i am legend. the title of the richard matheson book was so absolutely fitting because it was also the punchline of the story. no need for spoilers here so if you're interested in going deeper into what i'm talking about, read the book. it's short.
now let's talk about the only film adaptation of that book to be so bold as to use the title 'i am legend'. will smith was actually pretty good as the last man on earth. he did crazy the way you assume a guy would be if he was left alone with nothing to do but kill the things that were vampires in the book but are now just infected people that look a lot like a cheaply animated cross between gollum and the 'the rock' half of the scorpion king (from the mummy returns, not the scorpion king movie) all day long. the majority of the movie plays out with a great sense of how much it would suck to know that you are the only human left in the world and that your dog is the last companion you'll ever have who will show some true sign of affection towards you.
then the chick and her kid show up and the movie takes it's jarring right turn from the source material. i can deal with right turns, but you gotta do them well. you gotta have a reason for changing the storyline beyond thinking that you might be able to leave the door open for a sequel. in fact the change from vampires to infected creatures was one i can appreciate. in my opinion there hasn't been a solid vampire movie made since kiefer sutherland and bill s. preston, esquire, terrorized the coreys in lovely santa carla. so yeah, change them to infected. matheson even touches on this to a degree in the book. and heck, the infected avenue seems to be working for zombies these days.
but the chick and the kid? that was the line that could not be crossed. again, read the book, but suffice it to say from this point on through the end, this movie was not 'i am legend'. this movie was 'i am kinda famous in my neighborhood'.
then tonite i stumble across this. the 'original' ending that magically takes a lot of the suck away from the theatrical ending and replaces it with something that could be proud to call itself 'i am not quite legend but i know you know my face'. this ending hits in ways that the theatrical ending so absolutely missed. i am legend the book at it's most basic level did not work because robert neville spent his every waking moment figuring out how to find and kill vampires. it worked because every single night his old buddy who was now a vampire would come to his house and torment the living shit out of him. it worked because robert neville so absolutely missed his family that he would question why he shouldn't just get it over with and go get himself turned into one of the undead rather than continue to live with the pain of his loss. it worked because in the end robert neville had a price to pay for the actions that he took as the last living human being.
this new ending works in a similar way and in doing so it gives credit to the source material and maybe just a little bit to the intelligence of it's audience as well. then again i'm sure the studios had the intelligence level of their target audience pretty well pegged when they decided that the best possible ending they could deliver was the one where will smith just decides to blow himself up. um... sorry for the spoiler but it was a sucky ending anyhow.
i spent much of yesterday afternoon reflecting back to when i was a kid. i was probably in 5th grade when i saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time. Day of the Dead came shortly after that and eventually i got around to watching Dawn of the Dead so that i could, not in proper sequence, round out the romero canon.
i loved these movies for what they were: bite your face off, tear out your intestines, munch on your internal organs, kickass good times. it wasn't until years later when i read a review of romero's works that it was revealed to me that he was actually inserting social commentary into his films.
for me, that's where Diary of the Dead goes right off the tracks. i think romero would have had better luck just videotaping himself telling the audience that we are a culture of observers who sit around, eyeballs glued to whatever video delivery device we happen to have handy, believing what we see on the screen instead of what we see with our own two eyes. then he could have had a zombie come in and tear out a nice big chunk of his neck while the camera kept rolling. then the zombie would shuffle off after its next victim, knocking the camera to the ground as it passed by, leaving the camera on the floor with a tight shot of romoro's face, his dying eyes fading, then turning, then he moans. and as he reaches out to get up, his living dead hand brushes the off button on the camera. end of movie. 5 minutes tops.
me personally, i'd rather see that movie, but instead i sat through romero's latest and far from greatest. where his messages were previously layered into the action of the movie, here he decides to just have the actors state the purpose of the film... over and over and over again. but is it worth it, you ask? it's romero so yeah, it's a gazillion times better than most movies most hacks might release straight to video, but it's got nothing on any of the previous Dead films (and yes, that includes Land of the Dead, previously the weakest of the bunch).
in the spirit of being a little more constructive with my criticism, i take back my earlier proposal of how this film should have been made and take this new direction from the title of the film itself. since the zombie who continues to lumber around carrying some trusted possession from it's previous "life" is a device romero has used countless times before to illustrate that the line between "living dead" and "just living" is pretty blurry, he should have just killed off the entire cast in the first 5 minutes of the movie. then have the kid who was taping the whole thing come back as the world's first reanimated documentarian of the new living dead culture.
diary of the dead, indeed.
here's a biased history lesson. but really, aren't they all?