![]() The film opens with footage from a news report filmed pre-apocalypse, which gives us the necessary background on the re-engineered virus without having to awkwardly shoehorn in it during expository dialogue, an approach that I appreciated. His backstory is gradually unveiled via flashbacks throughout the film, and we learn that the epidemic spread quickly, resulting in the military quarantine of New York City from which his family fled. ![]() Neville spends his time in an abandoned and desolate New York City bathing his dog in his heavily locked-down Washington Square home and experimenting on live subjects (of the rat and vampire variety) in a desperate search for the cure. 1% of the population turns out to be immune to the virus, including Dr. In the film, the pandemic is caused by a measles virus that has been genetically re-engineered to fight cancer and soon mutates into a contact- and airborne virus which rapidly overwhelms the country, killing 90% of the population and turning 9% of those who survived into vampiric predators that mostly come out at night … mostly. In the novel, the plague is tied to dust storms and swarms of mosquitoes that wreak havoc across America after a war in Panama. I may also do a double-review of these films in the future, if I’m feeling sassy.) Both the film and the novel follow the plight of Robert Neville, the possible sole survivor of a terrible pandemic that turns its victims into vampire-like monsters. ![]() (The novel was also the inspiration for 1964’s The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and 1971’s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. Directed by Francis Lawrence, this film is (very loosely) based on the brilliant 1954 horror novel of the same name by Richard Matheson.
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