Betrayal of an SF classic

Rating: 3/10 (20 January 2008)

I saw two films last night, one eagerly anticipated, the other avoided. The other (The Italian Job) I reviewed as 'A sickeningly awful travesty of a classic film' but then, I expected that because it was 'an American Blockbuster'. This, on the other hand, is the other side of the negative 'American film-making' coin and represents a more depressing prospect as it is a betrayal of a great US book rather than a great UK film (books being more reputable in my opinion).
Like others before me, I loved the NY scenes and the sequences with Robert's dog which form an essential part of the book. Yet they totally missed the point here. The book is an exquisitely portrayed justification of the very idea of Vampires existing at all and that derives mainly from the events of the time in which it was written, whilst the film hi-jacks ideas such as 9/11, a cure for cancer and so on, making this background premise a whole lot less convincing.
Will Smith does a fair job of Robert Neville but, if you ask me, he was the absolutely WRONG choice for the part. This is never more obvious than in the flexing muscles scene which is a transparent and wholly unnecessary bid to bring in the female crowds. I know that if you made this film without him, it probably wouldn't sell but, in the book, Robert Neville was an extremely tragic character (what happened to the elegantly portrayed idea of tragedy in modern books and films?). If you were the last man alive without much hope, having to go through the same old routines in order to survive, with no company, desperate to save the human race and find a cure, would you be so utterly ripped? There are limits to how deliberate self-delusion to keep oneself going can be maintained. It's not as if he fights many vampires in this film like some super hero and it's not like he's working out in order to look good is it?
There are hints about his tragedy but, if you were to read the book with its more drawn-out character exposition, you would know about his family life, what happened to his wife and daughter, how he met up with the dog and various features of the vampires that make them stand out from your average nasty blood-suckers by characterising them properly. I won't spoil it for you so GO READ THE BOOK!
If you do read the book, you should be able to see how this film could have been so much better. Nevertheless, I must add a few !!!!!!!BIG SPOILERS ABOUT THE BOOK HERE!!!!!! in order to review it. For a start, Neville was not a scientist. He was just an ordinary desperate man who spent hours poring over textbooks in an abandoned library trying to find all manner of tips to help his lonely existence. The arrival of the dog was a godsend to him and he spent months trying to catch it, tame it and figure out why it wasn't infected. Neville was bombarded each night by vampires who knew him when they were alive and who would taunt him endlessly so that he could not sleep and he spent most of each morning repairing the house's outer defences. Neville became an alcoholic and makes various attempts to block out the sounds of the vampires outside, even going outside to fight them in one foolish and desperate act of frustration. Indeed, there are various heart-stopping moments that are completely lost in the film which appears to make a nothing of Neville's trials.
Furthermore, in the book there was a reason why he survived so long and this is bound up with him meeting Anna. I will try to avoid giving the whole game away here by telling you the real ending because I'd like people to read this book but, suffice to say, that the movie chickens out once again, as is common for an American film aiming for a blockbuster status but only serving to cheat its viewers, by giving us a hopeful ending with just a tiny note of tragedy. If you were to examine the premise of why the book was written in the first place, you would see the betrayal of the whole reason why Matheson wrote this classic here in the first place combined with the whole reason why they changed it.
This is a classic example of early American SF being brilliantly subversive and American film taking over and replacing the best ideas with propaganda in order to create what it thinks is the appropriate effect for its audience.
My low rating is because it would have been SO EASY to make a film about this book that was 'edge-of-your-seat' brilliant and heart-wrenching by giving us a genuine human biopic of this man. It also betrays the sheer quality of American SF yet again in a way that reduces the whole genre to the sort of turgid surface-play that you get in Star Trek plotting (quite apart from the often high quality of its hard SF) and which gives the genre a bad reputation in literary circles. Shame on you!