I love The Omega Man. Charlton Heston grimacing his way through a postapocalyptic ’70s? you betcha. So a remake with Will Smith? Ok, maybe that’ll work. I like Will Smith.
It starts off pretty strong. They’ve teamed Will up with a German Shepherd dog, given him a bit of a back story. He’s a more paternal figure, having had a wife and child. He even treats his dog like a kid, talking gently to her in the bath. This fella has a little more at stake, at least at the beginning, and a lot less misanthropy. This Robert Neville keeps thinking about his family while he works on his anti-zombie serum. Aww. Nice.
But here’s where my issue is: the virus that has destroyed civilization turns its victims into bloodthirsty maniacs, burning with rage like the zombies of 28 Days Later. In the Omega Man, what it did was turn them into albino cultists who want to destroy civilization on purpose, to un-do all the evil that had led to the creation of the disease in the first place. For Will Smith, it’s easy to shoot his way out of trouble. They’re unreasonable. For Heston, it was an ideological thing.
But it’s always easier to kill the enemy when they are monsters. They can’t be reckoned with, because they have nothing to say. If, on the other hand, your enemy has some kind of motivation (and some justification, to be fair), then your “hero” becomes a little more implicated in what he’s gotten into. So, by de-humanizing the diseased, the movie lets Neville off the hook. He doesn’t have to face the moral implications of killing a fellow human being who has some right to live, nor can he even negotiate with these terrorists… oops, I mean, zombies.
Makes you think, don’t it?