The characters, dialogue, and story are all great, but there weren’t very many creative choices in terms of camerawork, direction, or other effects. Neville was just a regular man before the plague, a simple man who worked at a factory and lived an ordinary life with his wife. Later, he finds the dog wounded and takes it home to care for it, but as he grows quickly attached to the animal, he tests the dog’s blood and discovers it is sick with plague, and he must kill it with a stake through the heart. The Omega Man is the story of Col. Robert Neville, an Army scientist who worked for the government creating viruses to use in warfare, and cures for said viruses. Even with the wrong turn at the end, it’s still a solidly entertaining motion picture. And yet, this movie was fun. The Last Man on Earth is a 1964 film adaption of I Am Legend.The film follows the story of Robert Morgan after a mysterious plague transforms the rest of humanity into undead, vampire-like creatures.. In this adaptation, a treatment to cure cancer using a re-engineered measles virus runs amuck. Even though Vincent Price is a great actor I think I have to go with "I Am Legend". Round VII (and overall) Winner – The Last Man on Earth. That’s when Neville sees a sign that convinces him the girl was right about the whole “God’s plan” thing. And it’s the Last Man on Earth that runs into this problem the most. So he heads home only to find something horrible in his apartment. I felt like I was watching a shallow video-game walkthrough. They, better than their remake counterparts really drive the point home that this is their world, not Robert Neville’s. He’s very careful to cover his scent when he goes back there, because as soon as they discover his location, they swarm it en masse and easily break in. //–> The Last Man on Earth The Last Man on Earth, an Italian horror/science fiction film released in 1964, is based upon the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend and is the predecessor of I Am Legend, the movie. He’s brought to their secret hideout, and Matthias holds a fake trial before sentencing Neville to death. This time Will Smith takes on the role of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville, the name Matheson originally used for the hero of his books, and the setting is our not-too-distant 2012. We use a [Watsonian point of view](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Watsonian_vs._Doylist), versus Doylist. They kill the vampires lurking around his home, and chase him through the streets of the city, until they corner him in a church. Everything he does turns out to be wrong, and after spending what’s left of his life trying to figure things out, he realizes that everything he did was in vain, and he’d become a bigger monster than the beings he spent years killing. “The Omega Man” is big and brass and full of life. The people were probably clamoring for his head on a pike, and the ones in charge had no problem delivering it. Neville goes through his life, struggling to survive, until one day things change forever. Instead it has a whole lot of blandness and studio interference. I Am Legend was terrible in my opinion. They hop on a waiting motorcycle and ride out of Dodger’s Stadium, and eventually head out of town into the countryside. While it may sound unfair to criticize the effects for not aging well, they didn’t look very good in 2007 either. Plot Edit. They take Neville back to his home and after bonding over “Shrek,” the girl tries to convince Neville that some others have survived the outbreak and begs him to join her on the way to a survivor’s colony. Well, not in name only, but you get what I mean. He lives in a brownstone with his own laboratory in the basement, seeking a cure in the hope that he can somehow save the world, despite it already seeming to have been lost. In his darkest hour after Sam’s death, he is rescued from the “Darkseekers” on the pier by a young immune woman (Anna) and a child (Ethan) who survived the outbreak aboard a Red Cross evacuation ship. Because this film is a shockingly accurate adaptation, taking the novel almost beat by beat, and even using some of the exact same dialogue. Because today we’re going to be talking about Richard Matheson’s landmark novella I Am Legend and all three films that it’s been adapted into. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. What started as an attempt to cure cancer by genetically modifying the measles virus. The monsters don’t seem to know where Neville lives, so he spends his days running tests, hunting deer, hanging out with his dog, and speaking to the army of mannequins that he has set up around the town to make himself feel less lonely. