The First Omen

(2024) ***1/2

When I first saw the title of this most recent installment in The Omen anthology, I thought about Julie's review from back in 2008 of the sequel to It's Alive in which she says, "I started calling the baby puppets, the "It's Alives,"as in, "he better watch out! There's an It's Alive in the pool", and I wondered whether there were people out there calling Damien himself, "The Omen", like "that woman better watch out! She might get impregnated by Satan's semen and give birth to a The Omen". That just me? Nobody? Okay, whatever.

I went into this skeptical, just waiting for some sign that this was going to turn out to be mediocre, and though my skepticism spiked right around the time the filmmakers swiped the "it's all for you!" bit from the original film (modifying it only by adding gasoline and fire to the equation), by the time the movie was half over, I realized I didn't hate it at all. In fact, there's a key philosophical difference between this one and all its predecessors that aligns more with my own morality that kind of makes me feel like if I'd seen this first, it might have been my favorite. I have more to say on this, but it's hard to talk about without spoiling the plot, so I'll give you a chance to tap out now. I'll just say that the only reason I don't feel like giving it 4 stars is that the original is one of the films listed as an example of a 3.5 star film in Thonscore and I don't want to rate this higher cause I feel like I already used up my Golden Buzzer in my review of Pearl. This is rather good though. It's shot and edited beautifully; Nell Tiger Free shines in the lead role and also has the name Nell Tiger Free which I'd award 5 stars in the yet to be published namethon.blogspot.com; and all the things that are supposed to be scary land where they're aimed. If I were giving it a straight thumbs up or down, it's thumbs up for sure. 

I guess in the '70s people just took it on faith (literally) that, in a movie about the Church confronting Satan that all of the Church people were worthy of our trust, and that their foes were Evil with a capital E and were here to do nothing more than kill only good people, and take over the world and that would be...bad, somehow? Certainly nothing like the ends and means of the unimpeachable Catholic Church, here to protect us from all that Evil lurking about. And then time passed and stories made their way into public knowledge of Catholic priests using their power to unsavory advantage, and their clout to cover it up.

Similarly The Omen is just about a shitty little kid who is destined to become Evil incarnate and will be protected in the meantime by mean-looking people and some large dogs. We never stop to think that anyone responsible for bringing Damian to the Thorn household would be any different. The First Omen decides to be more nuanced, presenting two conflicting factions in the Church itself, one more Humanist and one purely Liturgical, and shows preoccupation with fulfilling the word of the Bible can sometimes, even at best, lead to self-defeating and cruel practices, and at worst do the Devil's work for him.

All told, The First Omen is a reinvigorating addition to the series that does everything you'd hope a sequel will do while falling short in none of the ways sequels often do. Solid piece of work; worth a look.