GalacticMu

BattleGate pointed me toward this clip of the leaked “alternate ending” of the recent theatrical release I Am Legend. It will be on the DVD soon, which is why I guess none of the clips have been taken down or anything.

Apologies to folks who haven’t seen the movie and/or read the book and are reading this anyway: I am not going to give much backstory. I’m just going to assume you know what I am talking about.

I wanted to like Will Smith’s Robert Neville, but I knew there would be no way. Smith will always play someone too cool, too smart, too able. He certainly wasn’t going to un-fit himself for the role, look more like an alcoholic with severe Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Neville needed to be played as a recluse, an asshole, a person constantly on the verge of losing it. He needed to be played by Hugh Laurie. What pathetic attempts made near the end of the movie to that effect were too little and far, far too late.

And I haven’t even gotten started on the actual movie yet.

The shots of the city were beautiful. I wasn’t real sure why they changed so much about the set-up of the movie (why is making a cure for cancer any more dramatic than some kind of unexplained biological fallout?). But none of this comes close to my total and blinding disgust at changing the vampires into zombie-monsters. Why? Why? Why? Why? The entire psychology of the book was obliterated. The book was no more. No more Neville boarded up in his house at night, listening to his friend Ben calling, “Neville… Neeeeeville…” No vampire ladies lifting their dresses, hoping to tempt out a lonely old Robert. Driving him to drink and self-hatred. And certainly no added punch in the gut when the end turns all ugly.

Oh yes, the end. Smith’s I Am Legend has to have the worst ending of any science fiction movie I have seen in the last decade. It didn’t help that as I sat in the theater (with Quagmire and my friend Noel) (can I call you Noel here, Noel?) a group of chatterboxy rednecks jawed any vacant thought that came into their sparsely populated minds. But at that point it didn’t really matter what the ending was, because the set-up was so completely ruined.

And so, out leaks this “originally intended” ending that was shot before the studio showed it to a “test audience” (read: chatterboxy rednecks who shot half-chewed popcorn out of their mouths whenever they shouted “HOT CAR!” at Smith’s Mustang) (I’m just guessing) who decided they didn’t like the ending. Why? Because it kind of sort of tried a little to wrap back around to the point of the story: that Neville had been mass-murdering not monsters, but creatures with feelings. Not humans anymore, maybe, but sentient beings nevertheless. No! Does not compute! Will Smith is a hero! He punches out aliens!

With both endings there is a Everything Happens For A Reason moment so that the audience doesn’t feel quite so lost and abandoned in a world without mercy or meaning. With both is the sudden appearance of a butterfly tattoo that Neville in all his observational skills has until this moment not noticed. And of course, one of the last things his child said before dying was “Daddy, look at the butterfly.” The rednecks choke on their popcorn and scramble for their Mountain Dews; MEANING! There is meaning! Some kind of divine purpose!

Did we even read the same fucking book? The one where all of humanity is turned into bloodthirsty monsters and then only after Neville has murdered thousands upon thousands of them, living a life of tortured, horrific solitude and loss, does he finally understand that he has been murdering thinking, feeling creatures? And then they kill him? It’s like the most goddamn nihilistic book ever written! Why even call this new movie I Am Legend? If you had told me before I’d seen it that it’d be worse than Charlton Heston’s greasy, hairy, shotgun-wielding, teenage-girl-boinking Omega Man, I’d have told you to pass the moonshine and tell me another funny story. And there I was at the end of I Am Legend, as the pious woman rolls into a human stronghold with a tube of cure-blood clutched in her sweaty grip (please, couldn’t they have at least put it in a cooler? to try and help convince me that she could just drive a tube of blood around for days and that the contents would be viable?) thinking, GOD WHAT I WOULDN’T GIVE FOR CHARLTON HESTON TO SHOW UP WITH HIS SHOTGUN.

Oh, and I hated the way the zombie-monsters looked. The tattered clothing all looking the same. The translucent jelly-ness that happens with cheap CG. The way their jaws and mouths can open wider than a human mouth actually can, just so they can scream in a monkey/hippo/Nazgul scream that the human vocal cord isn’t capable of. Boo, hiss, I’m done.

Wait, no, I almost forgot. The link up there that goes to the clip? And that guy’s comments? I wanna punch that guy in the ear.