My wife put me on /ignore

The blockbuster I am Legend, has the wrong title.

I should have been Legend is more appropriated.

Why? Oh com’on. It is almost useless I explain you why.

If you have read the book, you know why.

And in case you still don’t know why, you are on my /ignore list.

If you don’t have reade (yet) the book, you really have to.

Anyway, for love of writing copy and pasting and for hate of having watched that movie, I’ll spend some words about that crap.

Warning, there are spoilers from here going on.

I am Legend (2007 movie, with Will Smith) is a movie based on Richard Matheson novel.

The novel tells the story about last man on earth that fighs for surving in a society completly composed by vampires. He is the only one who resulted immune to the pandemic disease that sterminated the humanity.

From wikipedia (with some cut):

Every day, Neville prepares for nightly sieges from a vampire horde. Neville spends the daylight hours repairing his house: boarding windows, hanging garlic garlands, disposing of vampire corpses and gathering supplies. Once darkness falls, the infected come out of hiding and lay siege to Neville’s house. They taunt him and attempt to entice him out.

After bouts of depression and heavy drinking, Neville decides to find the causes of the disease. Books and other research materials are obtained from a library, and through painstaking research Neville is able to discover the root of the vampiric disease; a strain of bacteria capable of infecting both deceased and living hosts.

In June 1978, Neville comes across a seemingly uninfected woman abroad in the daylight and captures her. After the initial shock of seeing another human wears off, Neville becomes suspicious of Ruth and is skeptical of her story. He also notices that she is strongly against the killing of the vampires - he feels that if her story of survival was true, she would have become hardened to their fate. Too late, he discovers that she too is infected and just as he realizes this, Ruth knocks him out and leaves.

When he wakes up, Neville discovers a note left by Ruth. In it, she tells him that the infected have slowly been able to adapt to their disease to the point where they can spend short periods of time in sunlight and they are even attempting to rebuild society as they now know it. They fear and hate Neville since he unwittingly targets and destroys their people during his daytime excursions and view him as a predator. In their quest to capture him, the infected sent one of their own to Neville. She adds that they have evolved enough to hunt the true vampires (dead bodies animated by the ‘germ’) and even manufacture pills that keep the baser vampiric instincts at bay.

Eventually the infected come to capture him; Neville watches from his house as they emerge from cars, kill the vampires outside with weapons and storm the house. He puts up a struggle but is badly wounded and, once captured, is taken to their headquarters.

Neville meets Ruth again in his prison; she informs him that she is a ranking member of this new society but unlike the others she doesn’t fear and hate him. She tells him she had come to his prison to try and help him escape but that is now impossible. She acknowledges the need for Neville’s execution, and slips him pills, claiming they will ‘make it easier’. Emotionally broken, Neville finally accepts his fate and tearfully asks Ruth not to let this society get too brutal and heartless.

Neville goes to his prison window and gets a glimpse of all the infected milling around in the yard waiting for his execution. When they spot him, he sees the fear, awe and horror in their eyes and he understands to them he is a scourge, just as they were a scourge to him at the beginning of the novel. Previously Neville saw the destruction of the infected survivors as a right and a moral imperative to be pursued for his own and mankind’s survival, but now he finally acknowledges defeat. He is the only immune human left in the world, the only survivor of the “old race”.

He glimpses a future society wherein infection is normal and he, Neville, is a murderous, biologic deviant. As he turns away and swallows the pills, Neville grasps the reversal that has taken place and that, just as vampires were legend in pre-infection times now he, as obsolete exemplar of old humanity, is legend in the eyes of the new race born of the infection.

End of spoilers.

Once you have read this plot, do you still think the crap on cinema was a good adaptation?

Do you really think it is? Do you think the original mean of the novel has been preserved by that? The humanity saved by his sacrifice? He found the cure at very last and immolate himself to let the woman with the child who was guided to him (her words) by God, then the woman found the only fortified citadel hold by the bunch of humans immune to the disease. An her final words are about Nevile who became Legend because he found the cure and sacrified himself.

FFS.

I really doubt it. I prefer the choice done years ago, in the Charlton Heston adaptation, The Omega Man: they didn’t even try to use the same name of the novel, since the difference was huge.

Or the very first adaptation of the novel, The Last Man on Earth. It has more of the spirt of the novel than I am Legend that dares to have the same title.

The funny thing is that when the movie hit the cinema the first time, there was rumor about an alternative ending, which refuelled my hopes after the huge delusion after the vision of the movie.

Youtube gave us the opportunity to take a look to the alternative ending.

Youtube gave me the opportunity to be fooled again.

At least, Youtube confirmed my intention to avoid to buy the dvd to check the alternative ending.

The alternative ending propose something more close to the spirit of the novel. But it is anyway miles away from the intention of Matheson.

Warning, there are spoilers again from here going on.

Neville had to die. Neville had to be the last one. Neville found no cure. Neville had to become the legend because he was the unique and last one.

I will never understand why the hell they did something like that.

Here, I propose you the clip: watch it and please don’t puke on the carpet, thank you.

October 24th, 2008 | Tags: I am Legend, Richard Matheson, Willy Smith | Category: /ignore list, Movie | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL