Flashy creature movie with no resemblance to the original

Rating: 4/10 (2 May 2008)

The write-up by csullaf (http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0814462/comments) titled "Extravagant wrapping around an empty box., 17 December 2007" already said most of what needed to be said about this movie, in my opinion, but I wanted to add a little bit.
As he said, I find it mind-boggling how quickly Hollywood will make a movie based on a story or earlier movie and end up with something that bears little resemblance to the original. It's the height of stupidity. The REASON people want a new version is because of the original, if you take that away, you have nothing left, do you? Which is what this movie has, as far as I'm concerned. There's just nothing there. Video-game monsters, poorly-developed characters and poorly-developed plot.
What really gets me more than anything else though ... again, as csullaf said, the changes they made, absurdly, make the title meaningless.
In the original and in earlier filmed versions, the vampires are fairly intelligent. And the main character is a legend to them, THUS THE NAME, "I am Legend".
In fact in the earliest filmed version of this, the Vincent Price version, if I recall correctly the female character who he befriends turns out to be sort of a mutant strain of the vampires, more or less half-human and half-vampire. As a result, you really do see it from their point of view. They are the future of the human race, a new mutation (the vampires in general) and from that perspective, the main character IS in fact a monster in his own right.
That's what makes the story interesting. That's what makes it any different from a thousand cheesy monster movies or, for that matter, from a video game.
But by making the vampires super-powered video game monsters, that whole side of it is lost.
And there's nothing left but a video game.
I really have never been able to grasp how they do it, how they take an interesting story and, at some point, make the decision "let's take everything that is interesting in this story and chuck it out". I mean they couldn't just be doing it accidentally, could they? I would just like to see the meeting where they do that. Are they all doing massive amounts of cocaine so they are all in some cocaine psychosis and then they have the meeting? Maybe they can make that a mandatory special feature on the DVD for movies like this in the future. "The meeting where we decided to take everything good and chuck it out". I think that would be good cinema, I would like to see a roomful of coked-up Hollywood executives barking and howling like madmen and making completely deranged decisions. And they probably have some pretty cute secretaries.
It wouldn't be any better than the movie they end up making but it would at least be shorter.