The Omega Man

Well, that covers all the film adaptations of I Am Legend. I'd say The Omega Man was definitely the least faithful, and the most firearms-intensive of the three. With Charlton Heston involved, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. It plays up a romance angle more than the other films, spends less time on the day-to-day necessities of life, but Heston does show the strain well. You can see him gradually getting more careless, or just being off, from the solitude.

I was disappointed there was no dog in this film, but they left that out of The Last Man on Earth, too. It's funny the things the films all chose to ignore. They all made Neville some sort of medical expert or research scientist, when he was no such thing in the story. That's part of the frustration in the story, when he begins trying to educate himself about disease and gradually realizes he's hopelessly out of his depth.

None of them opted for the story's ending, either. In Matheson's work, Neville is captured and set to be executed by the society the living infected have built. The fact they'll execute him isn't exactly condoned, but it's apparent they are trying to rebuild civilization. The Vincent Price version comes closest to this, as it shows the living infected still willing to use cars, guns, to reason and care for people. They're even working to develop ways to overcome the weaknesses of their condition (sunlight aversion, for example). The goofs in the hoods that are after Heston opt to reject technology, and seem only concerned with destroying everything they fear. Maybe Mathias has something in mind beyond that, but all he shows interest in is scapegoating to keep people scared and obedient. Tony Stark circa Civil War, then. The infected in Will Smith's version don't seem likely to be building any civilization. They still have some intelligence, but they're mostly just killing machines.

The other bit is Neville's fate. In the book, he realizes he'll be the boogeyman the new society uses to scare their children. That's who is going to regard him as legend. It won't be surprising if, in a few generations, he'll be described as ten feet tall with laser eyes, and subsisting off the eyes of bad children who don't eat their vegetables. Heston and Smith are both legends because they provide a cure for the disease, giving humanity a chance to get back to how it was before. The infected will, in theory, eventually either be cured or wiped out.

Price's fate is more similar to the original story, but even there, his end is more about his defiance as the "last man on earth". Which paints the people killing him as not human, even though they look human, talk like humans, fear and destroy what's different like humans. Price's death signals the end of the line for people, and rejects any potential these people who have survived the disease, and learned to live with it, have for growth.

Maybe someone will do a straight adaptation one of these days. The ending is kind of ugly, the group hunting and destroying the individual, but it also suggests that humanity, for good or ill, can persevere through most any obstacle.