Thoughts on watching The Omen Trilogy

The big sell of The Omen of course was that it revolved around a delightful little boy – like Rosemary’s Baby, only with the kid rather than the husband in the role of the adorable baddy. Watching all three of the original Omen films together though, this becomes increasingly problematic as the trilogy progresses. Actually it’s a good job that Damien in The Omen II isn’t the Antichrist. (I’d probably worship him.) And I’d much rather have Damien Thorne in charge of the world than Tony Blair or Barack Obama. (At least Thorne goes foxhunting.) But even so, by the time we get to the last reel the Antichrist has degenerated into little more than a glorified Bond villain (albeit superbly played by a young Sam Neill, in his first major film role) and much of both the charm and the shock-factor of the saga's beginning have evaporated.

One big problem with Neill's Damien is that his philosophy makes no sense whatsoever. He thinks Jesus was a bit of a pantywaist, he fornicates with single mums, and he's a bit of an animal in the sack. But there was nothing particularly odd about any of that even by the standards of the 1980s. And, as for genuine Satanism, whatever happened to Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law?

In many ways it’s a pity then that the only "Satanic" elements left in the series by its end are the very same  “supernatural” ones that Richard Donner had started out wanting to keep to a minimum. Donner directed a genuinely gripping drama about a woman going quietly crazy because she thinks her little boy is evil (and, because it's a horror movie, we end up reflecting that she was probably right). Damien, the sequel, at least presents a young many enjoying an idyllic New England adolescence that is only interrupted by religious whackos coming along and spouting off mumbo-jumbo and then and getting killed in hilariously gruesome accidents. The rise of a genuine Antichrist, with plausible politics and realistic means, would at least have given the third film a similar dramatic foothold in the "real world". What we get instead is still enjoyable, but it's also schlocky and silly and rather disappointing.

Nevertheless it’s interesting how sympathetic and attractive a character Damien is. But, and as with Star Warses I-III, there is an eventual moral cop-out and it is disappointing. And that's because having an Antichrist that the audience actually root for would be even better than a genuinely sympathetic Darth Vader. We hear a little bit about Damien's plans to cure world hunger, end world poverty and bring about world peace: what's disappointing is the inference that he's not really interested in such things except to further his political career. To have an Antichrist who genuinely wanted world peace and a brotherhood of man  – and to bring about a Heaven on Earth as opposed to the heavenly afterlife promised by Christ – would, alas, be a little bit too challenging for modern American audiences. So what sort of New World Order does Neill's Damien want to bring about? It's not clear, except that there'll be fewer Catholic priests in it and a bit more torture.

 

Of course that was in the 1980s. Nowadays the Catholic monks trying to kill Damien would be the baddies – and indeed Hollywood morality even then held that no one who killed or tried to kill another person (except accidentally and/or in self-defence - and/or avenging the death of a beautiful child) could be allowed to survive until the last shot. Whether or not little Peter actually survives (and is brought back to life by Jesus and/or because his mother has killed Damien – and she is just about the only person in the whole sorry series who does seem to have survived, though thankfully the writers didn’t think to have her actually impregnated by Damien, Sarah Connor-style*) is not made clear. But Damien Thorne in the 21st Century would no doubt would have mutated Freddie Krueger-style into a cool, funny children's cartoon character. And Peter would probably be a funky teen vampire with ripped pecs. And nowadays the goodies are even allowed to torture people (if the evidence of 24 and Zero Dark Thirty is to be believed). But I digress.

To be fair, that the saga rather goes to pieces in the third act is no great surprise. In modern movie-making that's really is just par for the course with trilogies. (Name a single trilogy – apart from Indiana Jones – that didn't go tits-up by the time it got to number 3.) One of The Final Conflict's various other disappointments is its return to – and in fact its over-reliance – on fictional prophecies. And the bollocks about insula Angelorum (for England) isn’t even anything like a patch on Patrick Troughton’s creepy poem from the first film. The return to England moreover is nice for various reasons, but it’s got shades of Jedi and Tatooine about it. It's simply too safe, and so it disappoints as well. Could we at least have seen Damien actually pulling the strings of global power at the UN – or even the “Holy Roman Empire”, as in the European Community, as mentioned in the first film? Alas, ambition failed as much as imagination.

It does have to be said though, none of this wasn't necessarily the fault of the writer. Andrew Birkin, who did the script, is indeed the same Andrew Birkin who was behind a film of The Pied Piper and who was the author of the most authoritative bio and TV biopic about the man who created Peter Pan, so it's small wonder that Birkin’s version of the Antichrist actually ends up being a cross between J M Barrie and Bruce Wayne. Birkin indeed makes several references in the film to the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, including having a scene set in Kensington Gardens next to the Peter Pan statue, with Damien thanking his new, blond girlfriend for allowing him to play with her son and 'to be a boy again'. The son himself is called Peter and is even played by one of the same child actors who played one of the Llewellyn-Davies boys in Birkin’s TV-series about Barrie.

In fact having the Antichrist grow up to be a bit of nonce would actually have been quite a neat idea. Sam Neill, who in Jurassic Park got to snog Joseph Mazzello, got the part of Damien Thorne largely thanks to the original Humbert Humbert himself – James Mason. And Andrew Birkin of course also did the screenplay for The Name of the Rose, in which he had Christian Slater having sex when he was still a kid (and playing a monk to boot). He also wrote a TV-version of Saki's short story 'Sredni Vashtar', about a little boy so wicked he makes Damien look like the Little Prince.

*I've read that this gimmick was in fact dusted down for the pilot of the TV-series - which, thankfully, never actually materialised.