I am Omega

I Am Omega is a 2007 straight to DVD release by the now infamous film producers The Asylum. Released one month before it's blockbuster counterpart, I Am Omega chronicles the adventures of a man named Renchard who believes he is the last man on Earth after a zombie infection wipes out civilization (I found out after checking the IMDB credits that his name is in fact "Renchard" and not "Richard," and I was going to comment about the strange nasal inflections heard from people in the film). As you can imagine, he soon finds out that he is not alone in this world, and he has to leave his fortress of solitude to rescue Brianna, a woman trapped in the nearby city. Like most post-apocalyptic films, this film has a problem straddling the fence between realism and convenience. If the character has an electric-powered home and drives around in a gas-powered vehicle, we have to have an explanation for how this is possible. There is a willingness by the audience to overlook some minute details, but when Renchard receives an "incoming video transmission" on his Macbook... come on. You're saying the Internet still works after a zombie apocalypse? Awesome.

Glaring technical errors, like the zombie infection, plague this entire film. I realize it's challenging to shoot a scene in a city where civilization has been eradicated, but could you at least do a re-shoot if a pickup truck drives into the scene at the last moment? The icing on the cake was a horrible nuit américaine scene towards the end which looked like someone had spent five minutes in Adobe After Effects applying a dark haze around the cast in the center of the frame. This was compounded by cuts to the cast standing in an area where it actually was night, seemingly seconds later.

As expected, the acting was mediocre and the dialogue was annoying. One character would not stop using the word "compadre" at the end of every sentence. The relationship between the leading man and leading lady was as scorching hot as the surface of Pluto. The villain's motives for his actions were at best mind-numbingly stupid, plus he makes the bone-headed (yet strangely oft-repeated in cinema) mistake of kidnapping someone he repeatedly states he just wants to kill. Why didn't you just kill them when you were standing right next to them with a loaded weapon in your hands? Am I the only one who picks up on this?