26 January 2008

Sleeping Men Don't Sneeze


For much of the last few weeks i've been agog and slightly in shock... appalled into silence, in fact. I saw I Am Legend, with Will Smith playing Robert Neville, a book that i truly love, and whose previous movie versions (The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston & The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price) i found pleasing, if a bit disappointing. And then i saw this newest version...

And... at first i was pleased. Re-locating the film to New York (because of course, New York is the center of the universe) was slightly problematic, but overall a useful and interesting choice. It did give us a break from possibly the most tiresome (but ultimately crucial) plot element of the original novel where the Vampires stand outside Neville's house each night trying to coax him out.

Ultimately the movie comes to precisely the opposite conclusion than that of Matheson's original novel, which is, i suppose, a useful mistake...

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