I've now completed the triumvirate of films adapted from Richard Matheson's masterpiece "I Am Legend."
I read the book, which I highly recommend to anyone (it's much more than a sci-fi vampire book), before I saw any of the three movies it spawned.
The premise of the book is that an apocalyptic plague has turned the entire human race into vampires, and Robert Neville is last known living human. His past is revealed throughout as he struggles to cope with his singular status and fight off the vampires, who taunt him each night from outside his home-turned-stronghold. It leads to a startling revelation that I won't reveal in case you want to read it for yourself.
Here's what I think of the adaptations:
By far the best of the three. Price turns in a good performance, and this movie by far does the best job of keeping the whole point of the book intact. It also happens to be the most faithful to the book (not that it necessarily matters, as I point out here).
Matheson, in fact, co-wrote the screenplay for "The Last Man on Earth." However, because of some changes made to the script, he is credited under the pseudonym Logan Swanson. Seems he didn't want his name on it, but he didn't want to lose out on the royalties either (can hardly blame him for that).
The major thematic elements are present here, and it's fairly well done overall. It mostly abandons the whole vampire thing, instead opting for more of a mutant race that has a few things in common with vampires. The Family, as it calls them, is also poorly rendered, but it's very 70s, so I suppose I should give it a pass on that.
This was just angering in a lot of ways. Will Smith is a good actor. He puts in a good performance. But the story was turned into something very cliché. And the vampire concept was completely abandoned in favor of mutants that just did not look good, especially considering it was 2007. It seems like the goal was scary, but they were not scary. The movie had very little of the thought-provoking material of the book.
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