Will Smith’s last movie, I Am Legend, was apocalyptically bad — in particular, the ending was awful. Now Phil has the alternate ending that was filmed but not used — I agree with him that it’s not perfect, but it is immensely better, and is also a little closer to the spirit of the book.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I think I prefer that ending. The one I saw in the theater really ruined the (admittedly unpleasant) feeling that the rest of the film had given me. Cheapened the whole thing.
What I enjoyed most about the movie up to that point was all the questions that the scenario invited. If you might be the last person on the planet or one of the last, if a new form of life that is completely different from humanity shows up and might replace us, how do you feel about it? What do you do?
It seems like being in such a situation would prove pretty handily that the gods we had and the beliefs a lot of us held about our own importance would be right out the window. Staring that kind of grim truth in the face, how do you go on? Especially if you held those false beliefs in the past?
Having an ending that sort of promises or implies the restoration of the status quo ruins all of that. It says everything will be ok and don’t worry yourself with those kinds of troubling thoughts. But I think everyone SHOULD from time to time trouble themselves in that manner.
I meant to add this to my previous post, but I forgot:
Stories like this one and like The Road by Cormac McCarthy are so frightening because they remind us that as a species, we’re not as special as we like to think and we’re actually hanging onto existence by a pretty thin thread. Forces out of our control or completely accidental can change things pretty easily, and it might be impossible for us to recover. The world we have now might be gone for good with no way to ever put it right.
Religion is comforting because it lets us think we’re the most important beings in the universe and surely no stupid, senseless cosmic accident or human error could completely ruin us. We’ll never see any kind of world destroying event unless it’s brought about by some kind of god who is on our side and will save us even from that.
I wonder how religious people feel with these kinds of stories (at least up until the Hollywood happy endings). They probably don’t let themselves be as vulnerable and open to those questions of what it would be like (and how your whole view of reality would shift) if such things really happened. I guess it’s comforting for them, but it’s still kind of a shame.
And we all know how dangerous that kind of comforting thinking can be when the people who believe in it gain power. Nothing is really dangerous or worrisome, since God will always bail us out at the last minute.
Well, given that this ending places humanity within the ecosystem instead of above it, and implies that we may not be the ultimate inheritors of this planet, it’s not hard to see why studio execs decided middle-America probably wouldn’t buy it.
Well, given that this ending places humanity within the ecosystem instead of above it, and implies that we may not be the ultimate inheritors of this planet, it’s not hard to see why studio execs decided middle-America probably wouldn’t buy it.
This ending is better than the first but in spite of the subtle bibical symbolism, I’ll take the ending of the Omega Man over either of these.
Ha! I feel so vindicated! This is actually how I was predicting it was going to end while watching the movie, with (SPOILERS!) the whole point of the zombies’ invading Neville’s house turning out to be so the lead zombie to get his girl zombie back.
Yeah, this ending is what the whole movie felt like it was leading up to. Plus, it had the added bonus of giving the name of the movie its real meaning.
Honestly, who cares? Are the Spiderman movies ‘worse’ than the comics because they don’t perfectly replicate the existing canon? (aside: if you do think this, I pity you. Immensely.)
Stop trying to think of a screen adaptation of a Thing as ‘Exactly Perfectly Similar to the Thing’ and realize that it can’t be, that it’s a wholly new artwork that shares a few names and narrative themes, but ultimately are separate.
I am so glad I never fell into the orthodoxy of fandom. Can’t you people just enjoy a thing without continuously tearing it down?
Yeah, I kind of figured it would have some kind of ending like this, too.
If it had ended this way, I would’ve been haunted by it and would have thought about it a lot more than I had. I probably would have mentioned it to friends who had also seen the movie and had discussions like the one we’re having here.
But that ending that made it into the theaters basically says “It’s ok, you don’t HAVE to think about this anymore. You don’t have to have those discussions or feel haunted. Problem solved. Worry about it no more.”
