Will Smith’s hit 2007 movie I Am Legend was fairly good total, however a brand new adaptation of the e book can repair that model’s largest mistake.

Warner Bros. is engaged on a brand new adaptation of I Am Legend, one which hopefully avoids the largest mistake of Will Smith’s model. Whereas he won’t be fairly as well-known as somebody like Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson was one other writer with an enormous affect on the horror style, in addition to the sci-fi and fantasy realms. Along with writing dozens of novels and brief tales, Matheson was additionally a fairly achieved screenwriter, penning each movies and TV exhibits. Nonetheless, this spectacular legacy has arguably been tarnished for a contemporary era by a serious change made to Will Smith’s I Am Legend adaptation.
Whereas Matheson, who handed away in 2013 on the age of 87, boasts many worthwhile entries on his bibliography, his most well-known written work is little question the post-apocalyptic 1954 novel I Am Legend. The e book focuses on Robert Neville, who believes himself to be the only real survivor of a viral pandemic that’s turned all these contaminated by the Krippin Virus into vampire-like creatures. So widespread and influential is I Am Legend – George Romero’s Night time of the Dwelling Lifeless was closely impressed by the e book – that Matheson’s story has been tailored into three completely different movies.
Vincent Worth starred in 1964’s Final Man on Earth, with Charlton Heston main 1971’s The Omega Man, adopted by Will Smith’s I Am Legend in 2007. Lately, information broke that Warner Bros. is reportedly creating a brand new I Am Legend venture, both a movie or TV present that might seemingly reboot the property. If that does certainly occur, the I Am Legend remake desperately must right the 2007 movie’s largest mistake, and that’s its ending. The Smith movie enormously altered the e book’s ending, as did the prior movies, and each time it was to the detriment of I Am Legend’s story. This new take can repair that error.

Those that’ve learn Matheson’s I Am Legend e book have by no means been glad with any of the movies’ endings, particularly that of Smith’s model, which is in any other case a fairly profitable interpretation. There’s a cause for that, because the I Am Legend title is proven to have a really particular context by the top of the novel. A brand new society of contaminated however nonetheless residing people have taken over the world, and Neville finds himself the final of a dying breed, that being a standard human being. Neville is allowed to commit suicide moderately than be put to loss of life for his vampire-killing escapades, however earlier than he dies, he involves the belief that to this new society, he’s a legend, a folktale, a boogeyman to be feared. Against this, the creatures in Smith’s model are nearly fully animalistic, devoid of the social complexities that make Matheson’s creations so compelling.
Whereas the unique undoubtedly doesn’t ship a really Hollywood-friendly ending, Smith’s Neville sacrificing himself to ensure a treatment for the virus survives is much faraway from Matheson’s meant ethical of his story. After three variations that each one ran away from faithfully honoring Matheson’s conclusion, it’s time for a brand new I Am Legend remake to repair that long-standing mistake. Lovers of the e book deserve it, and in an age the place downbeat movie and TV endings aren’t almost as unusual as they had been even 20 years in the past, there’s no cause to have this fourth attempt at I Am Legend try to placate its viewers with a happier final result.

Submit Views: 294