Cheesy Omen Remake Pulls In The Kids, Just Like The First One Did
Written: Jun 07 '06 (Updated Jun 09 '06)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: A decently made carbon copy film.
Cons: Unoriginality- except the fun of seeing Rosemary take care of This baby!
The Bottom Line: If you want to see how a good remake is remade, retrace your steps to a theater and rewatch this story.
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| Ed.Williamson's Full Review: The Omen |
The 2006 Omen did just what the studio wanted: it sucked in the youth audience like a black hole swallowing a star system, it scared everyone with standard movie parlor tricks, and made a lot of money so that the studio can stay afloat for a while.
Oscar material this ain't, and everything about it is a little cheesy. Still, it was a much better movie than I had expected because the writers and director stayed sober and on task and delivered. Of course, this kind of film-making is relatively easy as long as you don't get too cute. With a remake, you already have it laid out for you, and 2006's Omen is essentially a carbon copy of the first one, plot-scene-for-plot-scene,gruesome-death-for-gruesome-death, and heart-rending-scream-for-heart-rending-scream. I can just hear the director saying, "Hey, if it ain't broke don't fix it!" when it came to the script, and no, they didn't change much except the faces of the actors, who do a decent job here, by the way. And as a piece of fiction put to film, the makers do a credible job of delivering. Nothing earth-shaking here, but at least its actors are not as wooden as in the wobbly Da Vinci Code, on whose coat-tails as a churchy movie it probably was strategized to ride and capitalize.
The plot more or less rides on a cut-and-paste re-write of (uncontextual) Biblical passages arranged to fit the storyteller's fantasy. This, by the way, is done year-by-year by would be "actual" religious types, mainly to scream out "We Are In The Last Days of Mankind!" chiefly to make a lot of money selling their "religion" or to make a name for themselves, as did far-right fundamentalist Christian Hal Lindsey a few decades back with his book "The Late, Great Planet Earth", which predicted that Armageddon was just a short time to come. That was 40 years ago. Ho-hum. Earth still spinning, Hal. By the way, did he really invest his book's profits in long-term California real estate ventures? Further hypocrisy then.
Anyway, I digress. The plot of this movie is about the fulfillment of a prophecy of the AntiChrist. There are signs and wonders in world news, which herald the birth of the AC, and it (he) is born to an American ambassodorial bureaucrat and his wife. As the kid grows up, in spite of the warnings of various religious types, this boy, named "Damien" (Gee...could that mean..."Demon"? Wow!) whacks all his close friends and family mermbers and a few religious types so that he can eventually ascend to power to "Anti" the Christ. Simple enough.
Why make a remake of The Omen anyway? To antagonize the horror buffs who really liked the first one? Maybe. But are there other reasons? Well, to grab on to the Da Vinci hype a bit perhaps, but maybe more to the point, probably to exploit the current climate of fear.
In the last 5 years there have been many traumatic events in world news that have impacted the psyches of teens and twenty-somethings who were born after the first Omen movies. The 911 attack, the Indonesian tsunami, killer hurricanes, Tom Cruise bouncing on a sofa, and global warming have all made our young peoples' (and our) adrenaline indexes go up. And so a movie ascribing it all to "The Devil" is a convenient fictional way to "explain" the bad stuff in the world ---through a movie.
The Devil did it. And the kids are eating it up, just like an earlier generation ate up the earlier "Omen" flicks, which exploited the fears of that generation's news headlines. Fear in the hands of Hollywood is a moneymaking commodity. An archetypal scapegoat. A generation that wants a common villain. Films about religion in the air. It was a safe gamble. Money is there to be made. Only blaming the devil for everything bad is just as nutty an idea as blaming God for everything bad; it ignores free will and takes the responsibility for human stupidity away and makes us all "Victims" (Oh, my!). But what could be nicer? Now we can go on making stupid choices but we have none of the blame: the devil made me do it. He's to blame. Yeah.
Of course the take on orthodox Christian theology in this movie is as much a load of clap-trap as was that of The Da Vinci Code. But its historical corruptions support its fictional story fairly well and so it makes for exciting special effects. Just don't bet your soul on the kind of theology you see in a film like this. If it's knowing the Divine you seek, there are better places to find it than in a movie house where the film's object is to have you drive your fingernails into your date's forearm while making moaning sounds while you watch someone lose their head (literally.)
The laffer for me---and the highpoint of the film---was seeing Mia Farrow, of Rosemary's Baby fame---turn up as an evil Nanny. Now if only they could have worked Woody Allen into the script too...
Because it is reasonably well done, I'll give it an average rating, three stars. It's not great, but it is not a complete clusterbust like a lot of films of the "horror" genre these days. Just don't believe anything you see is real.
Three Stars/***
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot
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Ed.Williamson
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
Reviews written: 607
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Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
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