[AVAST! THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD!]
I understand that when someone does a Cracked article, it's usually for the purpose of pointing out the hilarity of some obvious or over the top detail or other things. But there's a differences between pointing out absuridity, and getting a major point about the absurdity WRONG.
For reference, here is the article:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18904_6-heroic-movie-deaths-that-could-have-been-easily-avoided.html
Now, it's completely right about the movie death being completely avoidable and helping NO ONE that he dies, but the problem is I am Legend is not about zombies. It's about vampires . . . might not sound like much but it's THE CRUX OF THE ENTIRE PLOT, hell it's the whole point of "1% of humanity is immune" which is kind of why there's even a plot to begin with past "watch the world burn." I could go on for hours about the problems with that and honestly the abomination that was released to theaters instead of the short novel's actual details . . . so I think I will give a sort of synopsis to satisfy my nerdiness.
The Movie: Neville is a military scientist and apparently spec ops officer who's on the front lines of trying to stop the new infection that is taking place since Cancer was cured and is infact due to cancer having BEEN cured. His family is stopped on their way out of the city but his own clearance gets them through. After this point, he stays behind to try and work on a cure, keeping only their daughter's puppy as a companion since they were not allowed to evacuate with the puppy. Skip to several years later, the apartment he lives in has a set of generators, bullet proof armoring and he has a cache of weapons bigger than Tom Cruise's swollen sense of self worth. This is when it's finally revealed that the vampires show up every night to run around slaughtering anything that still has a normal pusle. It's revealed that Neville has made psychotic sociopathic friends with manniquins all over the city that he uses in place of real human companionship and thinks none of the admittedly COMPETENT AND GENIUS HUNTER VAPMIRES will mess with them at night to the point where one day he walks to where one of the manniquins he is best friends with normaly is, and he's not there. This creates a HILARIOUS scene of mental breakdown where Neville goes through the city screaming the manniquins name telling him he better not be messing with him and to show his face. When he finally does, it turns out to be a twilight trap as the sun is setting and the vampires show up with vampire dogs (hmmm foreshadowing?) that wait in an iconic space where there's a litteral line OF SUNLIGHT blocking the dogs from Neville, and when the sun goes down far enough to take away the line, they attack him and the dog, chasing the dog away. Neville escapes, the dog comes back with scars and bite marks (hmm FORSHADOWING?!) and they go to their lab, he meets the woman and child at some point during all this madness, and has a relationship building subplot so shallow and forgettable I can't actually remember when in the movie she and her kid show up. SO, let's skip ahead again a bit to the titular final moments, the dog is shifting, turning evil and it's fur is coming off in clumps, Neville has to kill it in a scene that made everyone in every theater ever watching this movie want to hurl everything they own at the vampires in this movie for killing it that way. Soon after all this, with the child and woman the apartment's defenses somehow go down, the vampires get in, the trio (minus the now very headless (revolver) dog) and block themselves in with a vampire near-corpse Neville has been keeping for experimentation, and has made a cure . . . and gives them the cure, kills himself and they get away to the "last human colony" and had off the cure to someone with no name or face that we see. The end, somber ending credits roll people that don't know the novel exists leave satisfied the rest of us leave angry.
