That's Two Out Of Three Movie Adaptations

I Am Legend has three movies (loosely) based off it. There's Will Smith's I Am Legend, obviously. Heston's Omega Man, and Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth, which is what I'm talking about tonight, since it was included on the other side of the DVD Panic in Year Zero was on. I'll probably be spoiling the movie extensively, just so you know.

Vincent Price is Robert Morgan, a doctor who believes himself the last man alive, besieged every night by the undead after his blood. After 3 years, he's developed a solid routine of waking up, checking his defenses of boarded up windows, garlic, mirrors, and crosses on the doors, checking his generator, then selecting a block of the city, and going hunting for the undead as they sleep, staking them and throwing them in a massive fire pit. At night he shutters himself up in his home and tries to make it through the night while one of the undead keeps calling 'Morgan, do you hear? Do you hear?'

We watch as Robert Morgan (he was Robert Neville in the book) struggles with his grief, and with the enormity of the task he's given himself: To hunt down and destroy every last vampire. As he puts it, it's his life or theirs. He also has to cope with the loss of his wife and daughter, both claimed by the plague, and his loneliness. He never breaks down to the extent Neville did in the book, where he one time flung his door open and charged out firing wildly, as if using the murder-suicide with the vampires, but he does tend to laugh hysterically at things that aren't funny (home movies of the wife and kid at the circus, the dog he finds being infected). We also don't see him sink into a drunken depression as Neville often did. Oddly, despite making him a scientist (rather than a factory worker as he was in the book), Morgan doesn't show much interest in trying to cure the plague. Neville traveled to libraries and laboratories, collecting books and equipment to try and suss it out. Perhaps because that was Morgan's job before civilization fell apart, he can't think of any new avenues to try. The movie also doesn't explain as much about the vampires as the book did, for example, why they don't simply burn the house down, though I'd offer two explanations for that (I can't remember what reasons Matheson gave). First, they want Morgan alive to drink his blood. Won't get much blood from a charred corpse. As for two, well, see the next paragraph.

A word about the vampires. They're idiots. They bear more of a resemblance to zombies, shambling slowly here and there, barely coordinated enough to pick up sticks and rocks to beat on Morgan's walls. They're weak enough Morgan can fight his way through a horde of them to reach his car, or house. Maybe they're weak because they have to feed off each other, and that's not filling, but it makes them look like a joke. Even Morgan explains that they're only a threat due to numbers.

I'm not certain whether the long flashback in the middle, which recaps the appearance of the plague, and ends when Morgan's wife shows up at the door (after he'd buried her), would have worked better broken into smaller flashbacks, that gradually flesh out how things happened. Also, I would have liked to have seen Morgan at some point respond to Ben Cortman's "Do you hear, Morgan?", perhaps try to strike up a conversation with him. It would have probably seemed nuts, but Morgan's grip on sanity is tenuous anyway, and perhaps it could have revealed something about one of them.

About Price's work in the film. I think he's very good at depicting a man alone, trying to survive against threats external and internal. The way he goes about his daily routine, largely unhurried. Even when burning bodies, he has one hand in his pocket as he lobs the torch, which suggests a boredom, or more likely, resignation. On the other hand, in the flashbacks, he has a hard time convincing me of the sincerity of his affection for his wife and kid. He's so creepy, I just don't really buy into it. His grief in the present does it more effectively. Also, the creepiness works when he finds another person, because you get the feeling he's trying to be warm and reassuring, but it's been so long since he's been around another person, he doesn't know how to. The smile isn't genuine, because it's been too long since he's had reason to really smile. In total, I'd say he does a fine job.

About the ending. Infected humans have learned to control the vaccine, and are rebuilding society. They destroy the unliving infected as Morgan does, but they aren't planning to ally with him. See, not every infected he killed was undead, so he's a scourge to them, just as he was in the book. So they plan to kill him, and it's curious how that goes. Morgan finds a true cure for the virus, and seems unconcerned that they're after him, but once they arrive, he doesn't try and tell them he can cure the infection, he just runs. Also, the living infected are scary. They all dress the same (all black), they herd the undead together and brutally wipe them out, then turn on Morgan. They chase him across town, and as they close in, women and children start showing up, there to see the scary killer brought down. Morgan, unlike Neville, doesn't recognize (or won't acknowledge) that humanity has become something new, and that he's an anachronism. He calls them all freaks, and proclaims 'I am a man. The last man.'

With all the infected dressed the same, it feels like a metaphor about conformity crushing the individual, or intolerance. Although, is Morgan guilty of that as well? He was always hunting down and killing infected, because he assumed they were all undead out to kill him. If he hadn't killed living infected, would they have accepted him, worked with him to find a cure? Or would they have decided they liked how they were, and come after him just because he represented something different? Ruth says the infected are forming a new society, and that's never charming or gentle. The problem is, infected or not, they're still people, still obviously capable of hatred and fear, as evidenced by their reactions to Morgan.

It's strange they're that scared of him. At the beginning, he says that in 3 years he's killed 11 vampires, though we seem to see him kill 4 or 5 shortly thereafter, but I don't know if those were all the same day. That doesn't seem like nearly enough for him to be regarded with such terror, since not all of those would have been living.