The Omega Man - Sci-Fi Film

The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston was one of my favorite science fiction movies. The premise of the film was that China and the Soviet Union had a biological chemical war - and the result was a worldwide plague that killed off the earth's population.

Charlton Heston played a military scientist named Robert Neville who discovered a cure for the plague, but on his way to distribute it the helicopter he was flying in crashed when the pilot got the plague and died at the controls. As the wreckage burned around him, Neville caught the virus and started to die. Before he blacked out he shot the experimental vaccine into his thigh and immunized himself.

When he revived, he returned to Los Angeles to find that everyone had died - everyone but a small band of people who had survived the plague but had mutated into crazed albinos who only came out at night. They called themselves "The Family" and followed a charismatic ex-newscaster named Mathias. Mathias convinced the mutant survivors that technology was to blame for their troubles and they spent their nights destroying the remnants of civilization.

For the next 2 years Neville endured loneliness and constant attempts by the family to capture and kill him. He turned his old apartment building into a fortress, mounting machine gun nests and floodlights on the roof to keep the mutants back. Artificial light and direct sunlight was painful to the mutants so by day Neville hunted the mutants and made attempts at curing a few he had captured - but the plague had made them all insane and extremely violent. Every night the Family would surround his fortress apartment complex and attack him with ancient weapons like the catapult - shunning modern conventional weapons - and Neville would use a sniper rifle to pick the attackers off one by one as he listened to music and cooked dinner.

Unknown to Neville, a group of people survived the plague and were living outside of Los Angeles - a small group of children and teenagers. Their youth and unique immune systems were fighting off the plague, but all of them were slowly turning into the zombies one by one. They knew of Neville shooting up the city attacking the mutants and they knew he was a scientist so they started watching him and making plans to contact him.

In one of his daily mutant hunts, Neville was ambushed in a dark wine cellar by the Family, and was put on trial for his crimes of technology. Found guilty, the Family took Neville to a football stadium and had plans to execute him by burning him at the stake, when the teens - led by a beautiful young black woman named Lisa, and an ex-medical student biker - turned on the stadium lights and rescued Neville in a daring raid.

Once at the teens hideout in the hills outside of the city, Neville started working on a syrum to cure the kids - mainly Lisa's brother Ritchie - a young teenager who was quickly turning into a mutant. Neville took Lisa and Ritchie back to his fortress to work in his lab, and a love relationship developed between Neville and Lisa. In what some say is the first interacial love scene, Neville and Lisa bonded and started to work towards rebuilding humanity. The syrum worked and Ritchie was cured, but the boy started feeling guilty that he was okay and the members of the family were suffering. Ritchie ran away to the Family hoping to get them to let Neville cure them - and Mathias had him killed.

Lisa, while out on a supply run during the day, caught the plague and turned into an albino. Neville came back to the fortress apartment building, only to find that Lisa had let Mathias and the Family inside - and he is captured. The ending comes soon after and I don't want to ruin the movie for viewers by telling the entire story, but you should go out and buy or rent this movie - it's a classic sci-fi flick - one of my favorite Charlton Heston movies about the future. During the time frame he made this movie he also starred in classics like "Soylent Green" and of course "The Planet of the Apes."

Review by Jim Fitzpatrick

Click here to return to sci-fi4you.iwarp.com