end because he has become a legend to the latter group, the way that Dracula and vampires were to true humans. Just reverse the time of day when the hunt would happen.

The woman who was supposed to betray Neville is just a Brazilian woman who is taking a kid to a survivor colony in Vermont. Neville dies while defending the cure for the disease that caused the vampirism epidemic. The woman and the kid make it to the colony, which is essentially a farm with a modern day castle wall surrounding a huge area of the land, that appears to be one huge impenetrable wall of steel and stone. How they built that up is anyone's guess. Neville is a legend because he found and saved the cure, not because of the irony that he had become to another group of sentient beings the same sort of monster that he feared attacking him.

As I said, it's a pretty good story. Will Smith plays a very good military researcher, and the movie captures enough of the essence of the book to say that it was not the result of some moronic Hollywood screenwriter thinking that he or she knew how to tell the story better than Richard Matheson. However, once you get to the last ten minutes of the film, you might as well be experiencing a total departure from the story. I suppose this is because the book's ending is bittersweet. Humanity is in much better shape in the book, than in the movie. It's just mutated. In the movie, humanity is barely still in existence, and there is little reason for me to believe that if that "survivor's colony" is any indication that there are enough different pairs of people to keep up basic genetic diversity in the human genome (unlike in the book).