The Omega Man [DVD] [1971]

Science fiction took a grim turn in the 1970s--the heyday of Agent Orange, nuclear peril and Watergate. Suddenly, most of our possible futures took on a "last man on Earth" flavour, with The Omega Man topping the doom-struck heap.

Charlton Heston plays the government researcher behind the ultimate biological weapon, a deadly plague that has ravaged humanity. There are two groups of survivors: a dwindling band of immune humans and an infected, psychopathic mob of light-hating quasi-vampires. The infected are led by Mathias, a clever, charismatic man set on destroying the last remnants of the civilisation that produced the plague. Heston has a vaccine--but he and the few remaining normals are outnumbered and outgunned. By day, he builds a makeshift version of the nuclear family (with Rosalind Cash as his afro-wearing, gun-toting little lady). They plan for the future while roaming freely through an empty urban landscape, taking what few pleasures life has left. By night, they defend themselves against the growing horde of plague victims. Both a bittersweet romance and a gothic cautionary tale, The Omega Man paints a convincing portrait of hope and despair. It ain't pretty, but it's a great movie. --Grant Balfour

With its opening long shots of a car driving through the canyons of empty streets stirring up clouds of waste paper, Charlton Heston's 1971 film The Omega Man is an interesting precursor of more recent last-person-on-earth films such as 28 Days Later. Heston is surprisingly good at conveying the terror of being completely on your own, with sanity that wanders into long conversations with the inanimate. Rather less good are the film's antagonists, victims of bacterial warfare left as albino psychotics determined to destroy Heston as a representative of the old dead world of science and technology and a small group of the infected, but not yet changed, who live virtuous pastoral lives in the hills. The film's racial politics are interestingly dated: the heroine, Lisa, is black and has some wince-worthy moments of blaxploitation movie chic; the moment when she changes is nonetheless chilling for being eminently predictable. Loosely based on Richard Matheson's classic genre novel I Am Legend, perhaps the best thing about the film is that it comes from an era when science-fiction blockbusters could be relentlessly downbeat.

On the DVD: The Omega Mancomes to disc with some interesting special features. There's a television "making of" that was shown at the time, as well as the trailer and an interesting short retrospective documentary containing interviews with the surviving screenwriter Joyce Corrington and a couple of the younger actors. The anamorphic widescreen picture is fine, as is the digitally remastered mono sound. --Roz Kaveney

Introduction by screenwriter Joyce H. Carrington, Paul Koslo ("Dutch") and Eric Laneuville ("Richie")
The Last Man Alive: The Omega Man
Charlton Heston: Science Fiction Legend
Theatrical trailers

Ratio: 2.40:1 (16x9)
Sound: Mono