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. This is by far the best set of films I’ve looked at to date, however, and all of them are worth your time. I just got the last man on earth, and the omega man on dvd today, hoping to watch them soon. anyway, they're both based on the same book. "We are fam-i-ly! We spend a lot of time with the Family in this movie, and having them be a weird cult instead of just a race of horrible monsters who want nothing but to destroy was a fun idea. The Omega Man toys with the idea of the Family being their own society and not wanting to be “cured”. As for The Last Man on Earth, it's not perfect and it's most probably a crowd-splitter. There’s nothing wrong with taking an action approach, but not at the expense of story and character development. Neville’s pretty confused about what’s going on, but a scrawny man named Dutch and the woman from earlier arrive, and save him. He specialized in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, and the work of his that may be most famous is one of his earliest novels, I Am Legend. Later Morgan sees her injecting herself with a serum and discovers she is also a plague victim, but part of a group which can keep the vampire/zombie symptoms at bay with the inoculations. The Last Man on Earth (1964)Written by William F. Leicester, Richard Matheson, Ubaldo Ragona and Furio M. Monetti.Directed by Ubaldo Ragon and Sidney Salkow.Starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Umberto Raho, Christi Courtland, Antonio Corevi, Ettore Ribotta, Carolyn De Fonseca and Giuseppe Mattei. Shape blocks of wood on his lathe into more stakes. Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death. Because while wandering around the wasteland of Los Angeles Neville finds something shocking. As they spend every night banging on Morgan’s door, never actually breaking in. If you’ve read my previous Throwdowns, you probably know I think the movie industry is getting worse at telling stories. Unfortunately he finds it too late, and the dog almost immediately dies from the plague, not being helped by the serum at all. And from there we got box office King Midas Will Smith involved, and the movie quickly became a studio commodity, trying to appeal to every conceivable demographic. Yes, they are still technically vampires but they think and they feel and they love just like Morgan. “The Last Man on Earth” is boldly stark and quietly disturbing. That may be a strange thing to praise so strongly but they created an amazingly realistic, detailed and believable backdrop for this film. That’s really all Neville’s life is. Rather than just to provoke a laugh or release tension so that it can be cranked up again, Neville’s irreverence seems like it’s intended to say something not entirely nice about his character. And that’s our second feature, The Omega Man. There’s a reason why Steven Spielberg didn’t end “Jaws” (1975) with a message about polluting the oceans or overfishing. I like both but I prefer Last Man for Price's subtle yet engaging performance and the more complex, challenging ending. The novel doesn’t really get into the hows or whys of the plague, other than kind of hinting that it may have been a result of a world war. The original ending completed this story arc, but Warner Brothers wanted a more action-packed ending, at the expense of plot consistency. That we could just as easily become extinct and the world would belong to someone else. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Like the lonely atmsophere and stark realism of Legend More, Last Mans closer to the book but SMITH's version seemed less sci-fi horror more accurate depiction of a virus wiping out earth there were flaws in the film and editing but the unrated directors cut adds some great elements and better ending! They do manage to send a member inside one night, but Neville succeeds in killing him. Closest one to the original novel, although still not a truly accurate rendition. “I Am Legend” also has some distractingly poor CGI effects. They lack any major intelligence, and spend most of their nights roaming the streets, and throwing stuff at Neville’s house. But when a war between Russia and China broke out, the world was suddenly overrun with a mysterious biological weapon, that is killing vast swaths of people. She’s initially wary of Morgan, and he is very suspicious of her. Then it’s the girl and the kid and they try and staple an entirely generic “three cheers for faith” theme onto the story. In both versions of the story, Ruth gets nauseous at the scent of garlic. So, while this novel does hew closer to the novel than the Omega Man, it gets the moral so wrong that it becomes my least favorite of the bunch. It can be like you’re watching the film through an aquarium. Oh, and go through the city killing vampires. He flees but these aren’t the slow and stupid enemies he’s used to. But when he gets outside Matthias is able to huck a spear into Neville’s chest. And, to make matters better, they’re almost all really fun stories! And while the death of Morgan and the rise of a new humanity is somewhat tempered by the fact that they are, you know, vampires, “The Omega Man” openly embraces the possibilities of change and progress offered in a world where the old rules and older prejudices no longer apply. The mundane nature of Morgan’s post-apocalyptic existence is truly creepy and Vincent Price gives a tremendously restrained performance to perfectly match that tone. So we thought it would be fun to analyze all three adaptations of Matheson’s book (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and I Am Legend) and definitely determine which one reigns supreme! He and his followers shun firearms, motor vehicles or any other creation of the “Children of the Wheel,” though they’re not opposed to designer sunglasses, and wage war on Neville with only the most primitive of weapons.