This was written as a response to Tan Kien Boon’s recent post praising the movie of the same name starring Will Smith and would properly show up as a comment on his blog via trackback if only he wasn’t using Blogger. Granted I haven’t watched the movie, but I have read the book it was supposedly based on and considering the spoilers to the movie version that I’ve read, actually watching it isn’t particularly high on my list of priorities. I’m sure that the movie is a decent enough action flick like so many others starring Will Smith like Bad Boys 2, Independence Day and Men In Black 2; entertaining, action-packed and exciting but schlocky, shallow and sappy.

The problem however is that it chooses to call itself “I Am Legend” and then proceeds to completely throw away all that is great in its source material. The real I Am Legend is a horror novella by Richard Matheson first published in 1954. It’s an influential and highly regarded book and the fact that it’s still in print today is a testament to its popularity. I highly recommend that people read the novella themselves but for those who aren’t going to read it anyway, here’s what makes the story so great and why its really called I Am Legend.

In the novella, the protagonist Robert Neville is the sole remaining human survivor of a plague that has swept across the entire planet. The disease appears to give the people who are infected by it vampire-like characteristics including stupor during the daytime, a ravenous and uncontrollable hunger and an aversion to garlic. Matheson was one of the first writers to explain these characteristics in a scientific manner, ascribing them to biological changes caused by a bacteria to which Neville is somehow immune.

A great deal of the novella deals with Neville’s efforts to study this disease in the daytime while carefully rationing the amount of daylight available to him everyday and reinforcing his fortress-house as the vampires invariably assault his house every night. As the days go by, the pressure of survival, the loneliness and the despair of knowing that he truly is the last human survivor takes a psychological toll on him and drives him slightly insane. He hates the vampires with a ferocious passion, digging through houses in the daytime and destroying any helpless vampires that he finds.

What he does not know however, is that a group of the infected eventually manages to find a way to suppress the effects of the disease while not curing them of it completely. These infected retain their personality and intelligence but still possess vampiric traits including helplessness during the day. However Neville refuses to acknowledge them as anything but true vampires and continues to kill vampires during the day whether they are intelligent or not. Eventually, the intelligent vampires manage to breach his defenses and bring him to a trial, accusing him of massacring them. To them, he is the monster who attacks them when they are defenseless when they are only trying to get on with their lives and rebuild a new society, albeit a society of vampires.

Neville is eventually executed by the intelligent vampires, but before he dies he finally realizes that he is legend, because forevermore, his story will be told by the members of the new society as a horrific monster who once preyed on them in the day, just as humans once had legends of vampires who attacked humans in the night. The true horror and hence brilliance of the novella is that who is the monster depends on perspective. When humans are many, then the one vampire is the monster, but when the entire world is populated by vampires, it is the one human who is the true monster.

So it’s truly unfortunate that entertainment executives feel that they need to replace this brilliant ending with a more conventional one in order to make the movie more appealing to the general public. And considering the film version of I, Robot, this isn’t the first time that a movie starring Will Smith has done this either.