The Black Pill Trilogy: The Omega Man

This is the middle child of Charleton Heston’s trilogy of dystopian films

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room, there was a knock on the door.”

That sentence is generally accepted as the shortest horror story of all time and it was the inspiration behind Richard Matheson’sI Am Legend.

The Omega Man (1971) bears so little resemblance to I Am Legend, that I’m not entirely certain that Matheson could have won a copyright suit.

This was the second film iteration of I Am Legend, the first, The Last Man on Earth was made only seven years before.  There is kind of an air of “that one doesn’t count” surrounding it. Hammer Films had bought the rights to I Am Legend but it died in development and was sold to Robert Lippert who made the Vincent Price version of the story in Italy.

Omega Man had an actual budget but there were quite a few more differences. I Am Legend despite taking place in the aftermath of a nuclear war, didn’t have much in the way of politics or social commentary but The Omega Man indulged itself.  

The movie starts with Charleton Heston driving around a deserted city in a Cadillac convertible. He seems to be just vibing, listening to his 8-track when he slams on the brakes and rips a burst from his S&W M76 into an office building, a hooded figure scurries away.  Then Heston wrecks his car.  

When he goes to a dealership to recon another vehicle he sees a calendar with the year 1975 on it, since this film was made in 1971 it triggers a flashback.  The long-standing frenemy relationship between Russia and China had turned cold and then very hot indeed. They attacked each other with biological weapons that spread all over the planet.  Neville in this iteration was an Army biological warfare research officer who came up with a vaccine in time to save himself but absolutely no one else.

The audience now knows Neville is a last man trope.  We see him doing his shopping around town then he stops at a theater and fires up a generator there so he can watch Woodstock for what is apparently the thousandth time.  He knows it so well he has the lines memorized.  

The choice of movie was not random. John and Joyce Corrington were the screenwriters who adapted I Am Legend.  They appear to have been fairly typical as Silent Generation liberals, they approved of the whole Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty mantra even though they were long past the blinking red palm crystal stage of life themselves. Silent Gen Liberals loved to pretend that Woodstock was this moment of cosmic harmony and beauty rather than the 1960s version of Fyre Festival. “An accurate memorial to Woodstock would have been a National Guardsman feeding a sandwich to a crying hippy.”

Their politics provided me with some unintentional laughs. 

Neville gets out of the theater and realizes he’s lost track of time. It’s almost sundown.  He charges home and some hooded figures chase him into his garage. He kills all three.

They were members of The Family; survivors of the plague who have become albino mutant luddites and not vampires.  So they aren’t zombies either.  The head of the family is Matthias, a former network anchorman now turned technophobic zealot. His number two is Zachery, a former black man with a big as AF afro.  The family lays siege to Neville's apartment building/fortress every night.

I had to laugh when Zachery referred to Neville’s pad as “That Honkey paradise.”  It was the sincerity of the detestation that sold it. 

I gave a sad chuckle when Matthias chastised Zachery for not letting go of the old hatreds.  White liberals were desperate for black people to do that back then. However, it only takes one side to make a race war.

Anyway, we see Neville in his apartment.  He has a collection of art that he’s looted from galleries, electronics from department stores, plus his research equipment.  All of them serving as Memento Moris of an apparently extinct race.  

As in the book Neville is doing what he can to fight off isolation dementia but after three years his gears are starting to slip. He has conversations with himself in mirrors and a video camera.  He plays chess with a bust of Julius Caesar and indulges his alcoholism. He tries to maintain a sense of normalcy by dressing formally for Sunday dinner.

All the while The Family taunts him at night trying to get him to come out. They burn things in a huge pyre in front of his building every night.  “What will it be tonight? An art gallery? A science museum?” Neville asks wearily. 

However, they did break up the routine by firing flaming ballista bolts at his house that night.  Neville countered by firing a BAR with an M3 infrared scope.  

Guess who won?

On his patrol the next day Neville sees a mannequin of a black woman move, then take off running.  He writes it off to more of his isolation dementia hallucinations. But later he is captured by the Family and taken to the Olympic Stadium where they plan to burn him alive.  But then, the stadium lights go on, blinding them and the black mannequin rescues him.  Her name is Lisa.

Stand by for Boomer narcissism, it turns out that people under thirty have some immunity to the plague. The Baby Boomers were going to be the salvation of the world remember?  In truth, it wasn’t just the youth that was backing this Cult of Youth.  Mao seems to have been the one to have started it and of course, Communists in the West began to mindlessly parrot his mantras from the Little Red Book: 

“The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. The World belongs to you. (The) future belongs to you. - Mao Zedong, mass murderer and pedophile

The Communists always act as a center of gravity drawing the Western Left with them.

