6) I Am Legend (2007)
The Story: After a man-made virus designed to cure cancer mutates and kills 90% of the world’s population, turning the survivors into nocturnal, vampiric predators, virologist Robert Neville (Will Smith) survives and carries out experiments in hopes of creating a cure for the virus. Alone in an overgrown, dilapidated New York City, Robert learns to withstand attacks by the Darkseekers and hunt for food, all the while searching for other survivors.
The Twist: After finding two immune humans, Anna (Alice Braga) and Ethan (Charlie Tahan), Robert brings them back to his home, where he is experimenting on an infected woman. Anna inadvertently leads the Darkseekers straight to them, and the creatures launch a full-scale assault against Robert’s house. After discovering that his treatment on the woman is working, Robert takes a blood sample and hands it to Anna, ushering her and Ethan into a coal chute. In order to save them, he pulls the pin from a grenade and takes out the Darkseekers, at the cost of his own life.
Why It Sucks: What movie expects its audience to get behind killing its sole main character to save two people who randomly show up in the film’s final third? The entire film focuses on Robert attempting to survive, but as soon as he meets the other people he has been hoping to find for years, he is immediately willing to sacrifice himself for them, even though it’s made clear that there’s plenty of room in the coal chute for all three of them.
Besides, Robert is a brilliant scientist, and it took him ages to come up with a cure for the virus. Who’s to say that the people Anna and Ethan eventually run across will even understand what he did or how to replicate it? Finally, changing the novel’s ending negates its main idea. In the novel, Robert was eventually captured by the vampires and discovered that they were attempting to build a new society after developing their own medication to counteract the effects of the vampiric virus.
The point of the film’s title was that Robert had become a bogeyman to the creatures, who were much more intelligent than he had realized. He was the sole remainder of a bygone species, a legend, killing them out of a misguided belief that it was his duty to find a cure and restore humans, not accept humankind’s replacement by the new species. In adding a needlessly heroic twist ending, I Am Legend loses sight of its original purpose and leaves viewers with an abrupt, wildly unsatisfying conclusion.
