I AM LEGEND: A movie that should have been made ten years ago

Ten years ago, Ridley Scott started pre-production on I Am Legend, a movie based on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel with the same title. I Am Legend had already been adapted twice before for the big screen: The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price and then as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971 (BTW the musical score from The Omega Man, composed by Ron Grainer, is one of my all-time favorite movie soundtracks). Well, by all accounts Scott was going to make the most faithful version of the original novel yet. I was able to see some of the concept art at the time: the vampires looked utterly terrifying, the locales very much desolate ruins.

And running around in this wasted world, trying to stay alive and racing to get indoors before the sun went down was going to be Robert Neville... played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was going to be Schwarzenegger's finest late-Nineties role (seeing as how Crusade never got made, which still irks me because that would have been an awesome film to behold). This would have been the role that defied everything else that Schwarzenegger had done, and would have defined who he would be as an actor for the next decade or more. Ridley Scott's I Am Legend would have been nothing short of epic... had it wound up in serious production.

What happened? I blame Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin more than anything. That film poisoned the well of everyone who was involved with it: Schwarzenegger and George Clooney were the only ones who really managed to escape that mega-bomb of a fiasco, but it still took awhile. By the time the stink had finally worn off from that rubber-nippled nightmare, I Am Legend had quietly been shelved. The last I heard anything being done with it was probably summer of 2000.

Well, tonight Ain't It Cool News has the first pics to be found from the production of I Am Legend. I had no idea production had started up again on this. And I would like to say that I'm really looking forward to seeing this novel given the big-budget treatment...

...but right now I'm not all that very impressed with where this is going. For one thing it's being written by Akiva Goldsman, whose previous work includes - yup - Batman & Robin. For another thing, this is going to star Will Smith as Neville. Which I like Will Smith a lot, but as a fan of the novel... well, I just can't see it working out with him in the role. I think they're going to play it more as an action thriller, when I Am Legend is not that at all. It's about the last normal man on Earth trying to retain his humanity, fighting to stave off hunger and temptations that if he were to succumb to them would mean the end of his life... or begin the damnation of another. I mean, to me the most heartbreaking part of I Am Legend is when he finds the dog: would that make it into a movie with Will Smith? Would they keep the ending just as it is in the book? I dunno...

Well, I've never seen The Last Man on Earth but I have seen The Omega Man and although it's dated quite a bit now, I would definitely recommend it especially if you want to see Charlton Heston at his gun-totin' finest. And by all means, do read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend: one of the books that Stephen King credits with starting his own writing career. It's very much the most original twist on the classic vampire tale that I've ever seen... and it's just a darned good book. In the meantime, I'll withhold further judgement on this new movie until I see more coming out of production.

But I still sometimes wonder just how cool the Ridley Scott version would have been...