I Am Legend is Both My Favorite Book and My Least Favorite Movie

A few days ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about our favorite movies. He told me he could talk about his favorite movie for hours, and he asked me if there was a movie that I felt that way about. It didn't take me long to think of an answer: I Am Legend.

I Am Legend isn't my favorite movie. It's my least favorite, and it was the first movie where I remember leaving the theater angry. I complained about the movie on the entire ride home and continued ranting about it for months.

Despite my hatred for the movie, the book is among my favorites. I first discovered I Am Legend during a trip to the bookstore. I noticed the book near the front of the store, on a table marked 'Vampires'. The book caught my eye because Richard Matheson wrote it, and I'd recently finished reading Stir of Echoes which he'd also written. Will Smith was on the cover of the only edition of the book the store had. I thought the book becoming a movie was a good thing. I believed that if I loved the book, I'd also love the movie. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The book was amazing. I devoured it in about three days, and it quickly became my favorite book. The book was about Robert Neville, the sole survivor of a pandemic that caused everyone else to become vampires. At night, the vampires surround his home, taunting him. He spends his days researching vampires by reading anything he can find about them, before going into their hideouts and killing them while they're in a weakened state.

In the book, we see flashbacks of him losing his family, friends, and neighbors to the pandemic. We also see him making tough choices regarding his wife and daughter, both of whom die because of the pandemic. He soon becomes the only remaining human in a world filled with vampires who require his blood to live.

The book is dark and gritty, but when I saw they'd cast Will Smith, I knew it would be more toned down. I still was optimistic that it would be a great movie, as it didn't need to be as dark to be a successful adaptation.

My hopes were dashed as I watched the movie that was stripped of everything that made the book great. Robert Neville doesn't hunt the vampires at night. They aren't vampires in this adaptation, but zombies instead. I could have dealt with this change, as the original book inspired many pieces of zombie fiction as well, including Night of The Living Dead.

The vampires in the book could still speak and usually spent their nights taunting Neville. The women tried to lure him out by using his loneliness against him, but what bothered him most was his neighbor, who quickly became his rival. This character is barely in the movie, and when we see him, he's a shell of the character he was in the novel.

The 'zombies' can't speak in the movie, instead, they make a series of noises. We don't even know that they have any humanity left until the movie Neville kidnaps one of them to find a cure, and it is the rival's mate. I'm not sure why the movie goes this route, but I suppose it's to both show the humanity of the zombies and show that despite trying to do the right thing, Neville is the 'bad guy'.

What bothers me most is the ending. Leading up to the ending of the book, Neville meets what he believes to be a normal woman. The pair develop a friendship until he discovers that she is wearing makeup to hide the fact that she is a vampire. She captures him and sets up his execution because of his crimes against vampires. As he's facing death, he can't help but think that he's become what the vampires once were-a legend. He's the only living human and he will soon become a myth himself.

This ending is absent from the movie. Instead, we get a forgettable round of explosions and Neville sacrificing himself to save a normal human woman. She's later seen with the cure, going to a place where humans have taken refuge. I'm sure there's a lot to say about whether the cure should be used, but that wasn't addressed.

Despite my hatred for the movie, I still ended up buying the DVD, because I needed to see the alternate ending. I hoped it would have the same meaning as its book counterpart, but it was just another attempt at doing something 'new'.

Unfortunately, it looks like I Am Legend is getting a sequel starring Will Smith and Michael B. Jordan. Hopefully, it's better than the original adaptation, but I do not plan to see it. I still believe the book is worth reading, even for those who don't read a lot.