I Am Legend Contrast
Richard Matheson’s short story “I Am Legend” written in 1954 has been adapted into several movies,
with the 2007 version, starring Will Smith, as the most famous of them. Unfortunately, the movie
cannot win the comparison between original book and new movie due to the Hollywood treatment
that it received. It shares the general plot of Matheson’s original idea but lacks a great deal of detail.
These details that have been twisted such as the disease which the en0re story is based on, the
monsters and the ending hurt the movie adapta0on enormously.
The only similarity concerning the disease in the book as well as in the movie is that it causes
humanity to show vampire-like behavior.
The disease in the book is a bacterial virus that evolved itself and gets transmitted by dust storms. In
the movie however, the disease is a cancer cure gone wrong and therefore it is man-made.
The scriptwriters of the movie might have wanted to bring the movie up to date since the book was
written in the 1950’s. This might have led to the whole cancer cure which in the end goes wrong,
because cancer has been such a big issue over the last decades and s0ll is that scien0sts eagerly try to
2nd a cure for it.
The monsters that appear to be basically the same in both the book and the movie version have very
unique di4erences.
In the book the vampire-like creatures Robert Neville has to face are split into 2 groups. The dead and
the s0ll living. The protagonist makes this discovery while trying to 2ght Ben Cortman o4 his lawn and
makes the conclusion that some of the s0ll living ones didn’t lose all their human behavior and that
they are not the stupid monsters that he thought them to be. Yet, the movie tries to make the same
conclusion by showing the viewer that the vampires have a leader and a set goal which is the
rescuing the leaders’ partner which Neville captured. But unlike in the book the movie protagonist
does not realize this.
The endings in the book as well as in the movie are two completely different ones.
Matheson’s ending with its ironical twist shows the protagonist and the reader what this new world is
and at the same 0me it reveals the full meaning of the title.