Some easy fixes for 'I Am Legend'
(This is very long and contains spoilers. It was also pretty much written for my own amusement, so I apologize in advance if it's not worth reading. In fact, you should probably just quit while you're ahead.)
Most of you know me as a hater. I love to hate things. This isn't entirely true - I love to love things, too - but it's probably a side of me you're familiar with. When things suck, I tend to say so.
'I Am Legend' sucks - in a subtle way. On the surface, they did many things right with this movie. The setting and feel of the environment matches the book's and maybe even surpasses it. In fact, just about everything up until the third act is perfect, except for a few major details:
1) The disease is supposed to mimic vampirism, not transform people into animalistic beasts. This may seem like splitting hairs, but the infected in the book were incredibly scary because they retained virtually all of their humanity while being changed physiologically by the disease. Many of the "monsters" were Neville's former friends and neighbors and they would stand outside his house at night, talking and screaming for him to come out.
2) Neville is interested in a scientific explanation for the disease in the book, and does not know how it originated. He does not concern himself with a cure. During the day, he explores the city systematically (like in the movie), except with the express purpose of finding and killing infected people (who fall into a deep coma during the day). These people are immune to bullets and can only be reliably killed by stakes, something Neville attempts to analyze scientifically.
These first two points taken together set up the entire purpose of the book. When you change them, for whatever reason - maybe Will Smith didn't want to be portrayed as a killer? - it changes the whole story and you might as well call it something else. The lame voice-over at the end is hardly a match for the original ending.
So let's compare the endings, shall we?
Movie: The third act is ridiculous. Neville sees one of his mannequins somewhere else in the city, and gets really mad for some strange reason. He shoots it up and goes to investigate, when he is captured by a snare trap. He passes out and wakes up near sunset, cuts himself down, and crawls to his car right before some infected dogs can get to him. His dog Sam is bitten up and eventually has to be put down. This is sad, but it's never explained who set the trap and why. You can make the case that the infected set it, but as Neville himself explains in one of his video journals, they have lost all semblance of human behavior and would therefore be incapable of the higher thought processes necessary to set a trap for him.
So ok, that's fine. Whatever. The dog dies. Neville goes crazy and lures a bunch of the infected out to the dock at night with a decoy of himself. He then waits in his car to run them down. They jump all over, beat up the car and basically throw it around (hooray for inexplicable super strength) until it flips and crashes, leaving Neville vulnerable. At the last minute someone rescues him.
**This is where it gets really stupid.**
There is a woman and a boy (Anna and Ethan) who have come all the way from Sao Paolo in search of a survivors' colony. They drive the exact same type of SUV as Neville, outfitted the same way. They rescue him and ask him where he lives so they can patch him up.
Neville wakes up at his house and confronts them, and Anna tries to convince him that God helped her rescue him and is telling her to go to the survivors' colony in Vermont. (She has not heard about this from anyone, I mean Neville even says, "How do you know?" and she says "God told me.") The whole scene has no point. It's just her saying "God told me" and him going "there is no God". It was weak. They could have argued that point better, or better yet, avoided it completely.
Neville explains why he likes Bob Marley so much, which actually was a nice touch and added to the depth of his character. (The reggae soundtrack did a great job of enhancing the mood at the beginning.)
Then the infected come to his house. He yells at Anna for letting them follow her. (Are we seriously supposed to believe that they are smart enough to set a trap, but not smart enough to figure out where he lives?) Fortunately, Neville has rigged up all kinds of lights and explosives that are apparently designed to attract even more of them and blow open his house. What a scientist this guy is.
So the infected get in - pretty darn easily. They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight. Neville manages to blow up his kitchen in the process. On purpose. Then he runs upstairs to see if the others are safe. He gets them and everyone goes down to the secret lab in the basement. They barricade themselves behind some serious glass and wait. The monsters come, of course, and OH NO - they are starting to break the glass!
Just then Anna notices that the infected woman that was chained to a bed is getting better. Yay! Neville's experiments have produced a cure! So he draws some blood, gives the vial to Anna, and stuffs her in a cubbyhole with the kid, telling her to wait until dawn. (Because while the infected are smart enough to set a trap, they will not open the door of a cubbyhole to see if anyone is inside.) Neville then grabs a conveniently placed grenade, pulls the pin, and rushes at the horde just as they break the glass, blasting them all to hell - or wherever monster souls are sent to. Probably Cleveland.
