I Am Legend Original Ending
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Hmmmm….i don’t know. I just don’t know. ON one hand, i like the emotional attempt going on here – but honestly, this may be one of the few times, for me, that i like the changed ending. I love that Neville dies. Now, yes, i like the original ending of the book more than both of these. But if i’m choosing between this or the one they went with, i think i have to go with what was. I enjoyed the demise of Neville. I could have lived without knowing for sure there was in fact the safe haven. Which is why i like this one, because here, in this alternative, we DON’T know for sure there journey will lead anywhere. But it’s the attempt that matters. So, yeah – i like elements of both.
But i love (what i have heard of) the way the book ends.
What an incredibly shitty alternate ending. This would have made me hate the movie even more.
I would have preferred something in the middle, where we do get the scene of Neville realizing that the zombies are semi-intelligent and he’s been committing murder this whole time. That’s kind of the point of the book, and I’m glad to see that the main bad guy was in fact the boyfriend of the girl zombie Neville captured in the beginning. I think that was very subtly hinted at and I was confused that they never followed through with it. Though apparently they had at one point.
One thing though—I’d heard that the script featured yet a different ending where the woman survivor is actually a zombie herself, and tricks Neville to go to Grand Central where all the zombies tell him that they should join them, and then he blows himself and all of them up. Does that ring a bell to anyone?
Eh. In the book, I wouldn’t say it’s the vampires’ intelligence that paints Neville as a murderer, it’s because by day he’s been staking the “civilized” ones who didn’t want to kill him as well as the “savage” ones who hang outside his house and taunt him every night.
In this, they’re still relatively unintelligent savages. He shouldn’t have any more sympathy for the vampire couple than he should for the lions. And besides, the vampires were trying to kill him even before he started experimenting on them.
Lame.
Wow Hugh was trying to explain this to me and I didn’t really get it. Much prefer this ending to the theatrical, so suck it, fanboys. Really enjoyed this movie overall, and I must say that I kinda liked him going out in a blast of glory, but it sacrificed more than his character, it kinda decimated the ability to understand these creatures. They set up the fact that these supposed “animals” were laying traps and organizing, thinking, etc. This ending pays that off in a much better and more thoughtful way. I like Neville being so consumed by his fear and hate that he can’t conceive of the vamps as being intelligent – every character needs a flaw, and that’s his.
This plays that out and gives him an arc. I don’t know if it requires his sympathy but it requires his understanding, if only as both a scientist and a human being.
Great stuff, I loved it. Too bad they didn’t go this way.
The thing I find amusing, as a former New Yorker, is that the east river bridges only lead to Long Island (yes, Virginia, Brooklyn and Queens are part of Long Island) and therefore, ultimately, are dead ends. However, the George Washington Bridge takes you to the rest of the country. So they blew up the ones that don’t take you anywhere and left the one that goes to the rest of the country standing.
Doug, LOVE the bridge details! ha! AND, more importantly, the alt end gives the human actor, DASH MIHOK, his emotional play. As an actor, that would suck (and it did) to have such a moment cut from the original!!
I thought the movie was just okay and didn’t love either ending, although I preferred this one just because it made you reconsider how you’d seen the movie until now– with this new ending, it appears that, from another point of view, Neville was actually the villain.
No version of this movie ever added up to anything, though. Most obvious version of this movie would have the cure as a macguffin, and the end would be a race against time to set the cure in motion before he’s killed. That’s one way to go. Another is the loneliness aspect, and Neville having to decide whether to just join the vampires. A way to go. Or have Neville trying to save the sanctuary in some way, sacrificing himself either for loved ones (not relative strangers you don’t care about, as in the movie we saw) or for the whole of mankind. At least then it would mean something.
The version in theaters meant nothing because we weren’t invested in that kid, even if he was in somebody else’s movie. And the alternate version meant very little, because, ultimately, the guy we’ve been following all this time turns out to be less interesting than the monsters.
I read the book in the early 90’s and can’t remember the ending. I also read the Schwarzenegger script written by Protosevitch, and although I can’t remember that either, I do seem to recall that it was pretty awesome. I still have it.
Whatevs. The alternate ending makes a tremendously disappointing movie just a smidge less disappointing.
Hearing both Christa and Hugh’s retelling of this, I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I do. This was pretty effective for me, though I would have preferred that the girl and the boy blew themselves up and Neville lived happily ever after with the vampires.
I just can’t get over how bad they look, with their elongated mouths and digi-skin. I really really enjoyed 2/3rds of this movie, but when she showed up with kid in tow, it lost me. Still, would certainly rent it again on Blu-ray!