I saw this several weeks ago but have yet to come up with much to say about it that Happy Simpleton hasn’t already covered. Really, I try not to be a “the book is so much better than the movie!” sort of person (although it did take me several viewings before I really made peace with Peter Jackson’s LotR movies). But if you’re going to (presumably) pay Richard Matheson for the right to do a movie based on his kinda-famous novel, isn’t it a bit weird to then make a movie that is almost nothing like the book?

OK, the basic setup—the last man alive on earth faces off against scary zombie-esque creatures—is similar to the book. And for a while, the movie hints that it will stick to the spirit, if not the letter, of the novel. But I don’t exaggerate when I say that the movie’s final 30 minutes is the complete opposite, morally and thematically, of the book’s finale. The novel features a major plot shift towards the end that explains the title and makes an otherwise average survival-horror story really memorable. The movie just… never goes there at all. And it thus remains a thoroughly average survival-horror movie.

This movie could easily have been done with bothering to call it I Am Legend. In fact, as it is, it’s pretty much just a PG-13 version of 28 Days Later. It’s not an awful movie; in fact the first hour is pretty good viewing. But for some reason, they decided to remove the really good stuff and replace them with characters and an ending that are, I promise you, significantly less interesting than they are in the book.

Oh well. Maybe I’m just a “the book is better!” snob after all. But if they’re not going to at least pay lip service to the original work, what was the point of making this movie at all?