Chateau Lloyd

Having run through the Mad Max films, I've decided to compare them to other "end the world" films.

One of the classics in the genre is The Omega Man.   This is based on a book titled I am Legend, which was made into a movie titled The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price in 1964.  The Omega Man was a 1971 remake and the latest entry is Will Smith's I am Legend from 2007.

Clearly the concept is a popular one.  In Heston's version, either China or the USSR has loosed a biological weapon that kills most people and turns others into sunlight-hating psychopaths.  There is a strong zombie-ish element here, and many of the set-piece scene echo George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which separated the concept of zombies from their Caribbean voodoo origins.

To modern eyes, the film moves slowly, unfolding gradually as the audience realizes that things are not as they appear.  Much of the horror element in the film is achieved by showing the way society collapsed.

Heston's character is the Last Man - a military scientist who perfected a treatment (they call it a vaccine, but it's really a treatment) for the plague but couldn't deploy it fast enough to save humanity.  He sits in his fortified house talking to himself, foraging for food, luxury items and trying to retain his sanity while fighting off The Family, a bunch of zombies led by a vindictive former newscaster.

There's lots of social commentary from the 70s of course.  Despite being conservative, Heston held many conventionally liberal beliefs about racial equality and these featured prominently in his films.

Another problem for modern viewers is the lack of what I'd call tactical skill on the part of Heston's character.  He's very casual about what equipment he carries, sets down his weapons out of reach, and basically sets himself up for trouble.  This might be lazy writing or simply that people hadn't explored the problem of 'adventuring' in as much depth.

It's worth recalling that modern sensitivities in this respect have been shaped by four decades of Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying, which often become intensely detailed in terms of what items are most useful, the proper way to clear a room, etc.  Console and online games have intensified this by making it accessible to people unwilling to read multi-volume rules sets.

As I've pointed out in the Mad Max films, religion is largely absent, save in The Family's anti-faith.  Heston himself does not pray, though he uses the religious-inspired curses of the time.

Yet as we've seen through the real-life pandemic (and throughout history), in times of disaster, faith communities can be crucial to surviving.  That would have been true during Covid but for massive state power being deployed to keep people away from church.  This combined with churches trying to show their fealty to "the science" by stopping in-person services well beyond what was warranted.

And yet, despite biological danger and official persecution, the faith endures.

This absence is more striking in The Omega Man because it uses some very heavy-handed symbolism regarding Heston's disease-resistant blood and how it can save humanity. 

As a film, it's very much a creature of its time, and useful to see what horror/post-apocalyptic films used to be.  That is to say it's a fun look back, but it is not a timeless classic one enjoys for its own sake.