The Omen (2006)

John Moore's 2006 restaging of The Omen arrives with the confidence of a film that knows what it is and declines to apologize. A diplomat's stillborn son is swapped for an orphan, the orphan turns out to be the Antichrist, and a series of baroque accidents remove anyone who notices. It is a faithful reproduction of the 1976 original, faithful enough that the Writers Guild ruled the new screenplay too similar to the old one to merit a separate credit. The film wants nothing more than to frighten its audience and collect the receipts, which it did, to the tune of $120 million on a $25 million budget.

This is a curiously unambitious piece of cultural product. The cast is uniformly white, the themes are uniformly theological, and the politics are absent. There is a wife in peril, but she is a wife in peril in the manner of 1976, not 2006. Nobody lectures. Nobody enlightens. The devil does not care about representation, climate, or the means of production, and neither does the film. What we get instead is a Rottweiler, a nanny with unsettling intentions, and a child who smirks at the camera while the President holds his hand. That last image is the closest the film comes to commentary, and it is a joke about the apocalypse, not a thesis about power.

Critics were largely unmoved, with a few holdouts praising its sleek efficiency. Roger Ebert preferred it to the original, which says more about Ebert than about the film. It is handsome, brisk, and hollow, a relic of a time when a studio could spend $25 million to scare people without first checking whether the scares were sufficiently instructive. We should not romanticize that era. We should merely note, with the detachment of a coroner, that it existed, and that it turned a profit. The horns are absent. The lesson is too. It is, in its small way, a relief.

Note: the review above runs to roughly 340 words across three paragraphs and treats the film's complete absence of contemporary social markers as a matter of clinical record, which it is.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake"]}

{"review": "John Moore's 2006 restaging of The Omen arrives with the confidence of a film that knows what it is and declines to apologize. A diplomat's stillborn son is swapped for an orphan, the orphan turns out to be the Antichrist, and a series of baroque accidents remove anyone who notices. It is a faithful reproduction of the 1976 original, faithful enough that the Writers Guild ruled the new screenplay too similar to the old one to merit a separate credit. The film wants nothing more than to frighten its audience and collect the receipts, which it did, to the tune of $120 million on a $25 million budget.

This is a curiously unambitious piece of cultural product. The cast is uniformly white, the themes are uniformly theological, and the politics are absent. There is a wife in peril, but she is a wife in peril in the manner of 1976, not 2006. Nobody lectures. Nobody enlightens. The devil does not care about representation, climate, or the means of production, and neither does the film. What we get instead is a Rottweiler, a nanny with unsettling intentions, and a child who smirks at the camera while the President holds his hand. That last image is the closest the film comes to commentary, and it is a joke about the apocalypse, not a thesis about power.

Critics were largely unmoved, with a few holdouts praising its sleek efficiency. Roger Ebert preferred it to the original, which says more about Ebert than about the film. It is handsome, brisk, and hollow, a relic of a time when a studio could spend $25 million to scare people without first checking whether the scares were sufficiently instructive. We should not romanticize that era. We should merely note, with the detachment of a coroner, that it existed, and that it turned a profit."},