| **plot spoilers of book and movie!**
I Am Legend, by Thomas Matheson was written around the same period as Phillip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
Phillip K Dick's daughter was heavily involved in the making of A Scanner Darkly, and the result is phenomenal - it is utterly faithful to the original story. I have watched it maybe a dozen times and never get bored of it.
I Am Legend is just as powerful a novella, but Richard Matheson had no-one in his corner in the Warner Bros studio. The resulting movie is so far off the book - plot, setting, ideology, morals and "moral", I Am Astounded it has the same name.
Why not call it "Mutant" or "Vampire" or "Cure" or any other blockbuster word - in which case it's a reasonable movie (aside from all the horrible CGI but that's another story).
In Matheson's book; Robert Neville is just an ordinary Joe (a washed out Michael Caine came to mind when I first read it 14 years ago), not a flashy Will Smith virologist/colonel. He battles with alcohol, he battles with sexual thoughts of female vampires, he battles with depression, loneliness and feeling useless.
One of the most poignant themes in the book is where Neville becomes amateur scientist to develop a way to kill the vampires more efficiently than using garlic and wooden stakes. It takes him trips to the library and many failed attempts to even start the scientific process, always ending in alcoholic despair.
He spends weeks isolating the chemicals in garlic and applying them to the vampires, to no effect. He procures a microscope to further his studies. It turns out to be a crappy microscope, and he ends up throwing it across his workshop-cum-studio-cum-bedroom. He curses himself for his ignorance - to him, a civilian joe, a microscope was just a microscope. After an alcoholic binge, he spends time in the library researching what makes a good microscope and then procuring a better one. It then takes him several weeks to learn how to mount a slide.
Is Hollywood too lazy to put this wonderful human struggle into a movie? So much easier to have him as a wizard colonel with a hi-tech lab full of sexy Apple hard drives?
His wife and child did not escape to a helicopter but died of the virus. He throws his daughter's corpse into the fire pits; he cannot bear to do the same to his wife. It's against the law but he sneaks her away and buries her, only for her to come back as a vampire...
The dog doesn't feature until halfway through the book, and then it's used to show Neville's desperate loneliness (just as the mannequins are used in the movie). It takes Neville weeks to coax the street dog into his house, it's a very moving story.
The woman who shows up - well this is where it all goes completely off the scale of bad adaptation. In Matheson's book, the woman is a spy for the vampires. There is a small group of vamps forming a society, they have developed a way to survive short periods of sunlight; they are getting healthier, able to think clearly, organise, live. They see Neville as the devil.
Neville is initially suspicious of her - indeed, he tests her blood. But he's craving human contact so much, he ignores all of the obvious signs.
Ultimately he is captured by the new vampire society, who plan to execute him in public.
The woman spy has fallen in love with him- but she is one voice and there's no way she could prevent the execution. Instead she slips him some suicide pills in his jail cell.
The title of the book comes from his last thoughts as he swallows the pills.
As he dies, he realises, with some amusement, the new vampire society is as valid as old human society. To this new society, he is the boogeyman, the bad guy; he's been sneaking out in the day and killing them in their beds. The concept amuses him:
"[I am] a new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend."
Now tell me how that translates to the woman finding a church, passing on Neville's expert cure and naming him a legend as saviour of the human race?
I would work on a new script but, like Neville, I'm battling with alcohol and lustful thoughts of female vampires..... help appreciated :-)
Last edited by taihunggao : 14-01-2008 at 03:46 AM.
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