Will Smith certainly seems a likable person, but with the exception of Ali and the MIB movies he has been in a bunch of utter crap. In particular, his sci-fi films have been awful. Asimov is still spinning in his grave like a pulsar after I-Robot. I would have to be Ludovico’d before I’d watch I Am Legend.
“I would consider MIB to be a new-age spoof rather than a sci-fi film.”
stogoe,
Still grinding that axe, I see.
I remember another good film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)
It too had different endings with the ‘grim’ one being the best.
well i haven’t actually seen the film (tho i am downloading it right now so i will pretty soon) but if carlton isn’t in it it probably won’t be all that great i think
I made the mistake of reading the book before seeing the movie. If I didn’t I would have gone in there with no expectations. However I liked how the modernized the movie from the book, I think they made the mistake of making these vampiric humans morph and become super strong. And I didn’t like the ending kinda dumb. Should have stuck to the book. But hollywood and movie goers like that happy ending crap.
I liked this ending better too. I knew they were there for the girl and it didn’t make sense why he blew himself, the girl he just cured, and everyone else up. I thought that was lame.
Stogoe,
There’s a difference between changing a script to better fit the directors sense of the story, and changing a script so that it becomes the exact opposite of what the original author intended.
Да.
Exhibit A: The Natural
At least part of why moviemakers use known books as sources for their work is to coopt the fandom of those works into being fans for their movie. If you want the rabid fandom to see your movie ten times, you also have to be prepared when they excoriate you for neutering the ending. “Do not call what you cannot put on hold.”
Another part of the problem is that the people who make movies from such sources want the legitimacy of those works, so when they generate output that compromise them, contempt would seem to be earned. Neutering a source work to make a movie is much like what Clarence Thomas did when he claimed those accusing him of engaging in sexual harrassment were attempting a “high-tech lynching” – claiming an intellectual and moral ground that one’s actions have actively rejected. (idea in end from Christopher Hitchens in For The Sake of Argument).
If you don’t want to be criticized for your adherence to a source work, the best strategy is to write your own.
Drekab,
I think that you can have an adaptation that’s not faithful to the original material while still being a work of quality on its own.
In a sense, it’s true that pointing out divergence between a work and its adaptation isn’t relevant criticism on its own; but the fact is that generally when people cite the divergence as a point of negative criticism, they are implying more than the simple divergence. They’re implying a comparison of the divergent elements. That’s something that can be relevant in many ways.
And Jaycubed ups the gravespinning ante. For a few years it was holding steady at “spinning so fast you could tap him for power”, but it appears the dreaded pulsar card has been played. Will anyone attempt to make dishonoured authors spin even faster, or is it finally time to introduce other varieties of motion? Tune in tonight!
The new ending is quite a bit more satisfying, as it acknowledges the atrocities Smith’s character committed, without turning him into a martyr. Losing that church+army==civilization shot at the end didn’t hurt. Man, that bugged me.
I didn’t see the theatrical version of I Am Legend but just watched the alternate ending, and I was struck by how similar it was to another horror story that was adapted last fall, Stephen King’s “The Mist.” The original novella ends with the narrator, his son & a woman driving north through the mist, trying to find survivors on the radio, and espousing the promise of hope. However, Frank Darabont’s movie version jettisoned that for a brutally grim (or maybe just mean-spirited) climax. Did they all switch endings on purpose?
I haven’t read Matheson’s original novel in years. I’d rather reread it than see the Will Smith version from everything I’ve heard.
@Numad:
The problem is that this work is not a good quality piece of work. It has SOME parts that are quality pieces, but most of it is utter crap. Smith is the only person in the film who seems like he’s actually earning his money (I’m including directors, CGI artists, etc).
It’s a shoddy piece of work and it’s also written by Akiva Goldsmen. (I think that’s his last name, anyway.) He’s also written the Da Vinci code movie and is writing Angels and Demons. He’s ruined, thus far, Da Vinci Code and I Am Legend. He simply cannot be trusted to do an adaptation. Period.