Anyway, the ‘Hope of the World’ has the plague too they just aren’t turning mutant as fast. For the most part. However, Lisa’s little brother is about to turn. Neville wants to know why they didn’t contact him, and Lisa says they were afraid he’d kill them. This was honestly kind of weak.  It was a carryover from the book, but in the book, it was the sapient vampires that didn’t want to get in touch with Neville because he was killing them during the daytime. It was a bad contrivance that needed to be papered over quickly so the movie could happen.

Neville informs them he is immune and makes a serum from his own blood, to cure Lisa’s brother, Richie.  Since he has nothing better to do with his screen time until her brother’s mutant albinism, clears up Ben Hur indulges his jungle fever with Lisa.  A lot of people insist this was the first time it ever happened in the movies but it would be more accurate to say that it was the first time they remember.  Assuming they didn’t remember it being Captain Kirk and Uhura.*

Neville wants to go join the hippy commune in the hills and cure them too, leaving urban remains to the doomed cultists.  However, Lisa’s little brother Richie wants to deprogram Matthias and his crew.  

Neville is a lot more realistic about former-human nature and sets out to rescue him, donning his barracks cover; the last soldier of the United States going off to battle.

Matthias has already murdered Richie.  

The final fight scene happens, Neville’s fortress/home is destroyed because Lisa turned mutant and changed sides.  Neville kills most of them but is mortally wounded by Matthais because his MP40 had jammed because, of course, it did. He should have stuck with the M76 because ‘Merica!

The hippies find Neville in the morning; he hands the chief medic of the hippies his blood serum and then dies in a Christ-like pose in the fountain.  Heston was always dying at the end of his movies back then, he was worse than Sean Bean.

The movie did carry one main thing over from the book.  Neville was a rather complex character who was trying his best not to fall apart.  It was engaging to watch Charlton Heston starring in a Last Man kind of story.

The Omega Man’s chief strength remains Charlton Heston’s performance, and truthfully it’s the only reason this film is still worth a watch.  At least if you are watching it for entertainment rather than mining it for the cultural zeitgeist. 

If you are mining it for the latter then it is a very rich vein indeed.

John and Joyce Corrington’s script demonstrates the Left’s stream of thought self-contradictions. 

The hippy commune was all groovy and righteous, man.  They were the hope for the future.  They just needed a little guidance from the older generation but then that generation knew it needed to get out the Youth Quake’s way.

However, the Family was a stand-in for the acknowledged dark side of the hippy movement.  They were a clear and obvious referent to the Manson Family murders that had sent Hollywood into culture shock. The mad laughter of the Family's women taunting Neville made that very clear.

The movie managed to both condemn and condone the Luddism of the Family.  There was a general feel of, hey, brother we dig your anti-modernity vibe but your burning shit all the time is a real bad trip, man. Neville planning to join the hippy comune indicates the writers approved of getting rid of the old world and building a new one. It just needed to be done with the right kind of hippy and not the Manson Family.

The Family was viewed as having one positive attribute however, they had left all racial differences behind when they became uniformly gray. There was also the childish belief of the American Left that if you just make all skin color the same then all racial conflicts will disappear.  The racial homogeneity of the people who were ethnically cleansing and those being cleansed in Kosovo and Rwanda would argue differently. This was however a very common trope of the late sixties and early seventies, which I saw in a few other things like the Lathe of Heaven. 

The fear of societal collapse was also a very prevalent theme during the seventies. If only they’d known what the future held. 

Director Boris Sagal managed to capture the stark feeling of an abandoned city, although there were a few scenes with cars moving in the distance.  It was impossible to remove them with seventies film technology.  Sagal kept the pace going at a fast clip because he probably knew the audience would stop buying what they were seeing if things slowed down. Or perhaps it was the fact that he was a TV director and that was his default skill set.

Nonetheless, he did manage a few genuinely iconic moments. Neville screaming that the phone ringing he was hearing was not real, and Neville playing chess with Caesar both still work well today.

The action scenes were good enough in their day too but don’t really hold up. That said, I did love the Seventies Funky Town music during the action beats, even if it was too slow of a beat for an excting scene.

The supporting characters were bluntly weak and single-dimensional. Lisa, Dutch, and Ritchie weren’t really developed at all.  Mattias spent the whole movie twirling his mustache. 

In summary, The Omega Man was a reflection of 1970s anxieties: Cold War fears, urban decay, and racial tensions. What it wasn’t was a good version of I Am Legend but Heston’s performance still makes it worth a watch now and then.

Next time

, Planet of the Apes

Discuss in the comments below.

*It is generally assumed that the first interracial was a 1955 production of Othello. If there is anything that predates that it’s lost media.