The Omega Man

Charlton Heston stars in this American sci-fi action feature. In 1977, the world's population has been virtually wiped out by a plague caused by biological warfare. The lone survivor in the deserted city of Los Angeles is scientist Dr. Robert Neville (Heston) who believes it is his duty to fight off the bloodthirsty mutants, calling themselves The Family, who roam the city's streets. However, this all changes when he is saved from The Family by a group of normal, young people, and begins to find himself attracted to their leader, Lisa (Rosalind Cash). Together, they try to develop a cure to the disease by duplicating Neville's original vaccine but find themselves in a constant battle with infected members of The Family. 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.