Quite a few years ago now, being inquisitive and of a methodical mindset, I got my hands on one of those magazines of the 100 Best…/1000 X You Must Y variety. I seem to recall it was called The Fifty Greatest Science-Fiction Films Ever Made or something similar. Now, most of it was made up of the usual suspects – Jurassic Park, The Terminator, 2001, and so on, but I was a little surprised to find Boris Sagal’s 1971 film The Omega Man included – a fun and funky piece of camp, perhaps, but a genuinely great movie? Well…
The Omega Man begins with Charlton Heston cruising around a strangely quiet downtown Los Angeles in his convertible, chilling out to the car stereo. Suddenly he spots a flicker of movement at the window of one of the skyscrapers, slams on the brakes and opens up at the spot with a submachinegun which he happens to be carrying. It’s definitely an arresting opening for a film, and to some extent what follows lives up to its promise.
The year is 1977, two years after the use of bacteriological weapons destroyed civilisation as we know it. Heston plays Robert Neville, formerly an army doctor whose work on a vaccine has left him the only man immune to the plague and – he believes – the sole real survivor of the apocalypse. He spends his days fending off loneliness and encroaching insanity and his nights fending off packs of albino mutants – plague victims who are still active and have formed a cult-like ‘Family’ (led by Anthony Zerbe) intent on destroying Neville, believing him to be the last remnant of a corrupt society destroyed by divine tribulation.
The uneasy impasse between Neville and the mutants is upset, however, when Neville discovers the existence of a group of young people still in the early stages of infection. Using his own antibodies, he can cure them, and they quickly cook up a plan to abandon the city for a rustic idyll (Heston pauses for a little slightly-provocative whoa-ho-ho with Rosalind Cash along the way). But, as every Sunday School teacher knows, you can’t save the world without the odd sacrifice…
‘This is the man – and I mean, The Man – but he’s cool,’ says Cash of Heston at one point, and there is a sense in which this has become the quintessential Heston vehicle for modern audiences. For many young people now he’s not really Moses or Ben-Hur or El Cid as much as that conservative, inflexible, inflammatory figure who in the last years of his life was given to popping up in the mass media in the wake of school shootings to make ill-judged pronouncements about the Second Amendment. He’s the embodiment of Rugged Individualism in this film, seldom without a gun about his person, and fiercely protective of his property rights if nothing else – despite the fact he’s nightly under siege from mobs of torch-wielding mutants, he refuses to leave his apartment, simply because it’s his home and he’s not about to let anyone push him out of it. It is, really, Heston as you imagine him being in real life.
This is fair enough, but some of the subtext of this film pushes it more towards absurd camp when it comes to its central character. Every time the mutants capture Heston, they set about symbolically crucifying him, while the revelation that his blood possesses miraculous curative properties prompts one character to cry ‘Christ, you could save the world!’ The culmination of this comes when a sweet little girl is introduced to Neville and innocently asks ‘Are you God?’ – Heston modestly declines to answer.
Heston’s presence and charisma are so potent and so central to the success of this film that you can’t really be too hard on it for the Heston-as-Christ metaphor, and unsubtle though the script is, it could be worse. The same writers, John and Joyce Corrington, also perpetrated the final script for Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and its interesting to note the parallels between the two – in addition to the post-apocalyptic setting, both films feature belligerent mutant hordes and the unexpected death of a child character.
The Omega Man is a far superior piece of work, being more than just an action melodrama or too blatant a star vehicle (a trap the remake of this film, I Am Legend, really fell into – and agreeable a presence as Will Smith is, when it comes to star quality he’s not in the same league as Charlton Heston). The early stages of the film in particular have a certain wistfulness and pathos to them, not least through the impressive staging of the dead Los Angeles (Ron Grainer’s marvellous score contributes a lot to this). A key early scene has Neville going to the cinema for a private viewing of the documentary Woodstock, the big man lip-synching with the optimistic hippies on screen. It seems to me that on one level The Omega Man is about the death of 60s idealism and the end of the hippy dream – the ‘Family’ of mutants seems to me to directly recall the Manson Family of murderous hippies, and the mutants’ obsessive desire to destroy the remains of modern civilisation is surely a dark exaggeration of the counter-culture’s desire to drop out of it.
Heston, of course, stands up for traditional, material values – he wears a uniform, eats and drinks well, lives in a nice apartment with all modern conveniences. The great triumph of the mutants comes when they are able to penetrate his sanctuary and smash all his stuff. The mutants are unambiguously presented as evil and misguided, and so the film is clearly standing up for the status quo – the catastrophe that has overtaken the world may be the result of global war, but the central conflict of the film is between traditional American values and those of a younger, more restless generation, with Heston firmly in place as defender of the former. (Those prepared to dismiss Heston as a conservative stereotype should remember his romance with Rosalind Cash in this film – this kind of inter-ethnic conjugation is rare enough these days, let alone back in 1971.)
In the end, though, whether it’s as an NRA poster boy, a Jesus-proxy, or the embodiment of the American spirit, The Omega Man is all about Charlton Heston. This isn’t an especially deep or subtle film, but it’s well-mounted and played with conviction, and for every roll-your-eyes moment of silliness or dated nonsense there’s one of genuine wit or invention. Is this really one of the fifty greatest SF movies ever? Well, maybe not… but if we’re talking about post-apocalyptic movies as a subgenre within SF, this is definitely close to the top of the heap.