If you recognise this title, chances are you've watched the film I Am Legend rather than read the book. That's fine and all, and I would make a complete book-to-film commentary about it, but both the stories are actually very far removed from each other. Some details are the same, but they're too superficial. If I were forced to write a unifying blurb for both it would go:
'Robert Neville has alone survived an apocalypse where everyone else turns to monsters. He used to have a wife. He tries to find a cure at some points. By day it is okay to go out, but by night the monsters roam the world. Near the end he does meet a woman who changes the balance of the story, but the stories are so completely different and so are the women and I can't really elaborate more than that.'
The first notable thing about the book I Am Legend is that back in 1954, it encouraged the idea of "zombie apocalypse" to arise as a genre, even though the book uses vampires. Despite what other sources may tell you by the way, they are vampires, vampires more than anything else. Don't listen to wikipedia telling you they're zombies.
For example, in the story, they:
- are allergic to sunlight which burns them
- only come out at night
- despise garlic
- can't stand the symbol of Jesus, the cross
- drink blood
- are quite savage and predatory
- die from a wooden stake to the heart.
They are vampires as much as the vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are, so don't call them zombies, k.
I have a few hypotheses other than stupidity as to why the film has deviated so far from the book. And by stupidity, I mean that the people responsible for making the film who had read it didn't know what they were doing, and couldn't read into the moral of the story at all. To them it was just pictures in their head that happened and had no meaning.
While some people are genuinely like that, I like to assume the best and that there is reasoning behind what they do, so here the possible reasons in order of optimism, from high to low, as to why they botched up the story and consequently the very good and interesting meaning of the book:
1) The movie was a celebration of the book, thanking it for opening up the genre to make apocalyptic style films what they are today, so they made it in name and likeness, but instead changed it to show how far the genre had developed, Hollywood-style and with modern touches. While this is highly unlikely and I have found no reason in any of the other commentary on it to suggest it is true, I would like to believe it the most because I don't want to live in a shit world where everything is crap and has crap reasoning behind it.
2) The book is old, and many of the things surrounding it are a bit outdated, so they discarded most of it. Because making the monsters like vampires is like, sooo 1900, and the main protagonists race and education and other details should be changed to reflect more what people are like today, and also, why have the monsters caused by bacteria when you can have VIRUSES instead? and so on.
To me, this is somewhat fair enough. The 1950's were a stupid time in many ways as far as I'm concerned.
However, continuing with this point, the story is changed up to the point where it takes the piss and a soft and hopeful ending is made of it that you don't have to give much depth and thought to, when compared. As the idea of society as it is now open to being at all wrong or strange in any way is completely unacceptable? That's more depressing than the idea of the ending of the book itself. Note though that I'm not giving it away.
3) The movie is merely a rip off of a book with a good name because the copyright is out of date (I don't know how copyrights actually work but I heard once that music copyrights run out 50 years after it's release, so after that you can do anything with the music) and so they're trying to pass off an old idea as original, while sticking to the conventions of Hollywood in the most people-pleasing way, and this just a way of getting as much money as possible.
I would recommend this book to fans of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories, which is a genre that I like. The book is nicely written too, and isn't too long. Read it if you want to.
