The Omega Man

(Sagal, 1971)

There have been several attempts to adapt Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend to cinema and to my mind they have all broadly misfired, making sufficient changes as to render the original meaning of the tale muddled at best, and forgotten at worst.

In The Omega Man, Charlton Heston plays Robert Neville, seemingly the last surviving person on earth after a biological war between China and Russia unleashed a deadly plague upon humanity. He spends his days cruising through Los Angeles in search of food, weapons and information as to the whereabouts of the elusive “Family”, a group of mutated plague survivors who are unable to withstand direct sunlight. When night falls he is forced to retreat to a fortified apartment complex, where is able to fight off the hostile Family despite their best efforts.

The Family are bound together under the leadership of Matthias, a charismatic yet fanatical demagogue. Rejecting technology, the nocturnal creatures have fallen back to primitive stature, believing reliance on technology to be the sin that caused the end of civilisation in the first place. To the Family, Robert Neville is a demon who hunts them as they sleep.

The film starts off well enough, with a number of striking sequences highlighting the desolate remains of urban Los Angeles. Heston swaggers around town with a purpose, knowing that in the daylight hours he is ruler of all he surveys. Right from the start, though, the soundtrack is a little off-putting: all jaunty, poppy funk, which only detracts from the tension.

The Family are too comical to be genuinely menacing; as they flail and stagger about, their only opportunities to succeed are afforded by inconceivably daft plot twists. Heston’s character is not a particularly likeable man, either; most of the sympathetic elements from the original book are lost or obfuscated. When he is given something worth fighting for, he becomes inexplicably careless.

When your source material is the end of civilisation as we know it followed by a plague of vengeful mutants, you would expect a little suspense, some scares or at least something to get your adrenaline going. There is something of a religious allegory buried within this film, but the hammy dialogue and laughable bad guys end up driving the point home sideways, resulting in a disappointing mess.

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tl;dr: I Am Legend is a great story and could be a truly excellent film. The Omega Man, sadly, falls short. It’s not completely terrible, but it lacks the darkness and threat of the novel, instead delivering a clumsy religious allegory laden with unintentionally slapstick violence.

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