Of the three films that have been explicitly drawn from Matheson's heady pulp sci-fi story "Last Man on Earth" Boris Sagal's The Omega Man is probably the most well-respected. While it is not as lavishly produced as Lawrence's (2007) I am Legend, nor as creepified as Ubaldo Ragona's Last Man on Earth, it is a nice example of a sci fi adventure film with a soul and a brain. <br /><br />Doctor Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) has survived an engineered plague which has wiped out most of the earth's human population. Neville developed a cure as the plague erupted, but was unable to get it into production due to a very unfortunate accident. He injected himself, and is now immune. Every night, he is hunted by vampire-like plague victims lead by the puritanical Luddite fanatic Matthias. Matthias and his followers view the plague as the salvation and rebirth of humanity and see their former lives as evil. Neville is the embodiment of everything they despise. Neville, in the meantime, is desperately pursuing survival and trying to re-create the cure. <br /><br />Then one day, Neville encounters a young black woman (Rosalind Cash) posing as a mannequin in a department store. <br /><br />Omega Man is not a sci-fi spectacular. There really are no special effects to speak of and the director, very appropriately, went to great lengths to make it clear that the story takes place today - not in some distant future. The film was made by a director whose career staple was 'made for TV' movies. Unsurprisingly, Omega Man is economically directed - and its thrift sometimes shows. <br /><br />The cinematography is effective, but some of the action scenes are unconvincingly shot. The cast is excellent - Cash and Heston are especially strong. Remarkably, Omega Man creates an abandoned Los Angeles in 1971 with no special effects - almost as effectively as "I am Legend" did in 2007. It is worth mentioning that I am Legend is estimated to have enjoyed a budget at least 10 times as great as Omega Man's.<br /><br />Omega Man is a good example of the semi-experimental tangents of late 1960s/early 1970s Hollywood film-making. Influenced by the cold war, nuclear proliferation, Viet Nam, and the burgeoning Western counter-culture, films like 2001: A Space Oddyssey, Silent Running, Rollerball and Omega Man - and even the original Star Trek series - stand out as landmarks in the usually intellectually barren landscape of mainstream sci fi. <br /><br />Recommended.