The Omega Man

Charlton Heston was always either yesterday’s man or tomorrow’s man, but never a man for today.

That at least was the conclusion of the Hollywood producers who, when they tired of casting him in historical epics set thousands of years in the past, catapulted him into the future via a string of sci-fi films.

Chuck may have ached to star in humdrum contemporary dramas, but the poor sod always ended up either struggling with wedgie woes in tight spandex or trying to hide his gnads as he undertook action scenes in a skimpy toga.

By the end, he must have been desperate to just put on a pair of chinos and be done with it. Sadly though, it seems no-one could find a home for his lantern-jawed visage and hulking, rangy frame in a modern day setting.

In The Omega Man (1971), Heston plays the sole-ish human survivor of a terrible biological war that has killed most of the human race. All that remain are marauding gangs of albino-looking mutants who can only emerge at night due to their light-sensitive eyes. (For reference, think of pasty-skinned, nightclubbing Brits in Ibiza during the high summer.)

When Heston discovers other human survivors and realises there might be a cure for the virus, the stage is set for a deadly confrontation against the mutants with the survival of the human race at stake.

Crikey! That would be enough jeopardy to turn most men into quivering jelly but, for Chuck, this really is just another day at the office. After all, this is the kind of man who laughed at the might of the Roman Empire (Ben-Hur), who commanded oceans to part before him as a party trick (The Ten Commandments), and freed the human race from simian slavery barely without breaking a sweat (Planet Of The Apes).

Yup, with Charlton on the job we already know the fate of human civilisation will be safe. So, to keep things interesting, the film – set in an imagined 1977 – weaves in a little contemporary social commentary.

Chuck enjoys the absence of gun control legislation
in post-apocalypse Earth

First, there’s a barbed critique of Sixties hippy idealism, most apparent in the scene where Heston sits in an empty cinema watching the 1970 Woodstock documentary. Clearly viewing the film for the umpteenth time, Chuck mechanically recites the interviewees’ aspirations about peace and brotherly love. We’re left to appreciate the irony between their vision for the world and the one Heston now lives in.

It’s also probably no accident that the mutants organise themselves into a group called ‘the Family’ – a not so subtle nod to beardy psychopath Charles Manson’s murderous cult.

Interestingly, even racial politics find their way into the film. Several clearly black mutants (remember everyone’s made up to look albino) refer to the world’s ills as a product of the ‘great white way’. Coming just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King and at the height of the radical activism of the Black Panthers, these words would have carried a resonance that’s easy to overlook today.

That’s what makes the romance between Heston and Rosalind Cash – one of the other human survivors – so striking. Inter-racial relationships onscreen were a rarity in 1971, and the film seems determined to shock by including a redundant scene where Heston and Cash shop for birth control pills.

Viewed today, the only jarring aspect of the romance is the large age gap and entire lack of chemistry between the two actors. But presumably when you’re the last man and woman alive on earth, you take it where you can find it. And, in fairness, such obvious obstacles didn’t stop Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones from being married for over a decade.

It's not fun being a mutant

Anyway, enough of such sociological ramblings. Let’s concentrate on the far more socially significant aspect of the film: the helicopter explosion.

This occurs in a flashback to events when the virus is first taking hold across America. Heston, an army colonel, is rotoring along to a military base.

As the helicopter is mid-flight, the pilot suddenly succumbs to the virus and slumps down dead in the cockpit. Heston is unable to control the ailing chopper, which plummets from the sky and crashes at speed into the ground with explosive effect.

Artistic merit

Judged against the standards of the day, pretty good.

Director Boris Sagal employs a small cheat and has the helicopter disappear behind a low ridge so we don’t actually see it hit the ground. However, Sagal rapidly cuts to lots of burning wreckage so it‘s not like we‘re completely denied our pleasures. For 1971, this is an above average helicopter crash

Do passengers survive?

Yes, Heston crawls clear of the wreckage. The pilot, if he wasn’t killed by the crash, was presumably finished off by the lurgy bacteria.

Positives

The opening scenes, which feature Heston driving through the desolate, deserted streets of Los Angeles, are as atmospheric an opening to a film as you could hope to see. It’s a powerful, eerie and disorientating entry into the film.

Negatives

It’s entirely possible that film composer Ron Grainger was scoring a made-for-TV romantic drama at the same time as Heston’s movie, and accidentally sent in the wrong tape. In places, the whole enterprise is nearly ruined by his awful soundtrack. Imagine Jaws with the Sound of Music score and you’ll get the idea.

Favourite quote

At one point, Heston says: “Take your stinkin’ paws off me you damn dirty mutant!” Okay, maybe I just wanted him to say it.

Interesting fact

Filmmakers really did struggle to find modern day characters Charlton Heston could play. Between Ben-Hur in 1959 and The Omega Man in 1971, Heston made just two films which had a contemporaneous setting.

Review by: Jafo

White House Down

Action movies set in the White House are like buses: you wait ages for one then two trundle along virtually at the same time.

Following the lamentable Olympus Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saved the free world largely by stabbing people in the head and neck, here comes an altogether breezier take on the kidnapped President trope.

The plots of the two films are spookily identical. Both boast a washed-up hero, traitorous agent, ‘cute’ kid and secret bunkers. Even the fake money demands to mask dastardly nuclear ambitions are carbon copied. But where Olympus was set in rainy darkness and gloried in its wearisome uber-violence (there’s a lovely scene where a pension-aged lady is repeatedly kicked in the stomach), White House Down takes place on a sunny day and is, for all intents, halfway to being a comedy.

