Word: omega
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha and omega of movie manhood--our civilized ancestor, our elevated destiny...
...epic form waned, Heston found new life as the ultimate loner, the only human among mutant species, in Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. "Damn you all to hell!" he cried in Planet, as if he were Moses smashing the commandments, enraged by the weakness of humanity...
...above his head one of the 400 firearms he owned - a handmade Brooks flintlock rifle - and proclaiming that the Democratic Presidential candidate could remove that gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands." It was as if Al Gore was Messala, or the Ape King, or the Omega man's marauders, or a band of Comanches who needed a comeuppance of defiant rhetoric plus massive weaponry. The declaration assured that popular history would now remember Heston not just as a movie axiom but as the Holy Gun Fighter...
...movie (which spawned four sequels, only one of which Heston appeared in) shows that in Vietnam-era science fiction, no less than in other films of the period, happy endings were not mandatory. Even escapist films offered scant chance of escape from the sour national mood. The 1971 The Omega Man (recently remade with Will Smith as I Am Legend) was another dystopian fantasy film. Again Heston was possibly the last human on earth, battling predatory subhuman creatures who might have been the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground or the Watergate plotters. In the jungle that has replaced civilization, reason...
What’s wrong is to see politics, as many do, as the alpha and omega of our lives. While some have called our generation apathetic or disengaged, we on the inside are perhaps more susceptible to political mania than any before us—particularly at Harvard. Here, for every burnt out non-voter, there’s two or three more that will start stumping for their favorite horse at the drop of a hat. These people have become so immersed in the argument against one political camp or ideology that they’ve entirely forgotten...