I Am Legend has been announced as a film production fairly much ever since it was published. In 1957, Hammer Films intended to shoot an adaptation entitled Night Creatures but this was abandoned after the British censorship board decided that the film as planned would have to be banned. This eventually went ahead as the Italian-American produced The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price. Richard Matheson co-wrote the screenplay but was dissatisfied with the results and substituted the name Logan Swanson on the credits. The Last Man on Earth suffers from a crippling dullness, although to its credit is the only of the film adaptations of I Am Legend that follows the novel, especially when it comes to retaining the idea of the last man on earth fighting vampires and the twist ending. Next came The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, which replaced the vampires with albinoid mutants and pumped up the action element. This too was regarded as highly unsatisfactory, especially in its abandoning of the essence of the book, including writing the vampires out altogether.

This third version was announced way back at the start of the 1990s and has remained in development limbo ever since then. Things began in earnest in 1997 with a screenplay by Mark Protosevich, the screenwriter who also wrote The Cell (2000), Poseidon (2006) and Thor (2011). (Mark Protosevich’s original script is available online and would have made for a strong, intelligent and well worthwhile adaptation, even if it too changes the ending). The project was taken up by Ridley Scott, director of science-fiction classics like Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), and mounted as a project for Arnold Schwarzenegger. (One of the interesting ideas in this version was that the first hour of the film would be without dialogue). This was dumped by Warner Brothers after the budget topped a then sizeable $108 million. (This was the point just before the wildly over-budgeted Titanic (1997) came out and seemed to be heading for almost certain financial disaster and studios were suddenly getting scared about big budgets). Schwarzenegger retained an interest in the project with Tracy Tormé, of Fire in the Sky (1993) and Sliders (1995-2000), writing a version.

Rob Bowmam, director of The X Files (1998) and Reign of Fire (2002), attempted to mount a scaled-down version with a reworking of Mark Protosevich’s script by John Logan, writer of The Time Machine (2002) and The Aviator (2004). There was a serious attempt to remount I Am Legend in 2002 starring Will Smith under Michael Bay, the director of Armageddon (1998) and Transformers (2007). This version ended up being canned by the studio after the release of the low-budget 28 Days Later (2002), which stole much of I Am Legend’s thunder. However, Will Smith continued to push the project. One of the most fascinating names attached to the Will Smith version was Guillermo Del Toro, the director behind Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), before going ahead with Francis Lawrence, the director of Constantine (2005).

One kept cringing through the various incarnations of I Am Legend – ie. Michael Bay, one of the worst directors in the world – and hoped somewhere in all of this that the various parties might give us a faithful adaptation of the story. One supposes that they should have given up hope upon seeing that the finished film version was based on the script that John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington wrote for The Omega Man, as well as the name of Akiva Goldsman who had been employed to work over Mark Protosevich’s script. Akiva Goldsman has laid a swathe of atrocities across the genre with his scripts for the likes of Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Practical Magic (1998), the previous Will Smith science-fiction outing I, Robot (2004), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009), as well as his having produced the Will Smith follow-up vehicle Hancock (2008), Jonah Hex (2010) and several films, Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Mindhunters (2004), for the perpetually dreadful Renny Harlin.

The great disappointment is that I Am Legend has been intended far more as a remake of The Omega Man than it ever has of the Richard Matheson book. The various changes that The Omega Man made to the Matheson novel have been retained – the vampires being changed into mutants that have an allergy to light; the Christian allegory at the end where Neville’s blood ends up saving the human race; Robert Neville being a former military officer. In that the filmmakers have allowed the title to revert to Richard Matheson’s book, they cannot be unaware of how much the book was botched by The Omega Man. However, to conduct a remake and prefer to keep all the changes that The Omega Man added, rather than go back to the original conception is such a depressingly ill-conceived idea it is difficult to contemplate.

Most disappointingly, I Am Legend has dumped the vampires and replaced them with all-purpose CGI mutants who merely have an aversion to sunlight. One of the most potent images of the novel was the image of the last man on Earth cornered in his home at night as the vampires gathered outside and pleaded with him to come out. Even The Omega Man kept that. However, it is missing here – the mutants fail to even find Will Smith’s home until right at the very end. Indeed, Will Smith’s Neville is such an all-round nice guy that this version fails to even give us any scenes of him tracking down and eliminating the mutants. Certainly, there are some elements from the book that were not in either of the other film versions – we see Will Smith’s Neville obsessively engaged in research to try and find a cure to the plague; as well as his having the dog companion that he spent much of the book trying to capture. It becomes the old question of – if they brought up the rights to a book and then threw much of it out, then why not just write their own original work? What we have, one suspects, is I Am Legend reimagined as a copy of 28 Days Later. (Which is ironic as George Romero was inspired by the Richard Matheson novel when he created the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968), while in turn 28 Days Later was very much a copy of Romero’s zombie films).