I liked the ending to ‘The Mist’. Yes it was brutal but at least it was thought provoking. Why should movies always require a happy resolved ending?
For me, “brutally grim” is a compliment. I had no problem with the film ending of The Mist, I just thought it was ironic that the alternate ending to I Am Legend bore more similarity to the end of King’s original story, rather than Matheson’s original story.
Phy,
I consider Asimov primarily a science writer rather than a sci-fi writer. My library has several times more of his non-fiction books than his fictional ones. They are especially helpful in explaining scientific concepts to neophytes.
I suspect that he might prefer the pulsar reference better than the “tap him for power” suggestion because there is no suggested mechanism provided for actually producing the power from his spinning body. “Like a pulsar” is simple, concise and implies both the speed & inertia of the spinning body.
ps. I find Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is a great reference for countering the ideas & proclamations of Monotheists on their own terms, always the hardest but usually the most effective method. It’s fun to have ’em run away screaming.
.
The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons can only be improved by the film-maker. I am embarrassed to admit to reading both and that after reading Da Vinci I read Angels thinking it couldn’t be any worse. It could and it was. I’ve never been so annoyed by two books that I’ve finished. Love the genre and the premise but OMFG these two books are stupid. Bizarrely I couldn’t put them down.
The Da Vinci Code and Angels… would be improved by a gallon of gas and a match.
I didn’t really like the ending to the Mist, because it was just TOO cutesy and ironic.
OK, so I just watched this movie, and I think it was unnecessarily scary. I mean, some of us are wimps and stuff.
The superstition bit was a bit irksome as well.
2/5 from me, no matter which ending you use.
“The problem is that this work is not a good quality piece of work.”
Kyle,
I didn’t say it was. It certainly doesn’t seem to be.
I guess I was just stating the obvious.
I don’t insist that movies stay true to the book. There can be good movie adaptations that are very different from very good books (see “Jaws”). But after reading the book (after seeing the movie), I was really disappointed with the movie. I though the book was so much richer in how it handled that aspect of being alone. I also liked how the bad guys in the book weren’t just screaming zombies, but clearly were thinking beings (throughout the story, not just in a secret DVD ending).
I didn’t like the way the movie took a psychological thriller that was the book and turned it into…Cujo? Night of the Living Dead? The problem isn’t that the movie wasn’t true to the storyline of the book, it wasn’t even true to the whole theme of the book. Jeez, in Jaws, the shark attacked randomly and without regard for much of anything. But that was true in the book and the movie. This would be like giving the shark and rhyme and reason to its actions (“All this beast does is swim, eat, and make little sharks. But it is upset because evil beachgoers are ruining its habitat.”)
I ran into David Brin in S.F. once and asked him how he felt about what Hollywood did with “The Postman,” if it was hard to let go of your story and let someone else alter it, etc. He said he had no problems with that, essentially saying that the book and the movie are separate entities, the movie can’t diminish the book, etc.
Perhaphs unsurprisingly, a Christian found a way to read certain things into the movie.
Just, uh, maybe not the sort of things we would have expected.
Weeeeeird.
Jaycubed:
Oh, snap.
I didn’t really have a problem with the original ending, though I would have ended it with Anna looking for the survivor’s compound, but you don’t know if she actually finds it.
The alternate ending was alright, though one thing I couldn’t help noticing was that when the infected broke into the lab, it looked like there were dozens of them, but when Neville wheels the gurney out with the alpha male’s girlfriend, you only see a handful of them.
If the studio had kept the alternate ending for the theatrical release, it would have continued Will Smith’s streak of never dying in his movies.
There were a few other things I would have liked to have seen added to the movie. Mainly, a flashback showing the last of Neville’s human companions succumbing to infection and attacks by the infected. You never see anyone in the movie get killed by one of the infected. I think it could have added to the fear factor to have actually seen a few soldiers get torn to pieces.