The movie ends with the woman and kid driving up to the survivors' colony and being let in. "Robert Neville found a cure and that is his legend," the voice-over says.
Give me a break.
Book: Ok, here we go. I'll start with the dog as well. Neville has a dog, just like in the movie, but in the book he captures it in the wild and trains it, only to have it die of the vampire infection. Bummer.
Neville is getting pretty tired of his life, which is hunting and killing vampires by day, and drinking whiskey and listening to music at night.
Then - bada bing! - out of nowhere, he finds a woman during the day. She is pretty messed up and scared of him, so he knocks her out to take her home and try and help her. She wakes up and is all nervous and jittery. Plus, Neville is suspicious, so he makes her eat garlic, which he knows the infected are repelled by. She ends up eating it (he kind of crams it in her mouth) and satisfies Neville's suspicions.
It goes on for a little while, until Neville does a blood test on her. (He has identified the so-called bacteria that are present in the infected.) She tests positive but manages to knock him out before he can do anything.
Neville wakes up and she is gone. She leaves a note that says that some of the infected people have figured out how to slow down the disease, but they still pretty much have to go comatose during the day and drink blood and stuff. She was sent as a spy to watch Neville because he is a threat to them - a mysterious man who can kill them while they sleep.
**This is kind of where the whole point of the book is made.**
The note warns Neville that he is in danger and should leave, and that if he were to leave that he would not be pursued. The people trying to live with the infection have formed a rudimentary society and are attempting to re-establish some semblance of a normal life. Neville, as we know, has been killing since the beginning of the book, and apparently some of the people he killed were "survivors" or not entirely wasted by the disease.
Neville decides to disregard the note and continue on like he always has. A few months later, the society has advanced enough to send a force to capture him. They take him alive before the new society and execute him. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become the last of a dead breed - the mythical figure that kills people while they are sleeping.*
He's the legend now, get it?
Look - I'm not some purist who thinks that movies based on books should always stick to the source material. What they should do is effectively translate the spirit of the book into another medium.
One of the points the movie made was that the disease was created by an effort to cure cancer. That's an interesting twist and I think it's in keeping with the spirit of the book.
However, they changed just a few key details and the whole mess got stupid. I bet somebody could even edit the movie at home and fix most of it. Now that might be something worth watching.
*thanks, wikipedia! Link
Most of you know me as a hater. I love to hate things. This isn't entirely true - I love to love things, too - but it's probably a side of me you're familiar with. When things suck, I tend to say so.
'I Am Legend' sucks - in a subtle way. On the surface, they did many things right with this movie. The setting and feel of the environment matches the book's and maybe even surpasses it. In fact, just about everything up until the third act is perfect, except for a few major details:
1) The disease is supposed to mimic vampirism, not transform people into animalistic beasts. This may seem like splitting hairs, but the infected in the book were incredibly scary because they retained virtually all of their humanity while being changed physiologically by the disease. Many of the "monsters" were Neville's former friends and neighbors and they would stand outside his house at night, talking and screaming for him to come out.
2) Neville is interested in a scientific explanation for the disease in the book, and does not know how it originated. He does not concern himself with a cure. During the day, he explores the city systematically (like in the movie), except with the express purpose of finding and killing infected people (who fall into a deep coma during the day). These people are immune to bullets and can only be reliably killed by stakes, something Neville attempts to analyze scientifically.
These first two points taken together set up the entire purpose of the book. When you change them, for whatever reason - maybe Will Smith didn't want to be portrayed as a killer? - it changes the whole story and you might as well call it something else. The lame voice-over at the end is hardly a match for the original ending.
So let's compare the endings, shall we?
Movie: The third act is ridiculous. Neville sees one of his mannequins somewhere else in the city, and gets really mad for some strange reason. He shoots it up and goes to investigate, when he is captured by a snare trap. He passes out and wakes up near sunset, cuts himself down, and crawls to his car right before some infected dogs can get to him. His dog Sam is bitten up and eventually has to be put down. This is sad, but it's never explained who set the trap and why. You can make the case that the infected set it, but as Neville himself explains in one of his video journals, they have lost all semblance of human behavior and would therefore be incapable of the higher thought processes necessary to set a trap for him.
So ok, that's fine. Whatever. The dog dies. Neville goes crazy and lures a bunch of the infected out to the dock at night with a decoy of himself. He then waits in his car to run them down. They jump all over, beat up the car and basically throw it around (hooray for inexplicable super strength) until it flips and crashes, leaving Neville vulnerable. At the last minute someone rescues him.
