I Am Legend
Alternate thoughts on the ending.
I Am Legend is a pretty grim story. Having just watched it and inspired by my fellow investigator’s thoughts on the ending, I thought I’d have a go at it. First some thoughts on the film, and then the ending.
I concur with Mr. shellshear that Anna and Ethan aren’t needed. They distract from what is a story about the (supposed) last human alive. Especially annoying was Anna’s shoehorning of religiosity into what was a nice little areligious film about the apocalypse. First there’s the miraculous timing (complete with shining lights) of Anna and Ethan’s rescue of Neville right at the moment when he’s about to commit suicide. Then when Anna tries to convince Neville that he should go with them to Vermont to the survivors compound she believes exists, based solely on the reasoning that she believes it exists because of a message from God, I thought Neville had become the sane one. Anna further claims that God has a plan, to which Neville points out that their situation is that all but a fraction of the Earth’s population has been wiped out by a plague which turned the human survivors (and some animals) into Dark Seekers. If such a plan exists it is of an order of cruelty right up there with the Flood. But the film will bear Anna’s belief out. Neville blows himself up with his final words expressing that he’s now listening to God and, what a bit of luck, the compound in Vermont really does exist. I thought Tinsel Town was taken over by Scientologists, not Christian apologists.
I’d like to keep the story grim, and keep Neville as nutty as he’d been shown to be. Neville’s got survivor syndrome bad. In his dreams he relives the death of his family, while his waking hours are spent in a daily routine of exercise, hunting, golf, DVD rental and working on a cure. His friends are store mannequins, and he won’t leave New York partly because it is ground zero for the infection, but mostly because he believes with a mania that he can fix the problem.
I’m going to run with the scene where Neville rationalizes the intelligent behavior he witnessed from the Dark Seeker as a sign that there is nothing human left in them to save. My ending borrows from the Sixth Sense in that the story we’ve been watching has been skewed to conform to the protagonist’s warped view of reality. It doesn’t need much changing to do so. A little foreshadowing is all with some innocuous changes to Neville’s daily routine by having him turn off a radio transceiver before he leaves the house each day. Also he’ll have a furnace to burn the bodies of the failed animal trials.
Neville’s wall of pictures of cure failures bears out that he’s trapped, experimented on and then killed many Dark Seekers. It’s suggested that the Dark Seekers are intelligent as it seems likely that they laid the trap with Kenneth the mannequin, basing it on the trap that Neville used to capture the female whom we see him test the cure on. Let’s go a bit further down this road. After barely surviving the Kenneth trap Neville decides to capture another Dark Seeker to try again with the cure, after all it doesn’t make much sense to quit after only one trial. But this time his trap isn’t successful for no Dark Seeker takes the bait. Neville becomes curious and approaches the trap to inspect it and realizes just in time that the Dark Seekers were using his trap as a trap to trap him. Kept out until after dark he gets home, but the Dark Seekers have tailed him and the final fight happens. Instead of assaulting him as a mob, this will be more like a siege against the clock as the Dark Seekers have only until morning before they must retreat.
The point of this siege is to show the Dark Seekers are more intelligent and socially organized than what we’ve been lead to believe. They use weapons, exhibit a chain of command and follow simple orders in some kind of language that sounds like animal growls. I want to humanize them. I’ll also take from the alternate ending in that once they’ve regained the kidnapped female Dark Seeker they leave without killing Neville. The Dark Seekers, although monstrous in appearance and incapable of surviving direct sunlight, are thinking beings.
As morning comes Neville sits alone in the wreckage of his house and its now that we find out in flashbacks that Neville’s cure works, but he refuses to believe it. He sees the Dark Seekers only as monsters, and so each time cremates the ones he cures. His radio transceiver crackles with the voice of a Vermont survivor asking for the daily update. Neville tells the survivor that New York is still unsafe and that there’s no progress to report on the cure. He says that he’ll be out of communication for a while as he must once more move house, but when he’s established a new lab he’ll begin his work again. He assures the other survivor that one day he’ll fix the problem.