I have read there is another deleted scene that is a love scene between Neville and Anna that takes place after the Bob Marley scene. If you notice, in the next scene Anna is wearing a different top. That will probably be incorporated into the dvd release.
Jaycubed – usually, when considering tapping dead authors for power, what I’m thinking about is attaching a shaft to their feet to turn the rotor of an electric generator. Possibly you could just wrap the dead author in wire and use them as the rotor directly, but that’s a lot more digging.
My irritation is due more to the seemingly inexorable dysphemism treadmill that this particular phrase seems to be on. The earliest versions made reference to the disgraced author shifting in his grave, and as time goes by, the rotational speed and energy has increased.
In other news, did you know that Will Smith was (is?)flirting with Scientology?
“…Will Smith was (is?)flirting with Scientology?”.
Quite frankly I’m beginning to think Scientology is a bit of a gold digging ho. It appears it flirts with anyone who earns more than a few hundred thou a year.
As evidenced by this list of the rich, famous and batshit crazy. Interestingly Mimi Rogers is proudly listed as second generation which means her parents were batshit crazy also.
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/fam_scientologist.html
You know, I think it’s exactly this sort of response that people are hoping to avoid when they say “the SPIRIT of the original.”
I could never have imagined that a movie where 90% of the world is dead or a zombie could be so boring. A week or two later i heard Smith is a scientologist now and then it made sense.
Hell, there have even been movie adaptations that genuinely improved on the original source. The Crow, by imposing a sense of pacing and a more coherent narrative structure than the graphic novel had while maintaining the general visual and emotional elements, being a classic example (despite the fact that it spawned a hideous sequel that attempted to copy that narrative structure verbatim, change some but not all of the details, and ditch the defining visual and emotional elements). Also, Peter Jackson has my eternal gratitude for cutting the bland, flamingly irrelevant filler that occupied the
bettergreater part of books 2 and 6 from the Lord of the Rings, and I think the changes he made to Aragorn’s motivations and mindset made him a more believable, sympathetic, human character.What I’m hearing about this tripe, on the other hand…
I’ve got The Last Man on Earth to watch on DVD, but won’t bother with the Will Smith version based on what people have said here. As others have commented, Matheson’s original ending can’t be changed without changing the meaning of the whole story.
On a related note, can anyone compare Matheson’s original novel of The Incredible Shrinking Man with the movie, which is itself a classic.
Azkyroth,
Another film that I think improved considerably on the book was Kubrick’s version of The Shining – no silly possessed boiler.
Phy,
Perhaps that is because the level of desecration that the media creates is also increasing, such as commercials planted in the corpse of the author’s work.
.
The shot of Neville looking at the hundreds of failed experiments, in the context of his new understanding of the post-humans is a great addition to the film and addresses Matheson’s original intent pretty directly. Still don’t like the butterfly-tatoo-as-divine-omen nonsense, but the scenes of him trying to adjust to not being alone are so good that they almost outweigh that nonsense.
Just to add to the list of great film adaptations that are teh awesomez despite (because of?) their departure from the original source material:
– There Will Be Blood
– The Shawshank Redemption
– Blade Runner
“very good books (see “Jaws”)”
I’m not sure I’d classify Jaws as a “good book”…
I stole this movie on Bit Torrent while it was still in the theaters. After watching the craptastic ending I actually felt proud that I had stolen it.
With the alternate ending(original ending) it’s a minor classic. I will pay for a copy of the DVD with this ending. But not as some alternate ending only selectable by going to a special features menu after watching the God’s plan ending.
As long as the movie industry keeps listening to test screening audiences and underestimating the general viewing public, it’s going to get exactly what it deserves. To get f***ed by the internet, just like the music industry. Fanboys(and girls) can and will make you money, no matter how easy it is to just get it off the internet.
