Remakes, remakes, remakes. I suppose we are going to have to get use to them because they look set to stay around for a very long time. I can understand (well just about anyway) the justification of remaking an old black and white movie, or a foreign language movie into English. I can also see that there can be some good in remaking something like The Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven, or Yojimbo into A Fistfull of Dollars or Infernal Affairs into The Departed. But why remake The Omen? To what purpose does it serve? There is no way you can argue to me that the original isn't accesible to audiences today. What sort of nonsense is that? If you think the story needs to be showed in front of a "new generation of fans" then why not release the damn thing in theatres again? The chances are I would see the damn thing. Don't even mention to people that it's a re-release, just show a good trailer and it would get the 16-24 demographic in that have never seen it (some probably never even heard of it). But anyway.... A good remake for me, is very hard to come by. Dawn of the Dead, The Fly and The Thing are the only remakes I can think of that I can honestly say were worthy of the original movie's name. The main reason to their success is that they took the original film's story and re-told it in a different fashion and actually added some creative thought into it. John Moore's remake of The Omen does not have one original idea placed into it's 110 minute running time. This is a lazy, hack-job remake if I have ever seen one. This is as close to a Gus Van Sant shot by shot remake I think I have seen. Every scene that was so memorable from the classic Richard Donner original is present and virtually unaltered and when they are changed in some way it's normally not for the better. I found myself waiting and waiting for all these big moments, everything in between was delaying and seemed like "filler". The film opens with a scene in the Vatican, where we are given a lecture by a priest telling us that disasters such as 9/11 and the various floods and Tsunami's around the world were all foretold in the bible. We are given a quick montage of all these disasters and straight away I was pissed at this movie. Why are images of the WTC burning needed in this Omen remake? It didn't scare me, it didn't hook me into the film and all it succeeded in doing was completely take me out of the moment of watching the film. Very tasteless and does more damage than good. The biggest and glaring problem with this remake of The Omen, is the kid they cast as Damien. In the original, you are always left wondering if this boy really is the son of the devil as his facial expressions never seem to give anything away, but in this remake your sure of it. He acts like the kid who didn't get the candy. The kid should have been playing the character with innocence rather than trying to hard to be creepy, so when the moments of "evil" come we are shocked by it. The death scenes commit the sin of "gore" and in an attempt to really shock the audience they turn them into Final Destination like kills. They are more laughable than scary. The deaths in the original Omen were so well handled because they came out of nowhere and were more terrifying than over the top. Onto the performances and I was really disappointed by Liev Schrieber in this movie. He walks around with this depressed and concentrated look on his face as if he is trying to figure out "how the hell did I get cast in this movie". Try smiling Liev, let us warm to your character at least. And Julia Stiles... well she has about as much charisma as me stood in line to see a Clive Owen movie marathon. And Red, Red, Red. Ok, I get it. Red means bad! The colour scheme is ridiculously over the top and any sign of it means that it's "an evil scene". Great subtly there. Seriously, there is a million things wrong with this movie but my review is already way longer than I wanted. AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.
rating: 2
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This remake is tasteless, uninteresting and feels like the work of a young kid who was struggling on his exam test, copying off the bright kid next to him but not understanding a word of it in his translation.