THE OMEGA MAN
© 2003 Warner Home Video
Maniac Grade: A
Disc Grade: B-
Reviewed Format: DVD
Rated: PG
Stars: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash, Paul Koslo, Eric Laneuville
Writers: John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, from the novel I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson
Director: Boris Sagal
Distributor: Warner Home Video
Original Year of Release: 1971
Retail Price: $19.98
Extras: widescreen anamorphic; theatrical trailer; introduction by screenwriter Joyce H. Carrington, Paul Koslo, and Eric Laneuville; featurette; "Charlton Heston: Science Fiction Legend" filmography; French audio track; English, French, and Spanish subtitles
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THE OMEGA MAN
By: Tony WhittDate: Wednesday, August 20, 2003
It's 1978, and a plague released during the Chinese-Russian war three years before has all but annihilated the human race. Of the survivors, there are the Family, a group of humans in the light-sensitive tertiary stage of infection led by the charismatic Matthias (Anthony Zerbe); a small group of children raised by Dutch (Paul Koslo) and Lisa (Rosalind Cash), who are themselves slowly "turning"; and former researcher Robert Neville (Charlton Heston), who is immune and who until recently thought himself the last man on Earth. Neville may be the Family's only hope - but they don't want his help, nor do they want him alive...
Screenwriter Joyce Corrington says that she and her late husband decided that making the last survivors of the plague into vampires, as they were in Richard Matheson's original short novel I AM LEGEND, simply didn't work. She's right, of course - what sort of food base would a population of vampires actually have? In a way, it's unfortunate, as it takes this movie even further away from the source material than the two previously filmed versions (1964's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, starring Vincent Price, and the 1967 Spanish short film SOY LEYENDA). But the shift in emphasis is serendipity, as it gives an otherwise dated film a relevance to events of our own time that makes it very uncomfortable to watch, just as much as (if not more so than) its cinematic godchildren THE STAND and 28 DAYS LATER.
Granted, there is a lot that brands OMEGA MAN as a product of its age. In one sense, OMEGA MAN is very much a film about color, about darkness and light, and about how those two opposites are unable to come together harmoniously without the huddled masses trying to prevent it from happening. The central conflict of the movie is as much about how Heston and Cash can bridge that color gap and find true love as it is about surviving alone and lonely in a hostile world filled with (ironically enough) albino zombies. This theme gets lost, however, as the Corringtons decide to introduce an extremely heavy-handed Christian symbolism, making Heston's character the savior of humanity and even leaving him to die in a position similar to that of the figure on the crucifix. (Cash's character even makes reference to crucifixion earlier in the movie when she takes Heston prisoner - it seems the Corringtons didn't trust us to get it.) The color theme is also overbalanced by the sheer amount of self-references - everything comes back to it, from Cash's afro right down to her jive-talkin' dialogue which probably sounded "hip" in 1971 but which would have sounded a tad embarrassing even by 1978. When Dutch says something about needing to get back to the kids because they get spooked when they're left alone, and Lisa says, "Watch your mouth," it's enough to make you cringe away from the two-by-four being leveled at your head and to scream, "We get it, already!" It goes to show how far things have come that, in a similar situation, the equally racially diverse protagonists of this year's 28 DAYS LATER never even refer to those differences - or at least how little a film like this would now need to harp on them.
While the dialogue and Ron Grainer's score plant the movie firmly in turn-of-the-'70s territory, the biological warfare plot strikes a note with us that hits a little harder than it might have done in 1971, and the movie is as relentless at driving that point home as it is about the racial harmony theme. Zerbe's acting may be a bit over the top, but we have no trouble imagining a similar leader creating a populist dogma based on Biblical themes that is terrifying in its inhumanity, especially in the face of The End Of The World As We Know It. And while Heston may be winning no popularity contests these days, he immediately gains our sympathy with his portrayal as the sole survivor of a biological catastrophe who is slowly losing his grip on reality. It makes us wonder even now what we would do in a similar situation, with or without Rosalind Cash around.
The DVD, unfortunately, is pretty bare bones in its presentation of this cult classic. The much-touted "introduction" featuring Corrington, Koslo, and co-star Eric Laneuville barely stretches to three and a half minutes, and the so-called "Charlton Heston: Science Fiction Legend" feature is nothing more than a briefly annotated filmography of Heston's science fiction appearances, trying to prove that Heston was the king of science fiction films of this era even though he appeared only in this, the first two PLANET OF THE APES films, and SOYLENT GREEN. The fact that the producers include 1980's THE AWAKENING on this list shows how desperate they are to prove their thesis. Instead of doing that, they should really have created a decent filmography for all of the cast and crew, rather than the piddly listing the disc does include under that tab. The contemporaenous ten-minute featurette "The Last Man Alive: The Omega Man" somewhat compensates for this, but only if you can handle Heston and an anthropologist of the day pontificating about why Neville would act the way he does. I suppose we should be thankful we have this much in the way of extras - given that both the director and Cash are no longer with us and Heston is sadly well on his way, a commentary track was never an option - though it's a shame that the beautiful 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer here is the only really perk that comes from having this movie on DVD.
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