The Novel: Neville is a factory worker in a rural town with a wife and daughter when the news reports that cancer is no more, several months later, it's announced that there's a new illness that turns people into horrifying beastly killers that roam the night and there are mass executions and mass graves for those infected. Neville's wife catches the creep and gets offed and burned up, but when his daughter gets it too he can't bring himself to send her to a faceless grave as if abandoning her, so he kills her in a softer way, and buries her secretly in the local graveyard. Skip ahead by several years, and Neville who is somehow immune, is constantly tormented and has been running and hiding for longer than he thinks could be possible, spent armoring his house and armoring the shed he keeps his generators in, careful to only ever leave his house during the day, constantly trying to gather more supplies and going further and further each day to find more gas for his generators and his car. Mentally making note of how long it will take each day, and noting aproximately how many days he has left untill he has to lock himself in his house and starve to death or walk into the darkness of hell itself and be devoured by the monsters that call it home. Tormented each night by his former coworkers who were not executed and even his own daughter calling out to him each night, screaming for hours on end untill the sun rises beckoning him to go outside and succumb to the ultimate death that he knows is waiting for him either way. He spends several more years stealing from a local library and hospital to get equipment and hoping the books in the libarary will show him how to use them and understand them and what he will be looking at. During one of his daily trips around his house securing his defenses and making sure it's not been sabotaged, a dog shows up, he spends several weeks after this point luring the dog to his home with meat, and luring the dog to be a companion of himself. Protecting the dog each night and watching old reel movies with it in his armored house, now fully aware of when the vampires come each night as long before they start to scream the dog knows they are around and even which side of his house now. Some time later, after using the dog as a sort of Vampire Alarm, the dog seems alert and even threatened looking toward the house, so he goes with the dog back into the house and finds a woman in a torn white dress with a belt standing in his bedroom, she pulls a knife from the belt and screams that she'll kill any vampire she's not afraid. This spirals down into a long period him trying to teach her what he is doing to find a cure, and momentarily saying she is taking mysterious pills from her belt. A while after this, she says she traveled to his house in hiding from a colony of "survivors" key point, never says human survivors. She then takes him to the colony, where he is heralded as the "last of the pure" and is subsequently locked up in jail to be turned and "cured" like the rest of them, he spends an entire night cursing the woman that deceived him, and during the night she sneaks to his cell, saying she has an escape for him, he refuses to believe her until she puts down infront of him, a cyringe of cyanide, telling him, "it's not an easy way out, but it's better." and the plot ends with him, battered and grizzled in a cell with cyanide injecting into his arm saying he is the last of the humans, the last of the "pure" the last of a million year old legacy, he . . . . is . . . . legend. Novel ends, everything evens out, the title makes brutal, twisted sense and we feel about as battered as we imagine the main character did.
Now, please, explain to me how average joe hoping he can figure out how microbiology works before having to starve to death or be slaughtered like a cow in a hamburger bun translates to radical black guy is a super genius soldier with no flaws except being mentally unstable saves THE WORLD! oh and vampires too, sort of but HEY LOOK AT THAT DOG!
Because honestly I can't understand how this happened . . . I really can't how the novel was translated into that.
I understand that when someone does a Cracked article, it's usually for the purpose of pointing out the hilarity of some obvious or over the top detail or other things. But there's a differences between pointing out absuridity, and getting a major point about the absurdity WRONG.
For reference, here is the article:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18904_6-heroic-movie-deaths-that-could-have-been-easily-avoided.html
Now, it's completely right about the movie death being completely avoidable and helping NO ONE that he dies, but the problem is I am Legend is not about zombies. It's about vampires . . . might not sound like much but it's THE CRUX OF THE ENTIRE PLOT, hell it's the whole point of "1% of humanity is immune" which is kind of why there's even a plot to begin with past "watch the world burn." I could go on for hours about the problems with that and honestly the abomination that was released to theaters instead of the short novel's actual details . . . so I think I will give a sort of synopsis to satisfy my nerdiness.
The Movie: Neville is a military scientist and apparently spec ops officer who's on the front lines of trying to stop the new infection that is taking place since Cancer was cured and is infact due to cancer having BEEN cured. His family is stopped on their way out of the city but his own clearance gets them through. After this point, he stays behind to try and work on a cure, keeping only their daughter's puppy as a companion since they were not allowed to evacuate with the puppy. Skip to several years later, the apartment he lives in has a set of generators, bullet proof armoring and he has a cache of weapons bigger than Tom Cruise's swollen sense of self worth. This is when it's finally revealed that the vampires show up every night to run around slaughtering anything that still has a normal pusle. It's revealed that Neville has made psychotic sociopathic friends with manniquins all over the city that he uses in place of real human companionship and thinks none of the admittedly COMPETENT AND GENIUS HUNTER VAPMIRES will mess with them at night to the point where one day he walks to where one of the manniquins he is best friends with normaly is, and he's not there. This creates a HILARIOUS scene of mental breakdown where Neville goes through the city screaming the manniquins name telling him he better not be messing with him and to show his face. When he finally does, it turns out to be a twilight trap as the sun is setting and the vampires show up with vampire dogs (hmmm foreshadowing?) that wait in an iconic space where there's a litteral line OF SUNLIGHT blocking the dogs from Neville, and when the sun goes down far enough to take away the line, they attack him and the dog, chasing the dog away. Neville escapes, the dog comes back with scars and bite marks (hmm FORSHADOWING?!) and they go to their lab, he meets the woman and child at some point during all this madness, and has a relationship building subplot so shallow and forgettable I can't actually remember when in the movie she and her kid show up. SO, let's skip ahead again a bit to the titular final moments, the dog is shifting, turning evil and it's fur is coming off in clumps, Neville has to kill it in a scene that made everyone in every theater ever watching this movie want to hurl everything they own at the vampires in this movie for killing it that way. Soon after all this, with the child and woman the apartment's defenses somehow go down, the vampires get in, the trio (minus the now very headless (revolver) dog) and block themselves in with a vampire near-corpse Neville has been keeping for experimentation, and has made a cure . . . and gives them the cure, kills himself and they get away to the "last human colony" and had off the cure to someone with no name or face that we see. The end, somber ending credits roll people that don't know the novel exists leave satisfied the rest of us leave angry.
