| | I don't understand why anyone would go to the trouble of writing a review without at least doing a wiki search.
The movie "I Am Legend" is taken from the book of the same title. A 1964 movie, "The Last Man on Earth," starring Vincent Price, is not even mentioned, yet is almost verbatim from the novel - and a pretty good movie, BTW. "I Am Legend" in its most recent incarnation is not as good as either the Vincent Price version, or the excellent Heston "The Omega Man."* Not a bad flick on its own, just kind of a waste of money, as it didn't add anything to the genre and was not any improvement.
* The anarcho-objectivist group - "The New Banner Institute" - with whom I conspired in the early-mid '70's, doted on "The Omega Man" as the perfect objectivist movie, pitting reason and science, in the person of the hero - Heston, against mysticism, religion and irrationality, in the person of the deranged victims of the plague. This was very similar to the new release. But in the Heston movie, the villains were not brain-dead zombies nor rabid hyperactive monsters, but rather crazed, paranoid exagerations of who they had been before the plague. A prominent liberal, ecologically-minded newscaster, who had criticized "uncontrolled science" becomes transmuted into a evangelical, humanity-hating zealot, whose followers spend their nights - as in all three movies, intolerance of sunlight is a hallmark of the victims - searching out libraries and science centers to trash and burn.
The "Banneristi" were so fond of "The Omega Man," that they would have several members target a local drive-in theater calling and requesting that they play the movie yet again, such that for a period of several years there was never a gap of more than a few weeks during which "The Omega Man" was not playing somewhere in Columbia, South Carolina, which we all thought was hilarious.
In fact, since very few of the patrons of the drive-ins actually went there to watch the movie anyway, this groundswell of mass support rolled on unchecked for years without any opposition, which must have totally mystified the pollsters who follow such things.
Anyway, I recommend "The Omega Man," if you want to see a movie that really portrays objectivist values - and is still a dynamite movie after all these years.
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