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It’s understandable that certain aspects of a novel have to be changed in order to make the journey from page the screen. Some famous, positive examples include vast sections of Jaws and almost the entirety of Nothing Lasts Forever (filmed as Die Hard), however, one thing I’ll never understand is when an adaptation decides to leave out the exact thing that makes the source material worth filming in the first place.
There was a hope that with 2007’s I Am Legend, we’d finally get a more faithful, state of the art adaption of Richard Matheson’s superlative novel after two previous versions mangled the source for their own ends. But where Vincent Price in 1964’s The Last Man On Earth, and Charlton Heston and 1971’s The Omega Man both took sizable liberties with a world overrun by vampiric creatures, can Will Smith finally give us the faithful version the book demands? Considering director Francis Lawrence also took huge poetic licence with Hellblazer when filming Constantine – the answer was most likely no.
In the year 2009, the world has found itself in one of the largest good news/bad news scenarios in it’s entire history. While a genetically engineered measles virus designed to cure cancer has been a success in eliminating the disease, the rather devestating side effect has been the mutated virus ultimately killing 90% of the human population and turning a further 9% into yawning-mouthed, vampire-zombies who stalk the deserted streets at night for blood.
In this dystopia we find U.S. Army virologist Robert Neville, who is eking out an existence as seemingly the only immune human in existence with his faithful German Shepherd, Sam. Spending his days having unlimited choice while renting from Blockbuster and teeing golf balls off of the USS Intrepid, he mixes things up by continuing his research while trying to cure the vampire plague. However, as he captures a test subject to continue experimenting his vaccines on, he discovers that the remaining creatures are acting less and less like mindless beasts every day.
While continuously being haunted by the memories of the tragedy that befell his wife and daughter, it seems that the smarter the monsters seem to be getting, the sloppier the nomadic existence is making Neville, and one day he finds himself outmanuvered with devestating consequences. However, while at his lowest ebb from suffering horrible loneliness and failing to find a cure, some much needed hope finally raises its head in the form of survivors. But with potential fresh victims in the area and an alpha vampire growing ever more sneaky and resilient, can Neville manage to get it together long enough to ensure that the world has a chance of survival against this undead plague?
When I first saw I Am Legend, I was initially fairly pissed that once again, Richard Matheson’s genuinely stunning original ending had mostly been abandoned in order to supply a safer, Hollywood ending. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, especially as the latest incarnation of Neville was being portrayed by blockbuster darling, Will Smith. However, years after my initial disappointment, it’s something of a surprise to discover that I was in a more forgiving mood much in the same way I reassessed Lawrence’s Constantine once my frustration with all the changes to the comic subsided. Yes, the movie version of Hellblazer is noticably a step down from it’s source, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a cool movie once taken on its own merit. In comparison, I Am Legend is undoubtedly flawed, but look past the moments that don’t work quite as well as you’d hoped, and there’s a bunch of stuff here that’s certainly admirable, if not exemplary.
So let’s sink our teeth into the bad first, and I don’t think I comes as any great surprise to discover that one of the film’s greatest flaws is some truly hideous CGI that almost irrevocably ruins the entire experience whether you’ve read the book or not. Quite why the film was willing to pull the trigger on computer generated vampires that look about as convincing as the Dwayne Johnson monster at the end of The Mummy Returns, when Blade II delivered practical, bald, mutant vampires five years earlier I’ll never know. Similarly, trying to inject hope into I Am Legend just doesn’t stick particularly well. The whole point of Matheson’s novel was to present us with a future where it’s the lone human who has become the scary monster on the hill that the beings down below treat with superstition and fear, so when the film starts bringing in Alice Braga’s survivor and words of a human outpost in Vermont, it diffuses major parts of the story that demands hope remains absent.
However, before we get bogged down in cop-out endings, atrocious CGI and a final third that completely misses the point, it’s worth remembering that I Am Legend actually starts out pretty damn good. The chief selling point it has is that this deserted vision of New York was quite unlike anything we’d ever seen before back in 2007 and it still hits pretty hard today. Obviously we’d seen chillingly empty cityscapes before, with the most prominent being an empty London in 28 Days Later, but I Am Legend takes things a step further, showing us a Manhattan where the undergrowth has broken through the streets and greenery grows unchecked up the sides of iconic buildings. In the middle of this broken, yet eerily calm Big Apple, we also find a Will Smith desperately trying to shrug off the blockbuster icon behaviour of Men In Black and Bad Boys and try and take the end of the world seriously.
It wasn’t the former Fresh Prince’s first attempt to do serious, but with a ruined New York and CGI vampires to pay for, you wouldn’t blame the producers to add some of that “Big Willy” persona to a story that’s seemingly resistant to chuckles. However, while it does break through every now and then (quoting Shrek, hyping up Bob Marley), the actor manages to keep an admirable lid on things. In fact, watching him try and stave of loneliness and despair by chatting to his dog (genuinely the best actor here) and setting up store mannequins to create the illusion of a population actually sees the actor managing to match the tone of the film, but when the final third kicks in, matters sadly fall apart fairly quickly. In fact, despite Matheson’s I Am Legend having one of the coolest endings in the history of horror literature, Lawrence’s version can barely manage one, and has since become one of those films where a debate exists over whether the theatrical ending or the alternate ending is superior. The genuine answer, by the way, is neither.
A truly impressive opening third not only delivers a how-to guide on how to portray an empty, ruined, major city (where would The Last Of Us be without it?), but it sees its usually more rambunctious star make a concerted effort to reign in the goofiness to make work. However, some truly terrible digital effects work and an ending that has all the stability of an igloo in Arizona thwart a lot of the work both Smith and Lawrence (and Sam the Dog) put in.
“It not as good as the book” is a claim that usually makes me roll my eyes, and it’s certainly valid here – but there’s some legitimately some good stuff to be found before those digi-vamps suck the life right out of it.