The Novel: Neville is a factory worker in a rural town with a wife and daughter when the news reports that cancer is no more, several months later, it's announced that there's a new illness that turns people into horrifying beastly killers that roam the night and there are mass executions and mass graves for those infected. Neville's wife catches the creep and gets offed and burned up, but when his daughter gets it too he can't bring himself to send her to a faceless grave as if abandoning her, so he kills her in a softer way, and buries her secretly in the local graveyard. Skip ahead by several years, and Neville who is somehow immune, is constantly tormented and has been running and hiding for longer than he thinks could be possible, spent armoring his house and armoring the shed he keeps his generators in, careful to only ever leave his house during the day, constantly trying to gather more supplies and going further and further each day to find more gas for his generators and his car. Mentally making note of how long it will take each day, and noting aproximately how many days he has left untill he has to lock himself in his house and starve to death or walk into the darkness of hell itself and be devoured by the monsters that call it home. Tormented each night by his former coworkers who were not executed and even his own daughter calling out to him each night, screaming for hours on end untill the sun rises beckoning him to go outside and succumb to the ultimate death that he knows is waiting for him either way. He spends several more years stealing from a local library and hospital to get equipment and hoping the books in the libarary will show him how to use them and understand them and what he will be looking at. During one of his daily trips around his house securing his defenses and making sure it's not been sabotaged, a dog shows up, he spends several weeks after this point luring the dog to his home with meat, and luring the dog to be a companion of himself. Protecting the dog each night and watching old reel movies with it in his armored house, now fully aware of when the vampires come each night as long before they start to scream the dog knows they are around and even which side of his house now. Some time later, after using the dog as a sort of Vampire Alarm, the dog seems alert and even threatened looking toward the house, so he goes with the dog back into the house and finds a woman in a torn white dress with a belt standing in his bedroom, she pulls a knife from the belt and screams that she'll kill any vampire she's not afraid. This spirals down into a long period him trying to teach her what he is doing to find a cure, and momentarily saying she is taking mysterious pills from her belt. A while after this, she says she traveled to his house in hiding from a colony of "survivors" key point, never says human survivors. She then takes him to the colony, where he is heralded as the "last of the pure" and is subsequently locked up in jail to be turned and "cured" like the rest of them, he spends an entire night cursing the woman that deceived him, and during the night she sneaks to his cell, saying she has an escape for him, he refuses to believe her until she puts down infront of him, a cyringe of cyanide, telling him, "it's not an easy way out, but it's better." and the plot ends with him, battered and grizzled in a cell with cyanide injecting into his arm saying he is the last of the humans, the last of the "pure" the last of a million year old legacy, he . . . . is . . . . legend. Novel ends, everything evens out, the title makes brutal, twisted sense and we feel about as battered as we imagine the main character did.
Now, please, explain to me how average joe hoping he can figure out how microbiology works before having to starve to death or be slaughtered like a cow in a hamburger bun translates to radical black guy is a super genius soldier with no flaws except being mentally unstable saves THE WORLD! oh and vampires too, sort of but HEY LOOK AT THAT DOG!
Because honestly I can't understand how this happened . . . I really can't how the novel was translated into that.
