10 Movies That Completely Missed The Point

The third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, Francis Lawrence’s 2007 Will Smith vehicle followed 1964’s The Last Man On Earth, starring Vincent Price, and 1971’s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. In all of the iterations of the story, a virus kills the majority of the world’s population, turning the majority of the survivors into ravening, vampire-like monsters. Only one man - supposedly - remains alive...

The pedigree is important, because Lawrence’s original climax to the film played as far closer to the ending of the book. In the novel, the protagonist is captured by the creatures, but comes to realise that the infected monsters he’s been destroying throughout aren’t the ravening, mindless beasts he thought they were, but are just as sentient and feeling as his own lost race.

Moreover, by taking on the aspect of unstoppable vampire slayer, he’s become to this new race, the inheritors of this new earth, exactly what myths of vampires and werewolves were to humanity. He’s become the monster in the night, the boogeyman, a mass murdering nightmare. He is legend.

The Last Man On Earth follows that ending, just without the protagonist’s peaceful acceptance of his death - he’s half-mad from years of loneliness and violence, and gets hunted down and impaled. In The Omega Man, the creatures are simply mutated humans. Heston’s protagonist finds a cure, but is killed before he can live to see it administered.

Lawrence’s film returns to the idea of the creatures as vampiric monsters, but makes them unable to speak. Without the ability to communicate, Smith’s Dr. Robert Neville sees them as inhuman, and therefore has no compunction about destroying them, or experimenting on them to find a cure.

In the original ending to Lawrence’s film, Dr. Neville finds out he’s wrong about the infected creatures - that he’s a torturer and a mass murderer - as he finds a cure for their condition. It’s an ending with hope, and at least a semblance of the point of the original story… but it didn’t test well, and the reshot ending had Neville sacrifice himself to save a woman and child from the mindless monsters, the cure being taken to the last few survivors to begin rebuilding their world.

Apparently the original ending - the one that didn’t miss the entire point of the story or the title - remained intact on the film’s release in certain other worldwide markets. Only western audiences were considered so stupid that we couldn’t handle the downbeat ambiguity of the real ending. What a crying shame.