Long-Awaited, Mostly Excellent Adaptation of the 1949 Novel, Not for Kids
Part 1:
Over 40 years ago, I was good friends with a guy whose mother said that Earth Abides was the best book she ever read. She couldn’t remember the author and regretted having lost her copy but described some of the story to me. There turned out to be several books with similar titles, but I was able to identify the correct one by George R. Stewart, published in 1949, and buy her a copy for which she was thrilled. Years later I found a nice hardcover copy in a thrift store and added it to my massive To Be Read pile. I finally did read it, finishing on December 31, 2012 as the world was scheduled to end in December 2012 so I thought it was appropriate to read a fall of civilization book. Basically it is about the last survivors after an extremely contagious deadly plague wipes out most of humanity. It was excellent and I loved it! I couldn’t understand why it was never a movie!
At the end of 2024 I read I Am Legend, which has been filmed three times. I was lamenting why Earth Abides was never a movie, and when I Googled it, I was astonished to learn a new miniseries had just come out! It is six parts of one hour each and can be seen exclusively on MGM+. There is apparently no free trial but it is well worth the subscription price for this series alone. I decided to make this the first movie I watched in 2025.
First, a word about the actors. All of the main characters in the book as far as I remember were white. The miniseries features white, black, Hispanic, and Asian characters. The main character, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, played by Alexander Ludwig, is a nice-looking blond, blue-eyed white man. Whenever I read I picture all the roles being acted out and although the actor I chose to picture as Ish when reading was not a blond, blue-eyed white man, Alexander Ludwig is wonderful in this role and really won me over. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember who I pictured as Emma, the first single woman survivor Ish meets. Let me say this about that. I’m going to get called a racist or something no matter what I say. I did picture a white person, and maybe the book gives a description, I don’t remember after over 12 years. I am very against race swapping with iconic characters who everyone knows how they look—Snow White, whose description is right in her name, Ariel in The Little Mermaid, historical figures such as Anne Boelyn, or classic literary figures such as Oliver Twist, all of whom have received the brownwashing/blackwashing treatment. So far they have not come after Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Harry Potter, or Sherlock Holmes, but it’s a matter of time. In this case, race swapping at the least didn’t hurt and at the most actually helped. Jessica Frances Dukes was wonderful as Emma. A white man named George was replaced by a man from Venezuela named Jorge. Ezra, an Englishman, was replaced by an American. (Not race swapping but it did remove the only English character in the book.) A few character names were changed. Apparently Jack and Mary were too plain for the script writer and were switched to Alex and Heather. Their ages were also reversed. Joey was left the same.
As for changes from the book, the author would certainly recognize it. The miniseries, like the book, is set in the Berkeley, California area. The special effects are OUTSTANDING! The Golden Gate bridge and many other well-known landmarks are shown in various stages of decay. Presumably they had to photograph these, edit any people and cars out, and edit dilapidation in, and it works WONDERFULLY! Only one or two CGI effects look slightly fake. The story begins with Ish being bitten by a rattlesnake which looks real as all get out. This series features a lot of blood all of which looks very real. I mention this detail, for one, so the viewer can be warned it is gory in places, and for two, because I have just watched several movies from the 1960s in which copious amounts of blood resembled red poster paint and really took the viewer out of the story with how fake it looked.
A few changes were made for convenience. For instance, early in the story Ish travels to New York where in the miniseries he only gets as far as Las Vegas. In the book, the character of Charlie arrives alone, while in the miniseries he is styled as a Charles Manson type with a group of followers--having the same name is coincidental. A few incidents are more graphic than in the book for dramatic purposes, and several key elements are left out, such as carving the years on a big rock every year and eventually making coins into arrowheads. One major change is the technology for living off the grid did not exist when the book was written, so the miniseries characters are much more comfortably set up than the book characters.