by Nicolai P. Zwar on 4/29/2002
 
The Omega Man is a rather effective science fiction B-picture (though with Charlton Heston it had an A-star aboard) about the (more or less) last man on earth who's fighting it out with a bunch of ghoulish mutants in the streets of Los Angeles after a bacteriological war between China and the United States has wiped off (most of) mankind from the face of the earth. Heston plays Robert Neville, a scientist who happens to be the only one immune to the bacteriological plague because he was able to inject himself a newly developed vaccine just in the nick of time. The mutants are degenerate albinos hypersensitive to light, led by a former newscaster named Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), whose mission it is to destroy all remnants of science and technology in general, and Neville as the last living representative of that bygone era in particular.

The movie is not without its flaws; the motivation of the mutants, for example, is never made entirely clear. They behave the way you'd expect a bunch of fanaticised ghoulish albino mutants to behave alright, meaning they all wear nifty black robes and scatter about like rats in the night, regularly meeting in front of Neville's super secured condominium for book burnings (which seems to be a somewhat odd activity to engage in for a bunch of albinos so sensitive to light they can be successfully opposed with a mere flashlight), yet the movie seems to be unsure at times whether their hatred of anything related to technological civilization is a mental delusion caused by the plague or rooted in semi-religious ideology or both. So we find Matthias preaching the mutant's creed to the "Family" (as the mutants refer to themselves) like a televangelist raised on the King James Bible, yet at other times it seems that one adopts these "doctrines" and becomes part of the "Family" the minute one is befallen by the plague.

Nevertheless, The Omega Man is at times highly entertaining and has over the years even gathered a small cult following. There are some very well staged action interludes, and many scenes - especially at the beginning - manage to convey a real sense of loneliness and what it might feel like to live all by yourself in a desolate metropolitan area. Pointedly, Neville's favorite movie is Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh's Academy Award winning documentary about the spectacular 1969 mammoth outdoor rock festival, where almost half a million people gathered peacefully for three days), a movie he watches regularly alone in a theater and has obviously already memorized. It becomes doubly pointed since the movie hints at the fact that the "Family" might have its roots somewhere in the flower power movement, too.

One of the most unusual assets of the movie is its downright daring musical score by Ron Grainer. It's daring because it's not at all what you'd expect or what genre conventions might have dictated. It neither relies on atonal or experimental avant-garde techniques sometimes associated with the better science fiction movies from that time period (like Rosenman's Fantastic Voyage or Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes), nor does it overly rely on electronic instruments (like Carlos' A Clockwork Orange). Instead, we get "a strange hybrid of conventional film score, wordless rock opera and highly dramatic cocktail music," as Jeff Bond aptly sums it up in the liner notes for this release. Grainer's music for The Omega Man is highly melodic, tuneful, even catchy; sometimes it plays like an eccentric piece of lounge music, at other times the music is strikingly bold and upfront, but at all times it remains eminently listenable and coherent. There are a number of different themes and motifs in the score; particularly noteworthy are the hauntingly melancholy and highly memorable melody that captures Neville's loneliness and his yearning for the past, the boldly defiant motif that stands in firm resolution against the depravity of the mutant