The weirdest thing about The Omega Man isn’t just the arresting, depraved imagery or the depressing, sometimes impressionistic take on an apocalyptic world. Instead, it’s strange to think that for six years, Charlton Heston was grappling with the end of the world, over the course of four movies: Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). In the first two ape films, Heston played Taylor, a depressed astronaut who finds himself on a future Earth in which humanity basically destroyed itself. In The Omega Man, Heston plays Robert Neville, one of the last survivors of the human race after bioweapons have wiped out most of humanity. In Soylent Green, Heston was Robert Thorn, the only guy who knew the horrible truth about a new food source.
Of these four oddly connected sci-fi films, The Omega Man is easily the least famous, but oddly, perhaps the most fun to rewatch. Like the Apes films, there’s some goofy makeup on the mutants who represent the survivors of humanity, but by and large, The Omega Man is slightly easier to buy, because the sci-fi hyperbole that drives the film essentially comes down to seeing a nearly empty Los Angeles. And, in this way, The Omega Man walked so Pluribus could run. 55 years later, after its release on August 1, 1971, The Omega Man holds up surprisingly well, especially if you view it for what it was: Essentially a feature-length Twilight Zone episode.
