The Omega man may now receive renewed attention as a result of the current and third re-make of the original story from which it derives, "I Am Legend".<br /><br />Whilst "I Am Legend" may well be more faithful to the original book, that text, however, is an unremarkable piece of escapist sci-fi. Whereas The Omega Man, using the story as a vehicle, developed it into what may now be read as an uncannily insightful analysis of latent undercurrents of late twentieth century culture.<br /><br />The Omega Man replaces the rather puerile vampire theme with that of a reactionary cult of anti-science. The epidemic that supposedly turns people into blood-sucking Buffy-beasts in the original story is replaced by a rather more believable illness of which symptoms are aversion to light and insanity. A TV news anchorman, using the technology of mass communications that science has put at his disposal, is shown as opportunistically exploiting the biological disaster to create a religious cult that entirely renounces science, with himself as its head.<br /><br />Aspects of this scenario reflected elements within the "hippy" movement that was nearly contemporaneous with the movie's making. The nascent "Luddite" reactionary element that was in hippiedom has swelled in prominence in the years since the movie was made, as the less harsh themes of Sixties "counter-culture", libertarianism and the renunciation of top-down political dogma, have evaporated. Today, in the mature, even decadent technological societies, the principal themes of culture and politics are a renunciation of science and the reassertion of mediaeval religious dogmas. These two elements frequently intertwine. Whilst the "environmentalist" political dogma seeks to dictate from above every aspect of everyday life for every citizen, the state has launched into a millennial conflict with renascent mediaevalist religion as it is expressed overseas in "terrorist" movements.<br /><br />Seen from today's perspective, Charlton Heston's depiction of the isolated, besieged man of science, Dr Neville, seems eerily evocative for the embattled minority of us who cling to the ideal of scientific truth that is now under attack. As in The Omega Man, we now see the mass media that is a product of science used by that media's own opportunistic elements to generate a hostility to science that they can then play to their own advantage. We have reached the point at which to dare raise the pseudo-scientific nature of the dominant political ideology that is environmentalism is to risk being rendered an outcast, like Neville.<br /><br />A far-fetched fantasy adventure at the time of it's making, The Omega Man now seems to have uncannily anticipated the major political themes of life in the early Twenty-First Century. A truly prophetic parable of our times.