What if "I Am Legend" used makeup FX instead of CGI to create the Darkseekers? And why
did the studio decide to go with the much-criticized CGI version instead?
"I Am Legend" made a killing at the box office upon its release in 2007,
pulling in nearly $600 million with its loose adaptation of Richard Matheson's
1954 novel. The story follows a virologist navigating the world after a pandemic has
turned most of humanity into a race of blood-feasting mutants. However,
the movie is less about vampires or viral outbreaks than it is about loneliness, and
nothing demonstrates this better than the uncanny, feral monsters antagonizing star Will Smith.
While the film performed well, the motion-captured CGI monsters,
known as Darkseekers, remain one of the most complained-about elements of "I Am Legend."
The director cites amped-up hormonal production and constant hyperventilation
as reasons to go the computer-generated VFX route. However, the glossy humanoids were just
too artificial-looking to counterbalance Smith's incredibly haunted performance.
It could have been very different. Just one week into shooting,
director Francis Lawrence was shown work-ups of actors wearing prosthetic pieces,
but didn't buy into the look and went with CGI instead. But a decade prior,
another "I Am Legend" was brewing, this time with proper practical effects.
In 1997, there was a proposed version of "I Am Legend" floating around,
with "Alien" director Ridley Scott attached and a post-"Eraser" Arnold Schwarzenegger set to star.
Darkseekers were called "hemocytes" in Mark Protosevich's script. They were
brought to life by a formidable team of FX artists including Alec Gillis,
who did creature FX work for several films in the "Alien" franchise. He would go on to work on
"Alien Resurrection" when the "I Am Legend" project fell through. The way the hemocytes look
in the 1997 version apparently stems from Ridley Scott's appreciation of 17th-century sculptures.
Sharing visuals from the original project, Gillis wrote on Instagram,
"Ridley was influenced by wax figures from the 17th century. We did a test
on a single female subject to show her in a few stages of emaciation."
Despite the impressive preparation work, the project sadly fell through, as Gillis explained,
"The budget was coming in 10 mil higher than desired. It all got shelved until
the Francis Lawrence/ Will Smith version years later. We did get
an interview on that version but there was next to no interest in makeup FX."
These emaciated hemocytes are impressively textured, with desiccated skin,
facial bone prosthetics, and diseased veins that the computers of the time
just couldn't emulate seamlessly. In fact, it could be argued that these makeup looks
have aged better than the film's creatures. It's a shame, as computer-generated imagery was otherwise
deployed beautifully to create the eerie illusion of a human-less New York City in broad daylight.
It's interesting to consider how the movie might have been different had Gillis and company
at Amalgamated Dynamics been given the green light. Under the watchful eye of Ridley Scott,
production designer Arthur Max apparently looked through countless photos of starvation subjects to
get the right "wasted away" look. Importantly, they still would have been speedy creatures.
In "The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made," conceptual illustrator Tani Kunitake revealed,
"[Scott] didn't want them lumbering around like 'Night of the Living Dead.' He wanted
them extremely fast, so they were running around like agile mummies."
That said, the script, once rewritten by Scott and John Logan, was "unrelenting" and didn't
have its lead character speak for nearly an hour. As a result, Warner Bros. reportedly
called Protosevich back to give the story another pass. So while the creatures would
have undoubtedly looked better using prosthetics, the tone would have been much darker. However,
that's not really a bad thing in a story about the last mortal alive.
Making movies is a balancing act, and 1997 was a time when visual FX technology was advancing fast,
which the science fiction of the year reflects. For instance, Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers"
used a mix of CGI and animatronics for its big bug baddies. Meanwhile,
Paul W. S. Anderson's "Event Horizon" made liberal use of prosthetics for the various
horrors that befall its deep-space crew. In times like these, the tech doesn't always
align with a director's vision, and Scott's ideas were ultimately too rich for the studio's wallet.
"I can still fix this." Still, it's fun to imagine what could have been,
even more so with the news that an "I Am Legend" sequel is in the works with Akiva Goldsman
returning to write the script. Michael B. Jordan is said to be attached to the film alongside Will
Smith, which might be surprising to those who haven't seen the 2007 film's alternate ending.
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