SPOILERS AHEAD
If you intend on reading the book or haven’t seen the movie, do NOT continue on with the review. The reason I made my own thread is so that those in the existing one didn't accidently read this by mistake and get mad at me for blowing the ending.
SPOILER ALERT!
Learning my lesson from the Harry Potter Book/Movie series, I chose to read the book I Am Legend by Richard Matheson before going to see the movie.
The 160-page 1954 science fiction novel is about the isolation and loneliness of being the last living human being.
The protagonist, Robert Neville, lives in Los Angeles in the home he and his wife started a family in, his wife and daughter victims of the disease that caused the world to become “vampires”.
The book shows Robert going throughout his routines, finding food, visiting his wife’s final resting place, killing vampires in their sleep, and burning the corpses of the dead infected left outside his house. At night he listens to music and drinks as the infected stay outside doing all they can to coax him out.
He struggles to understand the disease which has mutated everyone, spending much of his time trying to rationalize how vampires are more then myth. To rationally explain why sunlight, garlic, and stakes do damage to them where bullets do not.
In the movie directed by Francis Lawrence Robert Neville is a virologist in New York and the cause of the disease is known from the opening minutes of the movie. Instead of trying to understand it, Robert is trying to cure it.
Where in the book the dog does not come into the movie until mid-way through, and does not play a major role, in the movie the dog “Sam” plays a significant role in the story.
Both in the movie and book versions of I Am Legend feature a woman who shortly after entering Robert’s life causes his ultimate downfall. The reasoning for this woman is vastly different from book to movie.
In the book, the woman is sent by a secondary version of the vampires, one that is capable of being outside for a few hours at a time. She is sent to spy on him, and after he discovers what she is he is knocked out. Within a short while later the secondary vampires, those who are not savages and have retained most of their humanity arrive at Robert’s house killing all of the vampires and arrest Robert.
In the movie she is on her way to Vermont to find a survivors camp. She ultimately leads to Robert’s death by allowing the infected people to follow her back to his house, soon after they overrun its defenses and he dies in a Hollywood self-sacrificial manner.
The most significant change is also the worst in my opinion. The movie changes the purpose for the title of the book.
In the movie, Robert Neville becomes a legend by finding the cure to the virus.
In the book, Robert Neville realizes that he is a legend to the vampires as the vampires are legend to human beings. He states "Normalcy was a majority concept. The standard of many not the standard of one man", the most sugnificant line in the book. While he considers the vampires to be the out of place creatures, they as the majority see him as the one out of place. He realizes that the vampire was once a mythical creatures who kill vulnerable humans in their beds as they sleep leaving only corpses behind as a testament to their existence, just as Robert Neville has become a mythical figure who kills both vampires and the “infected living” while they are sleeping (during the day).
In short, he has taken the place of legend as vampires once were, hence the title “I Am Legend”.
This ending is far better, and less Hollywood. But, in truth the simple reasoning so much of the book had to be changes is that though Will Smith is remarkable in the movie, and the CGI of a vacant New York is breath taking, they cannot carry the film for over an hour. The Robert Neville of the book rarely speaks through the first half or more, and movies done by inner monologue do not sell.
Book: 4.5/ 5
Movie: 3.0/5
