i have not read the book that the movie is based on, but when i first popped the disc into the player i saw that i had two versions that i could choose from. i decided to watch the theatrical release and at the end, i was confused as to why the movie had ended the way it did. it just didn’t make sense.
i read online that the movie was actually rewritten and changed from the book to end this way so that it would be more commercially palatable. so i watched the alternate ending that was on the disc and it COMPLETELY changes the entire relationship between the zombies and dr. neville. though i liked the theatrical release, the ending did feel a little forced and i felt like there were some loose ends. the alternate version really changes the tone of the entire movie and wraps up some references made in the movie earlier much better.
definitely check out the alternate ending, it is fantastic.
I felt that there were some unaddressed and unanswered questions after I saw the movie, too. Like, why do a setup to imply that the zombies are much smarter/human-nature-ish than Dr. Neville had originally dismissively thought? Why imply that the head zombie was doing a rescue mission to get his girlfriend back, complete with zombie recruits? So I bought the book to see if these points were more fleshed out.
The written story is COMPLETELY different from the movie. Sure the character names were the same, but in the book, Dr. Neville wasn’t all that likeable as a character, he didn’t have a dog (altho he tried to adopt one that turned out to be infected), and there were no zombies! They were VAMPIRES! And he was going around house to house staking them in the day! AND…in the end, the vampire society thought he was a threat cuz he’s “different” so they took him to their prison and sentenced him to death! Totally different themes and social/societal/human nature critiques in the book, but I definitely didn’t feel it was one of Richard Matheson’s better-written works at all. I much preferred What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time. Even Stir of Echoes was better, even tho the movie was a little disturbing to me.