Review: The Omen

Friends have asked me why Hollywood would remake The Omen, a film remembered fleetingly, if at all, for a few images of terror, Gregory Peck, and the pulsing, moody Carmina Burana-like score, an Oscar-winner for composer Jerry Goldsmith. Their concern is a slightly embarrassed mix of indignation and curiosity: Their attitude is that if movies they remember fondly don't need to be remade, what justifies a return to The Omen, which wasn't very good the first time?

But remakes often happen to correct significant errors with original films, namely that they didn't make money for the right people. Why should Dr. Seuss's estate alone profit from How the Grinch Stole Christmas? Can't Ron Howard get some of that sweet Who-ville coin? And so, we get remakes -- even remakes of films as marginal as The Omen.

But then again, if pop culture is often a indicator of how people are actually feeling -- if there's a link between the stories on the front page of the New York Times and the books at the top of the Best-seller lists in the Book Review section -- then we can see that supernatural claptrap with one foot in the Dark Ages and the other somewhere around the End Times has been selling pretty good recently: The Da Vinci Code, the Left Behind book series. So at the beginning of John Moore's version of The Omen, footage from 9/11, Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami provokes plenty of long, serious looks from The Vatican's top men, who've met to decipher symbols from the Book of Revelation with a series of PowerPoint slides...
Putting aside real moral questions about the use of a 9/11 clip in The Omen, the only thought I had when Moore used the footage in the first five minutes was blasé befuddlement: Is that all you got? Turns out it is. Moore's remake of The Omen is a dud. It wrings out the occasional twitch, usually with Moore's penchant for millisecond jump-cuts, and even elicits the occasional nervous squirm, usually with a pretty ace decapitation. But as it scratches at pulp, it's also too bloodless. It's full of good – at least interesting -- actors who are given nothing to do. It's about the Son of Satan, who, as it turns out, doesn't have more than 10 lines of dialogue.

But really, The Omen is about what happens as Robert Thorne, a highly-placed U.S. diplomat (played with earnest resolve by Liev Schreiber), and his wife, Katharine (played ... by Julia Stiles), are expecting their first child. Arriving at the hospital, Schreiber is told that his child is stillborn. His wife doesn't know. But another baby's mother just died in childbirth. ... This ploy, known in the trade as the ol' switcheroo, is part of a plan to have the Thornes unwittingly raise Damien, the only begotten son of (as they say on heavy metal records) Satan, Satan, Sa-tan.

One look at Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, the kid who plays Damien for the bulk of the film, should have told the Thornes something was up – the kid doesn't talk, glowers from under a jet-black bowl cut with disturbing pale blue eyes and has the scowl of a 16-year-old convert to vegetarianism. And that's part of the problem: Moore does everything but put a "HELLO: My Name Is" sticker on the kid with "THE SON OF SATAN" scrawled in lamb's blood on the white part below. And that's all there is to the part -- there's no dialogue, no sense of who this kid is as a kid (or who this kid is as a monster, for that matter). He sulks and skulks and has the occasional quiet, family homicidal moment with mom.

Dad's busy with work -- he becomes ambassador to England after a, uh, sudden vacancy -- but still finds time to meet and bond with David Thewlis' Jennings, a cynical long-lens photojournalist and Pete Postlethwaite's Father Brennan, a scary, bald priest. Turns out Thewlis has been developing photos of people around Damien that include visual hints of their eventual demise -- a cloudy noose, a falling sharp shard of light -- in the background. Schreiber and Thewlis team up to travel the globe looking for the truth behind Damien's past, while Stiles gets to handle the kid and his creepy nanny, Mrs. Blaylock, played by Mia Farrow in high "Scary Poppins" style as a fussy, bloodless fanatic.

So, Schreiber and Thewlis globetrot and dodge dogs while Stiles faces peril at home, which is another problem with The Omen: Satan doesn't seem to have a lot in his arsenal. Sure, he can kill people through freak accidents -- but only, it seems, after they've passed on exposition dialogue to Schreiber. Milton's Satan has stratagems, powers and minions at his call; The Omen's Satan has a few mutts, Mia Farrow and a copy of Photoshop with which to inflict his suffering. By the standards of 2006 summer trash movie-going villainy -- where Ian McKellen can re-route bridges and Kevin Spacey can build new continents -- Satan's not exactly bringing a lot of heat.

The casting of Schrieber and Stiles seemed promising -- How bad could The Omen be, film buffs ask, if these two are in it? – but they're trapped in Moore's lack of vision. And bear in mind that Dan McDermott's script was found to be so close to David Seltzer's original 1976 script that the Writer's Guild of America gave Seltzer complete credit for the remake.

I barely recall the original The Omen outside of a few images -- Peck, a decapitation, ritual knives being raised high, the glowering kid. Much like the contrast between The Poseidon Adventure and Poseidon, it's a hell of a lot easier for me to remember flashes of newness and excitement in my hazy memories of the '70s original than it is recalling anything about the 2006 remake I saw less than a week ago.

But there's an audience for this remake, namely curious horror buffs, people who weren't alive for the original and a not-insubstantial demographic of viewers who would like to see the Biblical Apocalypse unfold on the big screen in the same way others would pay to see a movie version of their favorite work of fiction. Hollywood greed, artistic sloth, pride in marketing (this Omen has a MySpace page – mmm, cyber-Satan!): it's too bad viewers get more of the seven deadly sins in the making of The Omen than they do in the actual film.