Cons: money cannot make a lousy script, plot, dialog, etc. good
The Bottom Line: This umpteenth attempt to dramatize the Coming of the Antichrist has something to offend everybody - Jews, Catholics, anyone with more than one brain cell.
What if they had a war between good and evil and nobody came?
THE OMEGA CODE promises but fails to deliver as a thriller dramatizing a scenario drawn (by Hal Lindsay, notorious doomsday crank) from the Book of Revelation*. We have had some other Judgment Day movies, including the Omen series, but this manages to be, against some tough competition, the most disappointing of the bunch. One reason that it's so disappointing is that the producers had the money to make a better movie but chose to make this one instead. In case you're in any doubt, this movie can be offensive (especially to non-Protestants).
Briefly put, Michael York, who once played John the Baptist in a big Bible movie but is more easily remembered from Logan's Run and from his Austin Powers appearances, is Stone Alexander, the chairman of the World Union (similar to the dictator he portrayed on the Seaquest TV series), who is really the Antichrist ... or maybe the False Prophet ... or maybe the Great Beast, anyway some villain out of Revelation. He has a henchman named Dominick, who - to be decidedly unsubtle - used to be a Roman Catholic priest but is now a psychopathic thug, played by Michael Ironside who has pretty much built a career out of such characters.
Dr. Gillen Lane (Casper Van Dien, from Starship Troopers) is a sort of New Age motivational guru who takes the Bible Codes scam seriously, which purportedly hide predictions in the Hebrew text of the Bible. Lane comes to the attention of Alexander, who uses him to get instructions via the Bible Codes, and using that guidance Alexander amasses such power that he rises to become a sort of global dictator. (In this movie it's called "the Torah Code" - perhaps hoping that the mostly WASP audience wouldn't realize that means the first five books of the Old Testament, and I - who wrote one of the scientific debunkings of the Bible Codes silliness - do not appreciate the implication that the Hebrew Bible conveys secret messages that assist Satan). Somehow, although there are only 5845 verses in the whole Torah, small enough for a computer to analyze a thousand times in 24 hours, Lane & Alexander cannot seem to need help in finding a particular verse that their computer needs to complete his Satanic instructions. Lane crosses paths with TV personality (on Alexander's payroll) Cassandra Barris, who is played by Catherine Oxenburg (whom, you may remember, was dumped from her role as Joan Collins's daughter on Dynasty and replaced - without a murmur from the public - by a girl recruited from a grocery store; by the way, Oxenburg is married to Van Dien, which raises the temptation for some tasteless jokes).
In a plot that bounces from Los Angeles, to the capitals of Europe, to Jerusalem, we see all manner of deviousness and intrigue. Unfortunately, very little of it is believable. Alexander manages to ingratiate himself with both Jews and Moslems by building a new Solomon's Temple and by rebuilding the Al-Aska Mosque (which he arranged to have dynamited) together on the Temple Mount - and then uses the Temple Mount to assemble his world government; but the producers were too sensible to include more than a couple of Jews or Arabs as either gullible or evil characters, they were not too finicky to make a Greek Orthodox priest and a Roman Catholic monk as villains.
This movie is bad on so many levels. Michael York is determined to prove that his career is on a downward slide (astonishingly, York is very enthusiastic about this opus and even wrote a book about the making of its sequel). Michael Ironside is so confident that his character is a continuation of the villains he played in The Next Karate Kid, Total Recall, etc., that he hardly tries. Catherine Oxenburg seems to want to prove that the producers of Dynasty made the right decision. And Casper Van Dien seems to think that his New Age guru is a kind of Indian - not the kind from New Delhi and the Taj Mahal, nor even the kind from the medicine lodge and the ghost dance, but the kind that stands in front of a cigar store.
The dialog would make a soap opera fan cringe, the plot twists are unworthy of a comic book, and the special effects are no better than that TV movie about Merlin. It seems like the most effort at a special effect is the computerization of the Bible code business with totally unnecessary frills that suggest that the audience is assumed to know nothing at all about (a) the Bible and (b) computers. Anyone who has read the last book of the Bible (or who stayed awake in Sunday School) can predict the plot, but the storyline seems to require that nobody - in the story or in the audience - ever did.
Rather than watch this "thriller", rent the video of the worst of the James Bond movies, even though you have already seen it.
------- PS: About two years after making OMEGA CODE, the same crew got together and made a purported prequel (actually a rewrite) titled MEGIDDO, in which virtually the only thing carried over is Michael York and his Stone Alexander character, but with the entire story told differently.* Different is not synonymous with better. I thought OMEGA CODE was lousy but MEGIDDO (which I have also reviewed on Epinions) is worse.
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*PS to the PS: I found out why MEGIDDO does not repeat any portion of the storyline of OMEGA CODE but stinks in its own unique way: In July 2000, when MEGIDDO was being planned (with the working title OMEGA CODE 2), the movie's producers were hit with a $40 Million lawsuit by Sylvia Fleener, author of "The Omega Syndrome", a novel published in 1996 (two years before they filmed OMEGA CODE). Not only are there obvious similarities between the novel and the movie, but there was eyewitness testimony that the movie people made considerable use of Fleener's novel. (This pretty much blows away Hal Lindsey's pretentions to having worked up the screenplay). The lawsuit was finally settled, on terms satisfactory to Fleener, in December 2001, nearly three months after MEGIDDO hit the theatres.
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