The “I Am Legend” movie came out a few years before the premiere of “The Walking Dead,” so it wasn’t a movie riding in the coattails of the zombie genre. While there were other movies that preceded it, such as “28 Days Later,” I felt the movie still stood on its own (and the fact that they were actually vampires).

In the book, the vampires have a superior intelligence, with going undercover as a human as an example. In the movie, they capture Neville, but I still see them as zombies, not the strategic vampires who can speak. When Neville interacts with the female vampire, we see how acutely intelligent they are, such as making their skin look more human with makeup.

I find it funny that in the movie, Neville is a black military scientist who has his own lab to research a cure, while in the book, he is an average white guy strolling through Compton. In all seriousness, Smith played the part well, and I’m glad there wasn’t any criticism strictly because of his race.

In the movie, we see the fate of Neville’s family in the scene with the helicopter crash. While sad, we’ve seen the same thing before in other movies and tv shows where the character wakes up after dreaming of the worst day of their life.

In the book, it is much more subtle. There is a line that encapsulates the internal torture Neville was going through: “Far out across that field he knew there was still a depression in the ground where he had buried Virginia, where she had unburied herself.” This is a representation of how the book does less with more, while the movie, while great, relies on dramatic explosions and violence to get its point across.

It was gut-wrenching reading that line because Neville not only experienced his wife succumb to the vampires, but also sees her as a recurring enemy as well.

What the movie does well is the entertainment factor. I loved the beginning scenes of Neville going through his day, from hunting to playing golf, to later in the movie reciting the lines from Shrek. It was a nice glimpse of how scary, yet repetitive and mundane, life can be in a post-apocalyptic world.

The movie approaches the dog relationship differently, where Neville has Sam from when she was a puppy until her tragic end after getting infected. Because Sam is a dog, it’s a given that we grieve her death. In the book, however, I thought it was much more heartbreaking. Neville found the dog. In that time, we realize that the dog was living alone, scared, and has to strategize how to hide from the vampires. When Neville takes the dog in, it panics and tries to dig through the hard floor of the house, inferring that’s how it hid while outside. I watched the movie first, so I assumed that the dog would, at the least, stay with Neville for a longer duration. It was like getting hit by a train when, on that same page, I read, “in a week the dog was dead.” The emotional toll I felt in that one page was arguably greater than the movie where Sam had significant screen time. It bears repeating that the book does less with more.

The movie differs from the book in that Will Smith’s character creates a vaccine and sacrifices himself so the other humans can replicate it. In the book, we can infer that Neville is the last human alive. He also realizes that he is the monster, not the vampires. There is a happy ending, and that’s with the vampires finally stopping the murderous Neville.