Certainly, Channing Tatum is much more likeable than Gerard Butler. (Having said that, Pol Pot was more likeable than Gerard Butler.) Normally, one should never trust a man whose neck is wider than his head, but Tatum lollops around the White House like a big, enthusiastic puppy and, between the cartoony fight scenes, gamely plays along with the film’s fromage-laden tone.

President Jamie Foxx, it turns out, is planning to withdraw troops from the Middle East so baddies storm the White House. Absolutely everyone is either killed or taken hostage – except Tatum and his precocious young daughter, natch.

While Tatum creeps stealthily around the corridors, still getting into scrapes at every turn, his tweenie offspring blunders around the entire building for ages without being spotted. She even records the baddies on her smartphone and posts the clips to news stations.

Tatum: owner of Hollywood's most ripped neck

(Incidentally, it’s a chief failing of action movies that kids are always plucky, resourceful and insanely tech-savvy. One longs to see a kiddie hostage just sobbing in a corner in a puddle of their own urine, which is clearly what would actually happen.)

It quickly transpires that President Foxx has been betrayed by his head of secret service, James Woods. (Presumably, Brian Cox was busy). Tatum manages to spring the First Dude and, with the pair trapped in the building among hordes of terr’ists, all is primed for a classic buddy action movie. Which, against the odds, is broadly what you get.

Of course, this being a Roland Emmerich movie, half of Washington has to be destroyed first. Bye, bye, Capitol Building. So long, White House roof. (There’s also a self-reverential quip about buildings going up ‘like something from Independence Day’, which no-one but the director will have enjoyed.)

There’s a weird mixture of acting chops on display. Jamie Foxx, aware that this won’t be the movie to bag him a second Oscar, has fun with his faux-Obama role. Lance Reddick, a former big hitter from The Wire, puts on his best game-face and frankly brings more gravitas to his lines than they deserve.

Indie darling Maggie Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, barely bothers to hide how bored she is with her role. In Secretary, she became famous for having her bottom spanked. Here, it’s just her face that looks like a slapped arse.

Most weirdly, Jason Clarke – who spent the first 30 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty exuding genuine menace as he water-boarded an Iraqi captive – is here stared down by the 13-year-old moppet. (Many in the auditorium may have been wishing someone at this point had handed him a bucket of water, flannel and small plank of wood.)

James Wood: Brian Cox was unavailable for this film

One thing is certain: White House Down contains the finest collection of cod-military jargon to grace a screen in some time. Rather than merely see something, this is a world where people ‘have a visual’ or ‘have eyes on’ them. No-one wearing a uniform seems capable of getting through five words without mention of ‘wetwork’, ‘black ops’ or ‘payload delivery’. People with straight faces say things like: ‘Eagle is 30 seconds from the vault: we are coming in hot’.

Of course, not everything is good. The moppet daughter, Scrappy Doo in human form, is allowed to squander way too much screen-time. The fight choreography is ropey: numerous bad guys can be spotted patiently awaiting their turn to get shot or punched. Worst of all, while tussling over the nuclear button at the climax, super buff Jamie Foxx is comprehensively banjoed by 66-year-old James Woods, playing a man who’s terminally ill with cancer.

And yet, it works. Most action movies either play it straight or lazily point to their own crapness with a post-modern wink, as if that excuses everything. (Snakes on a Plane, anyone?) It takes genuine skill to make the audience guffaw at the daftness of the whole endeavour and yet still root for the good guys.

Happily, the film’s producers also seem to have put some thought into the exploding helicopter scene. It occurs when the reliably useless military bigwigs, unaware that the baddies are armed with ‘Javelin’ surface-to-air missiles, send in three choppers under the radar. (‘We have Black Hawks!’)

I hope this isn’t spoiling things, but they all get blasted to smithereens. Once hit, the first casualty careers in low over the White House roof and clips off the American flag, which flutters broken and twisted to the ground. (See what they did there? That’s called a ‘metaphor’, fact fans.) As tradition dictates, the second chopper then hovers around politely waiting to be hit – but it too crashes in a winning fashion, splurging into the White House pond to serve up a rare explosion and big splash combo.

That’s good, but it gets better. The third chopper has time to hover directly over the White House roof, and a dozen marines are already shimmying down long ropes when, oops, the final missile hits. Cue splendid shots of a huge Black Hawk swirling helplessly with flailing marines hanging on to the ropes like its some demented fairground ride, before the whole thing crashes into the roof and explodes.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

It appears that some people actually sat down and spent time debating how they could most entertainingly splatter a few helicopters over the White House. Compare with Olympus Has Fallen, where the cinema audience literally couldn’t tell what was happening for most of the chopper scene.

Positives

Probably the most innovative thing about the whole scene is that Emerich has the brass nuts to let it unfold during a bright, sunny day. Most action directors, painfully self-conscious about the limitations of CGI, hide their chopper conflagrations behind cover of rainstorms or murky darkness. Our Roland has the sense to realise that if you only serve up the explosions in a fresh and quirky way, no-one’s going to be arsed about a bit of unlikely-looking pixilation.

Negatives

When the third chopper crashes through the White House roof, its back rotor blade ends up spinning dangerously up against someone’s face and then stopping…just in time. This tired old trick, first deployed in Mission Impossible and repeated in countless films since, should surely now be allowed to see out its final days in the Exploding Helicopter Rest Home for Overused Scenes.

Interesting fact

Despite creaking unsteadily towards his seventh decade, James Woods turned up at the film’s premiere slobbering all over his latest girlfriend: a 20-year-old moppet. That wasn’t creepy at all.

Review by: Chopper