How do I put this nicely? THE OMEN was good, and deeply heretical. The sequels were bad, and also deeply heretical. THE FIRST OMEN manages to be even more deeply heretical, and yet somehow not notice it:
Say what you like of ROSEMARY’S BABY – which is what immediately popped into my mind when I saw this trailer – but at least the book* had its Satanists take the Catholic Church more seriously than this flick is going to. And this isn’t just me being pissy because I’m a (bad) Catholic myself. If the trailer’s hints are accurate, the movie’s going to take the position that the Antichrist is the work of the Church herself. Put another way: do you unironically like Jack Chick tracts? Then do I have a movie for you.
That’s not what bugs me, though. No, what bugs me is that I will be pleasantly shocked if it turs out the writers and directors had deliberately decided to explore the more lurid aspects of paranoid anti-Catholic Christian eschatology. That at least would be something ambitious – but I’m morally certain that it didn’t play out that way. Dollars to donuts, this foray into the Church-as-Whore-of-Babylon was completely accidental, and thus going to be dull as dishwater.
Screwtape was right. You just don’t get the sinners we used to get, these days.
Moe Lane
*I decline to discuss the movie while the director still lives, and walks the earth.
#commissionearned
I couldn’t get over how lazy it was.
Redoing all the big moments of the original? That’s just lame. It’s less homage, and more unintentional parody.
Not gonna lie…. Now I want to see what Jack Chick would have done with Bergolio, the RC embracing the WTO, and that paganistic environmentalist conference they had a couple years back.
Yeah. At least Chick would have MEANT it. ‘Lazy’ is a good word for what this flick is going to be.