“very good books (see “Jaws”)”
I’m not sure I’d classify Jaws as a “good book”…
Indeed… Jaws is my go-to example for a so-so pulpy book that was made into, well, one of the greatest American movies ever. I mean, that ending that Benchley had, talk about underwhelming.
The Godfather, while a richer read, with some interesting stuff that never made it any of the movies (Johnny Fontaine mostly) is still just a glorified pulp novel, but again, turned into a masterpiece.
Shawshank Redemption I always saw as a pretty straightforward adaptation of King’s story. Excellent, in fact. I submit To Kill a Mockingbird as a great book that made a great movie. David Cronenberg’s adaptations of Naked Lunch and Crash too.
Will,
I agree completely about Shawshank and Mockingbird. (The latter is one of the great American novels, IMO.)
Speaking of King and Difference Seasons, Stand By Me was a reasonably faithful adaptation of “The Body”.
The film version of Slaughterhouse-5 was also very faithful to the source.
I agree completely about Shawshank and Mockingbird. (The latter is one of the great American novels, IMO.)
Fuck yes! (to the parenthetical)
I’ve still not seen a film version of it, but reading that novel in high school changed how I understood this nation in a very profound way.
Jeff, the movie is a thing of beauty – I think!
I saw it two or three times, by chance really, when I was about 9 or 10. It was life-changing experience; as you say, it opened my mind up to all sorts of things I’d never had reason to consider. And I can’t say I’d been sheltered up ’til then… (Heck, when I was 8 I was probably the most responsible person in my household. But I was… eight… not very sophisticated.)
Anyways. Lately, I’ve felt the need to see it again.
As a kid, I experienced the story more or less the way Scout experienced it – through my eyes and ears, viscerally, comprehended with a child’s mind.
I didn’t get around to reading the book until I took an AmLit course a couple of years ago. And so I experienced the story again, but more in the way that the narrator experienced it: That is, as an adult revisiting and reassessing, in a comparatively detached way, vivid childhood memories of a profoundly formative series of events.
(***warning, gentle readers: potential spoilers follow***)
I also realized how damn funny the book is, and how beautifully written; and I could see how sweet Atticus was with his daughter even when he was giving his dry wit a workout and it was all sailing right over her head (just as it had all sailed right over my head when I saw the movie as a girl).
It’s been at least a dozen years but I can still taste the movie, in a manner of speaking. I can still play scenes in my head as if I had a projector inside my skull. I remember how it made me feel: the mythic fear of the Radley house, those getting-it-while-not-fully-comprehending-it feelings about the court case, the necessarily languid pace of the deep south in the summertime, the easy gentility that fit Atticus and Miss Maudie like a second skin but which masked virulent bigotry in many of their neighbors, and the hateful ignorance and the cycles of abuse that drive key events in the story. The loss of innocence…
The book is a masterpiece, I love it dearly, but the movie remains my primary experience of the story. Sensory input is a powerful thing… our brains are more inclined to tell us “this is real” in a way it never would, or could, when processing words off of a page. (This last observation can kick off an argument against watching too much television news, but that’s another thread.)
Sensory input is a powerful thing… our brains are more inclined to tell us “this is real” in a way it never would, or could, when processing words off of a page.
Ah, but which senses. In another simultaneous thread Ichthyic and I are talking about writing…he can use music; I simply can’t. I can lose myself in music in ways that film will never capture me. This is a whole big ass conversation (or three thousand) but it’s one I love.
I just assigned a paper to my race/ethnicity students to analyze their own identity and shifts in terms of changing relationships (fairly standard sociological stuff, but always blows students’ thinking away…white students particularly seem to struggle *shock, not*). One last year wrote in terms of her relationship to particular texts (but she didn’t go far enough in the anaylsis…and she knew it). They can be powerful (texts, writ large) in shaping our perceptions.
OK, after an entire bottle of sangiovese after some sake at a meeting with a student about her senior research project…i have no idea if anything i’m saying makes any sense.
yeah, To Kill A Mockingbird rocks. :)