There are other sections of the film that contain pieces of writing that are just bizarre – like the attempt to use a section from Shrek (2001) with Shrek not wanting the donkey following him as a metaphor for Will Smith’s preferring his loneliness. The appearance of Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan out of the blue is poor writing. One thought for a time that the film was following the book where Neville meets a woman who appears to be a survivor but is in fact a vampire that can survive in daylight and has been sent to seduce him. This turns out not to be the case and we get a series of not-at-all credible scenes where Alice Braga starts going on about God’s will and setting out on a quest to find survivors elsewhere, which seems entirely unbelievable in terms of the mass destruction that we have seen throughout.

The most bizarre part is the ending of the film. Richard Matheson’s ending has been thrown out and instead we have Will Smith sacrificing himself a la The Omega Man, allowing Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan to go on together to find the colony where humanity has survived, taking his blood with them to provide an antidote for the rest of the survivors. When we see her at the gates of the town and the people beyond in a perfect smalltown USA setting, even with church bells ringing, it is something that seems as ludicrously false and forced an ending as it was in Damnation Alley (1977).

The strain of divine providence that goes through these scenes is equally bizarre writing. The ending seems to leave one with the underlying belief that God is on the survivors side and that all (even the elimination of everybody on Earth and the rest turned into mindless zombie mutants) accords to His purpose if only we can believe in the cryptic signs. It is as bizarre a parable of divine salvation as it was at the ending of George Pal’s The War of the Worlds (1953). One can also note that when the film explains the title ‘I Am Legend’ in the end voiceover narration it completely reverses it from what it was meant in the book. In the book, what it meant was that Neville in his campaign to eliminate the vampires was now a legend to the vampire people in the same sense that Count Dracula was regarded as a mythic figure of fear by humanity; here it is taken to merely mean that Neville is a legend in the heroic sense for having sacrificed his life to save humanity.

Francis Lawrence and the visual effects team take maximum opportunity to show us a devastated New York City with various landmarks lying in ruin or overgrown and lavishly staged flashbacks showing the military blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, not to mention the glorious image of Will Smith shooting golf balls off the deck of an abandoned aircraft carrier. It should be pointed out that much of this spectacle of devastation is not present in the book – Richard Matheson keeps the hero cooped up indoors and spends very little time describing the scenery (which was set in L.A. as opposed to New York). Nevertheless, Francis Lawrence’s depiction of the devastation surrounding Will Smith is exemplary. Particularly captivatingly is the opening scene that Lawrence throws us into with Will Smith with a rifle hunting deer through the streets in a sports car and into Central Park – something that holds a dazzling sense of turning everything familiar completely on its head.

I was not a huge fan of Francis Lawrence’s debut film Constantine, which likewise demonstrated an attitude towards its source material that basically threw everything up into the air and then decided to do something completely different. Lawrence seem to lack the visual style to give Constantine what it needed to work. The good news is that Lawrence has done his homework since and I Am Legend works far better directorially than Constantine. Lawrence seems exceedingly at home with the environment of big-budget special effects. More so than that, he creates a number of sequences of taut suspense – Will Smith’s venture into the underground lair to rescue the dog, the scene where he is trapped upside down in a noose as sunset comes and the mutants start to advance. Lawrence also does a fair job of depicting Will Smith’s loneliness – especially his grief during the dog’s death – although these scenes are still not a patch on the megalomania, despair and madness of Bruno Lawrence that we had in The Quiet Earth (1985).

I Am Legend was a reasonable box-office success and Will Smith has signed up to play in a prequel. I Am Omega (2007) was a cheap copy from The Asylum.

Richard Matheson’s other genre works include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) based on his novel, the scripts for Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World (1961), the occult film Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), the Corman-produced mortician’s comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Last Man on Earth (1964) based on I Am Legend, the Hammer psycho-thriller The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), the classic Hammer occult film The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), the historical biopic De Sade (1969), Steven Spielberg’s first film Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) tv movies, the haunted house film The Legend of Hell House (1973), the tv adaptation of Dracula (1974), the tv movies Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Stranger Within (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Dead of Night (1977) and The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver (1977), the tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), the time travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980) from his own novel, Jaws 3-D (1983), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), and numerous classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Thriller and Star Trek. Works based on his novels and stories are The Omega Man (1971) from his I Am Legend, the afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come (1998), the fine ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), The Box (2009) and Real Steel (2011).