Fractal Films: I Am Legend (2007)
Director: Hey, aren’t you the guy responsible for stinking up the screen with Batman & Robin and Lost in Space?
Writer: Well, there were other people involved, but sure. Yup.
Director: My God, they were indescribably awful pieces of turd.
Writer: Hey, I’ve won an Oscar since then.
Director: They really should take previous offences into account with those.
Writer: Fuck you very much. Aren’t we meant to be making a film together?
Director: Er, sure. I’m A Legend, or something.
Writer: I Am Legend. A science fiction classic, one with perhaps the greatest thematic reversal and final line in the genre, one that ties the very title of the work into its theme, that shows its hand from the very start yet still remains shocking. Haunting, horrific, a study of how a man becomes a monster.
Director: Yeah, we can totally capture that with, y’know, CGI. Computer-game CGI that’ll be cheaper than using talent. Or having to pay lots of extras. Or the whole boring process of putting makeup on those extras.
Writer: I’ve been thinking. What we should do is make a film that, despite the crap effects, isn’t that bad. Have Will Smith going mad from isolation, the soul-destroying effects of hiding from monsters every single night.
Director: Whatever. Look, this is what we’re doing. Whip out the ending. Then tack on a bit with a woman and child who’ve been led by God- literally heard God’s voice, who’s guided them to Will Smith’s character. Will Smith will learn to believe in his faith once more, and thanks to God’s advice sacrifices himself and gives the woman the cure for monsterhood. Then God will lead her to a troop of survivalists- we’ll really clearly code them as survivalists, with a mountain compound, lots of weaponry, US flags everywhere- and the last scene of the film will show a big church at the centre of the compound, with bells triumphantly ringing the faithful who’ve been spared at the end of the world.
Writer: Which leaves the title of the film meaning what?
Director: That Will Smith is, y’know, a total fucking legend.
Writer: So, we’re actually making Christian armageddon porn?
Director: No, we’re making an absolute fuck-ton of money.
Writer: Hold on- you’re the guy that did Constantine.
Director: What’s your point?
Writer: Shit, even I think you should never have been let near a camera after that.
on January 21st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I take it that it’s shit, then? I feel justified in refusing to see it now, exactly because of Akiva Goldsman’s involvement, and I thought Constantine was absolute crap, but I think I might’ve mentioned that on here before! I might watch it on Channel Five in a couple of years time, probably when I’m too hungover to change channels.
The last movie adaptation of Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’, The Omega Man, is worth checking out, if only for the disco vampires with silver hair!
on January 22nd, 2008 at 9:56 am
The biggest problem with the film is that 90% of it is surprisingly good. The creature effects are uniformly shit but beyond that there’s a real bleak edge to the film that captures a lot of the atmosphere of I Am Legend.
But it all collapses at the end, which is seriously flawed. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the ending of the book (the very final line, in fact) is one of the most perfect in SF or horror. All of that is chucked out in favour of a weak, nonsensical (in story terms) ending that stinks very strongly of Christian fundamentalism (SPOILER: only the faithful survive at the end of the world).
It just does not make any sense to me. How do you spend so much time and effort on adapting something when you so completely miss the point? But that’s just what the film industry’s like, I suppose. It shouldn’t really have surprised me, I know, but I think I was lulled into expecting more because the film got so much right. The ending was such a bitter disappointment because it would have been so easy to fit the novel’s ending into this film, and had they done that- just changed the last five minutes just a little bit, and it could have been awesome.
The thing about the Omega Man is that the very first scene (you know, the short advertisement for the NRA) tips you off to exactly what kind of film it is, so you can enjoy it on those terms.
on January 29th, 2008 at 4:22 am
I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read “I Am Legend” — but I do feel, now, as though I’ve sat in on Hollywood production meetings for soon-to-be-damaged movies. You’ve probably committed some sort of copyright infringement here. Funny stuff!
on January 30th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I’d recommend the book to anyone who’s interested in that type of post-disaster fiction. It really is a genre classic, and probably the best SF/Horror hybrid ever written.
on July 16th, 2010 at 11:55 am
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