**This is where it gets really stupid.**
There is a woman and a boy (Anna and Ethan) who have come all the way from Sao Paolo in search of a survivors' colony. They drive the exact same type of SUV as Neville, outfitted the same way. They rescue him and ask him where he lives so they can patch him up.
Neville wakes up at his house and confronts them, and Anna tries to convince him that God helped her rescue him and is telling her to go to the survivors' colony in Vermont. (She has not heard about this from anyone, I mean Neville even says, "How do you know?" and she says "God told me.") The whole scene has no point. It's just her saying "God told me" and him going "there is no God". It was weak. They could have argued that point better, or better yet, avoided it completely.
Neville explains why he likes Bob Marley so much, which actually was a nice touch and added to the depth of his character. (The reggae soundtrack did a great job of enhancing the mood at the beginning.)
Then the infected come to his house. He yells at Anna for letting them follow her. (Are we seriously supposed to believe that they are smart enough to set a trap, but not smart enough to figure out where he lives?) Fortunately, Neville has rigged up all kinds of lights and explosives that are apparently designed to attract even more of them and blow open his house. What a scientist this guy is.
So the infected get in - pretty darn easily. They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight. Neville manages to blow up his kitchen in the process. On purpose. Then he runs upstairs to see if the others are safe. He gets them and everyone goes down to the secret lab in the basement. They barricade themselves behind some serious glass and wait. The monsters come, of course, and OH NO - they are starting to break the glass!
Just then Anna notices that the infected woman that was chained to a bed is getting better. Yay! Neville's experiments have produced a cure! So he draws some blood, gives the vial to Anna, and stuffs her in a cubbyhole with the kid, telling her to wait until dawn. (Because while the infected are smart enough to set a trap, they will not open the door of a cubbyhole to see if anyone is inside.) Neville then grabs a conveniently placed grenade, pulls the pin, and rushes at the horde just as they break the glass, blasting them all to hell - or wherever monster souls are sent to. Probably Cleveland.
The movie ends with the woman and kid driving up to the survivors' colony and being let in. "Robert Neville found a cure and that is his legend," the voice-over says.
Give me a break.
Book: Ok, here we go. I'll start with the dog as well. Neville has a dog, just like in the movie, but in the book he captures it in the wild and trains it, only to have it die of the vampire infection. Bummer.
Neville is getting pretty tired of his life, which is hunting and killing vampires by day, and drinking whiskey and listening to music at night.
Then - bada bing! - out of nowhere, he finds a woman during the day. She is pretty messed up and scared of him, so he knocks her out to take her home and try and help her. She wakes up and is all nervous and jittery. Plus, Neville is suspicious, so he makes her eat garlic, which he knows the infected are repelled by. She ends up eating it (he kind of crams it in her mouth) and satisfies Neville's suspicions.
It goes on for a little while, until Neville does a blood test on her. (He has identified the so-called bacteria that are present in the infected.) She tests positive but manages to knock him out before he can do anything.
Neville wakes up and she is gone. She leaves a note that says that some of the infected people have figured out how to slow down the disease, but they still pretty much have to go comatose during the day and drink blood and stuff. She was sent as a spy to watch Neville because he is a threat to them - a mysterious man who can kill them while they sleep.
**This is kind of where the whole point of the book is made.**
The note warns Neville that he is in danger and should leave, and that if he were to leave that he would not be pursued. The people trying to live with the infection have formed a rudimentary society and are attempting to re-establish some semblance of a normal life. Neville, as we know, has been killing since the beginning of the book, and apparently some of the people he killed were "survivors" or not entirely wasted by the disease.
Neville decides to disregard the note and continue on like he always has. A few months later, the society has advanced enough to send a force to capture him. They take him alive before the new society and execute him. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become the last of a dead breed - the mythical figure that kills people while they are sleeping.*
He's the legend now, get it?
Look - I'm not some purist who thinks that movies based on books should always stick to the source material. What they should do is effectively translate the spirit of the book into another medium.
One of the points the movie made was that the disease was created by an effort to cure cancer. That's an interesting twist and I think it's in keeping with the spirit of the book.
However, they changed just a few key details and the whole mess got stupid. I bet somebody could even edit the movie at home and fix most of it. Now that might be something worth watching.
*thanks, wikipedia! Link
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posted by Brandon at 1:33 PM
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