OMEGA MAN, THE - HD DVD review

OK, what do you think? Is it just coincidence that Warner Bros. are issuing the 1971 sci-fi adventure "The Omega Man" on HD DVD and Blu-ray at almost the same time they're releasing their newest remake of the Richard Matheson novel, "I Am Legend," with Will Smith to theaters? And do oil companies make a profit, or is that coincidental, too?

The first movie version of Matheson's book, "The Last Man on Earth" with Vincent Price, came along in 1964. So now connoisseurs of the subject have three screen adaptations of the story to argue about, although I must confess that I didn't care all that much for any of them. Guess I'm not a connoisseur.

Still, you can't blame a studio for trying. WB even include "Movie Money" in each keep case for "The Omega Man" (including their latest standard-definition re-release, I might add), worth up to $7.00 toward the purchase of a theater ticket to the Will Smith account. The studio wants to get you coming and going, but if you really like "The Omega Man," you can't go wrong getting practically a free ticket (if you go to a bargain matinee) to the newer film, too.

So, let's get on with the show. "The Omega Man" begins with absolutely no fanfare. It starts right in with Charlton Heston as a former military scientist, Col. Robert Neville, riding around a deserted Los Angeles in a red convertible and stopping to fire an automatic weapon at persons (or things) he sees moving in nearby buildings. Then a phone rings. That's actually a scary moment, and I liked the opening, its getting right to the point the way it does. How the world came to be deserted, leaving Neville practically alone, the film tells us later in flashbacks.

Unfortunately, from the opening sequence on, the movie goes downhill, an adventure with little adventure, a thriller with few thrills, but a movie with a whole lot of talk.

It's the second year of a plague that has wiped out most of the world's population, the result of biological warfare gone very, very wrong. Neville finds himself immune because he helped to develop an experimental serum that worked on him but which he never had the chance to use on others. Good luck for Neville; bad luck for Mankind. The only other survivors he knows about are mutants, people affected by the disease who haven't died yet but cannot see in the light and, thus, only come out after dark. Apparently, the disease not only affected these mutants physically, it affected them mentally as well, because they now blindly follow and obey a mutant guru, a quasi-religious leader named Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who teaches them to hate Neville as the symbolic survivor of a corrupt world that destroyed them all. What's more, the mutants all wear black hoods and robes, which they evidently found in one of L.A.'s notorious black-hood-and-robe shops, and they all behave mindlessly, sort of like Red and Blu fans at a format convention.

Most of the story moves along at a crawl, with a horrendous musical track that almost single-handedly destroys any atmosphere the film tries to create. Worse, the film has a kind of made-for-television feel to it, despite its being shot largely on location. Maybe the fact that its director, Boris Sagal, did most of his work for television before and after this production contributes to the lackadaisical end result. People in the film just chatter at each other most of the time, with virtually no development of tension or suspense and little imagination in the camera angles, the lighting, the set decoration, or anything else that might have distinguished the proceedings.

Heck, we don't even learn anything about the characters other than that they're in a tight predicament, so we can hardly feel sympathetic toward them, particularly not toward Neville because he seems so distant and cold. Part of this might be Heston's rather distant acting style, which tends to be more wooden than communicative, but mainly the fault's in the script, which gives him little to do other than wander around the city by day and shoot a few mutants by night.

Neville does finally run into a few other normal people, and wouldn't you know it, one of them just happens to be a pretty young black woman (Rosalind Cash), who eventually becomes a romantic interest. At least she shows a little spunk and personality, more than you can say about anybody else in the picture; yet her black-power attitude, her groovy jive talk, her psychedelic clothing, and her gigantic Afro hairdo tend to date her and the movie considerably.

The action sequences, what few there are, are not very exciting, especially with that dreadful music I mentioned playing behind them. Twice the mutants capture Neville, and twice we find the outcome predictable. What kind of deal is that?

Then it all ends with a final melodramatic conflict that seems more corny than thrilling or climactic, aided and abetted again by the film's distracting background music. Well, very little of "The Omega Man" makes much sense, so why should this have been any different.

Video:
The picture quality's not bad, given the film's age. By that, I mean the original print looks to have been in pretty good shape, and the resultant VC-1 1080 transfer looks clean. The WB engineers maintain the film's 2.40:1 aspect ratio, and they capture the film's Technicolor hues in deep, solid shades. Facial tones do seem a trifle dark, though; object delineation and detailing is at least average for an HD transfer, with very little bleed-through; and one notices grain only in a few outdoor scenes. There were a couple of instances of moiré effects I wouldn't have expected, minor but visible. Otherwise, a reasonably unblemished screen offers up some reasonably decent video.

Audio:
The Dolby Digital Plus 1.0 monaural audio is hardly something to write home about. It's clean and quiet enough, true, but there is nothing much else to say about it. One notices from the outset a limited frequency response and dynamic range, a light bass, a soft impact and thrust, and a nonexistent surround. That's OK. Since most of this adventure thriller is more talk than thrills, the DD+ reproduction does well enough with the dialogue.

Extras:
There's not much in the way of extras on the disc, and they are all in standard definition. The most appealing thing is a recently made, four-minute introduction with two of the movie's co-stars, Eric Laneuville and Paul Koslo, and the movie's screenwriter, Joyce H. Corrington. Following that, you'll see a ten-minute, vintage featurette, a promo really, "The Last Man Alive--The Omega Man," in standard-screen size. In it, Charlton Heston discusses the movie's themes with noted anthropologist Ashley Montagu. About the only thing I learned from this chat was that even noted anthropologists know how to turn a buck.

The extras conclude with thirty scene selections but no chapter insert; a widescreen theatrical trailer; English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Swedish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. As usual on a WB HD DVD, there are also pop-up menus, bookmarks, a zoom-and-pan feature, a guide to elapsed time, and an Elite Red HD case.

Parting Shots:
"The Omega Man" reminded me a lot of two films from the preceding decade, "The Time Machine" and "The Planet of the Apes," except that I liked both of those films more than I liked this one. They all seem intent on investing the action with messages about societal disparities, something that proves problematical in "The Omega Man" because it takes itself far more seriously than its simpleminded plot and characters deserve. The result is not an awful film, just a remarkably dull one.