If you loved the book, this movie will make you very, very angry

Rating: 1/10 (29 January 2008)

It never fails to amaze me how terrified Hollywood studios seem to be of deviating from clichés.
"I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson, the inspiration for a lot of successful horror writers and movie directors (Stephen King and George A. Romero among them), was written in 1954 and could reasonably claim to have set the bar for all post apocalyptic fiction. It was brilliantly realised, and is, for the record, one of my all time favourite books, not least for the amazing revelation at the ending which defines in one shocking and horrifying moment the real truth of the protagonists existence.
53 years after this book was published, they made this movie. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I had fears that this movie would parallel "I Robot", which was another hammy Will Smith movie that twisted the great story or stories it was based on into predictable Hollywood pap. Sadly, my fears were not to be assuaged.
However, while "I Robot" took a number of Asimov concepts, and made them less than the sum of its parts, "I Am Legend" is a hack job, plain and simple. I criticise this film entirely on the fact that its creators had the sheer chutzpah to borrow the same title from that classic novel, and then alter the storyline out of all recognition. They evidently did not realise why the book was called "I Am Legend" in the first place.
It is a worrying trend, I think, that movie and TV producers think they can use expensive imagery to distract their audiences from pathetic and predictable cliché, when their original source material could have made their movie so much more brave and better. Do they think we are all idiots? Because if that is the case, then my feeling about them is most certainly mutual.
For the record, I like Will Smith in some of his roles (Enemy of the State), but I really wish he would stop accepting roles in movies which shamelessly bowdlerise the original material. Especially material which is very close to my heart. 0/10.