Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man is an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend with the screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington. Preceding Charlton Heston’s 1973 dystopian classic Soylent Green by a couple of years, this dystopian tale is set in Los Angeles and depicts a different kind of darkness than its successor.
Heston’s role in the movie is that of an army scientist, Dr. Robert Neville, who survived a pandemic of near future (story set in 1977) by testing an experimental vaccine on himself and is now immune to the pathogen while being the only normal guy left in LA – the titular “Omega Man” of the story. The other survivors are a group of mutated people, collectively called The Family,” who hate humanity as it used to be and kill any “normal” surviving human in a ritual ceremony. And Neville is their prime target that they stalk at night.
The science in The Omega Man is minimal with no actual details of the nature of the pandemic or the mutations that created The Family. The movie leans more to the thriller side with dramatic elements in many scenes that parallel Heston’s role of a man with a gun whose private life is plagued with loneliness. At the same time, the movie’s horror element is quite obvious with some vampirish qualities of the The Family combined with their murder rituals targeting normal humans. Yet movie database sites like IMDb and general info platforms like Wikipedia at the time of this writing haven’t added a horror tag to the movie’s assigned genres.
Rosalind Cash as Lisa and Anthony Zerbe as Matthias play significant characters among the rest of the cast. The movie’s ending is quite dramatic in its visual and symbolic merit. Matheson is said to have assessed the movie as too far from his original novel. On screen, however, The Omega Man makes a great dystopian presentation with Heston’s screen charm leading the show.
