Whether you enjoyed I Am Legend or not, check out the alternate ending; it sets the "main" "zombie" character (billed as Alpha Male) as the protagonist's foil and moral equal instead of a mere nemesis. Though the new ending shows more consistent character logic and sets up themes like "love vs. hubris" instead of just "loneliness is sad," this is relevant to this blog how? As follows:

- The Alpha Male is no longer killed for attacking an apparently innocent Dr. Neville. He now has a just motive, alluded to in earlier scenes but left hanging without this ending. As far as he reasonably sees things, Neville is a serial kidnapper whose victims must unite and take the law into their deformed hands. Which is fine, since zombie police are incompetent, conducting no-knocks on wrong houses and so forth. Or maybe that's normal police.

- For what crime is the Alpha Male character murdered in the original version? Breaking and entering Neville's home after Neville entered his and left with gun blazing? Setting mannequin traps modeled after Neville's own? Killing his tormentor's dog? Are any of these worse than kidnapping and injecting volatile substances?

- In the original, most members of this character's race are monsters, so therefore he is judged as a monster as well, and his slaughter is actually presented as a moment of Christlikeness on Neville's part, embellished by quite a few previous associations between Neville and Jesus. The alternate ending does away with this collectivist logic; this character has his own intentions that have nothing to do with the random violence attributed to others who resemble him. He is an individual. Maybe they're otherwise all killers and demons, and this person is just one of a kind, but that's the entire point: he is one of a kind. That's libertarianism.

- Even more than being one of a kind, he's also the best of his kind. When his comrades rush to attack Neville as the lab door is opened, the Alpha Male orders them to fall back. Thus he is an argument for the inevitability of progress; things are getting better, perhaps influenced by Neville's earnest efforts but just as importantly because things, when left alone by ignorant but concerned outsiders, usually do improve. He displays disdain and suspicion towards Neville as the female is being released, but he also shows clear sympathy during Neville's head-hanging expression of guilt. Trust in the ability of evolutionary "markets" to produce better humans is similar to trust in financial markets, right?

- This ending fills with irony Neville's pronouncement that "social devolution appears complete" among the infected. When the Alpha Male exposes himself to lethal sunlight just to snarl at Neville, he is not being a raving beast but is protesting the taking and gun-butting of his ladyfriend. Imagine how useless propaganda would be if we could all see the "enemy" as human instead of devolved monster.

- It becomes a film about desperately seeking to understand instead of destroy. It is the supposed inhuman who offers the decisive act of communication (the butterfly smear) and is attributed with supernatural wisdom by an enlightened Neville ("...I'm listening," he says, alluding to an earlier dialog about listening to God). Maybe Hillary Clinton and other neocons should listen, too, instead of mocking the idea of negotiating with "evil" foreign leaders.

- Instead of forever staying the course in "his Ground Zero," assuming his coercive practices can eventually save a world that is in no hurry to be saved, government agent Neville leaves this new breed of human to fend for itself and evolve and hopefully begin to civilize, as it does in the few short days the film's main thread covers.

- Neville's comeuppance and revelation speaks to the government tradition of forced medical care (government-sanctioned lobotomies, CIA experiments, shock therapy episodes, Tuskegee syphilis, druggings, ritalin prescriptions, rehab stints, etc.), not to mention the state's more explosive brands of larger scale intervention.

Neville, no longer a self-righteous suicide bomber AND well-intentioned government agent, is humbled to accept a fellow individual's choice to be sick, to bark like a lion, to breathe rapidly in shadowy naked dude huddles, and to not watch his female companion used for involuntary medical experiments. It's also important that the final scene is no longer a speech about a legendary military hero accompanied by institutional symbols (church steeple surrounded by camouflaged United States soldiers, gigantic border walls, and retina scanners); it's now a trio of individuals, otherwise strangers, reaching out across free airwaves and open roads.