This remake of The Omen is very interesting. It’s quite a while since I first saw the original Omen from 1976 which came, I guess, as something as a riposte to 1974’s The Exorcist.
This version has been described as a re-imagining, but I’d say that it’s more of a shot-for-shot remake, with David Seltzer being credited as the writer of both films. There are twenty-first sensibilities to this film, but this is some kind of post-ironic take on the original. The look, style and feel are very close to those of the earlier version. There are certainly scary sequences, but there isn’t as much blood and gore as we tend to get nowadays. This isn’t a Final Destination type of film.
It’s been a while since I saw that version, but the famous sequences are still there intact with Liev Schreiber and Julia Styles taking the Greogory Peck and Lee Remmick roles of the American ambassador to Britain and his wife. Mia Farrow takes on the disturbing Mrs Baylock role – little Damian’s nanny.
David Thewlis plays the reporter’s role that David Warner had in the original, while Patrick Troughton’s Fr Brennan in the original is now Pete Postlethwaite.
The two films do differ from each other, but not enough to be considered a long way apart. The pacing is very deliberate, and the performances are pretty good. This film’s been remade with serious intent, and even some of the original Jerry Goldsmith score has found its way in.
The one thing I did find very noticeable was that the whole thing was made in the Czech Republic. The scenes in London were patently in no such place, with CGI London Eyes grafted into a couple of scenes. I don’t proclaim to know every square foot of London, but the scene where Thorn meets Brennan under a bridge in the rain, was certainly not in the capital, and was quite possibly actually in a studio. But the real tell-tale signs were the police vehicles which simply weren’t accurate, and most of all, the locale of the car chase that occurs towards the end of the film. You’ve got to be suspicious of any streets with tram-tracks, unless they’re in Croydon or Manchester, and when a car headlight briefly lit up a Czech bank sign (complete with Czech signage), you know that the production was shot on a budget. Having said all that, it was equally the case that London wasn’t London in last week’s Dr Who.
A completely separate aside now. For years, I’ve always linked films to the IMDB, a database that I first remember compiling in UNIX from a newsgroup download back in 1989, before the advent of the web. But I’ve got to be honest – I really hate the pop-unders that it serves up all the time. Get rid of this nonsense now.