Last weekend Jen and I saw I Am Legend at a theater in Manhattan. The film itself was awesome, and it was preceded by the trailers for Iron Man and The Dark Knight, which both look fantastic.
Some plot details of both the film and the novel are discussed below, so read no further if you wish to avoid spoilers.
The film I Am Legend bears only the slightest resemblance to the 1954 Richard Matheson novel from which it is adapted. Only the basic premise of the story has been left intact: Robert Neville is, as far as he knows,the lone survivor of a plague that has swept the country. In the novel, the rest of the population have become vampires. This big screen adaptation gives us a plague that was started with a cure for cancer, but soon infected the population and turned them in zombies. These zombies are not only fast-moving, in the style of 28 Days Later, but also seem to have some intelligence.
The film closes with a bittersweet, Hollywood ending: Will Smith's heroic act of self-sacrifice, followed by the first seeds of a new society being planted. The novel, on the other hand, ends with Robert Neville captured by a new society of still-living infected, who have learned to contain the virus, and find that not only the walking dead are a threat, but also Neville, whom they fear because he has hunted and killed both the living and (un)dead infected for the past three years.
I would not hesitate to recommend both the film and novel versions of I Am Legend, but they must be considered as separate entities, mutually exclusive of each other.
