OMEN III: THE FINAL CONFLICT (1981) Review
God, I love Sam Neill. Does anyone else love Sam Neill? Like… seriously, the dude is a legend, and he’s also low-key one of the most iconic and important ‘faces’ of horror in his generation. It’s funny how little we talk about it, really, but Sam Neil is almost like a kind of prototype Ethan Hawke or Patrick Wilson; an actor who has audience recognition but isn’t quite A-list, but who also has a weird and wonderful tendency to gravitate toward horror despite never really earning the status of your Christopher Lees, Peter Cushings, or Vincent Prices. When you stop to think about it, Neill’s filmography is stuffed filled with awesome (and often fairly schlocky) genre flicks — there’s the properly tense and claustrophobic Dead Calm, the discomforting and weird as all hell Possession (watch this, please, if you haven’t. Just so you can tell me what the fuck you think is going on), Snow White: A Tale of Terror, which I haven’t seen but am now going to seek out, the somewhat underappreciated vampire-flick Daybreakers, and, of course, the three big hitters; Carpenter’s excellent Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness, Paul W. S. Anderson’s ‘The Shining in space’ haunted house movie Event Horizon, and Speilberg’s epic and damned near perfect masterpiece, Jurassic Park (and yes! Jurassic Park is a horror movie, I don’t care how much you think it doesn’t ‘feel’ like one — whatever the fuck that means — it’s scary, gory, and tense as shit, and 100% deserves its place in the genre). And amongst all of these brilliant, weird, and (at least in some cases) actually scary properties, the actor also managed to find the time to portray the antichrist himself!
Neill’s presence in Omen III: The Final Conflict, made this particular threequel a kind of excitingly anticipated endpoint to my trilogy watch-through. I’d never seen it before; much like my experiences with Damien: Omen II, I had avoided the films out of a weird sort of distrust of the franchise brought forth by the utterly shite 2006 remake of the classic original. I love the original The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, and have done so for a very, very long time, so I guess I just didn’t want anything ‘tainting’ it in my head as that remake did. Firstly, that’s a stupid-ass reason to avoid a movie (a sequel or remake literally can’t taint a different movie unless you let it), and secondly, as it turned out when I finally did get around to watching Damien: Omen II, I was being an idiot. Damien: Omen II is awesome, and I’m disappointed with myself for having not enjoyed it for years! All of this meant that by the time I actually came to sitting down and watching Omen III: The Final Conflict, I’d allowed myself to get hyped up! Could it be that The Omen franchise, at least this original trilogy, was actually going to turn out to be… good!? The first two suggested this was likely to be the case, and Neill’s involvement only furthered that impression.
Turns out it's shit, though. An utterly bollocks whimper of an ending to a trilogy that started off so goddamned strong. How disappointing.
Yep, it would seem the real ‘omen’ here is the one that says threequels almost always let the side down. With the exception of The Lord of the Rings (which I don’t count, to be honest, because it’s one movie split into three, not three separate films), the new Planet of the Apes movies (underappreciated and absolutely awesome) and Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy (just absolutely beautiful), I’m not sure I can even think of a three-movie series that manages to stick the landing of the third entry after two successful outings. Toy Story isn’t even technically a fucking trilogy anymore, Indiana Jones (again, not even a trilogy now… ugh) wavers in the middle, the original Star Wars trilogy fucks it on the third, Back to the Future remains enjoyable but undeniably lessens in quality with each subsequent film, and The Matrix… well, let’s just not talk about The Matrix… (and I’ve just remembered there’s a fourth one of them now too, anyway!) Perhaps the closest to a genuinely decent narrative trilogy (thematic trilogies don’t count, I don’t think) that I can come up with without resorting to google is Raimi’s Evil Dead series, but even then the second movie remakes the first and third remakes the second, and all three are so hilariously tonally inconsistent that to class them as one continuous story is… well, sorta silly. I guess there’s Sergio Leone’s so-called ‘Dollars Trilogy’ — which consists of A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — but it’s never been entirely clear whether Eastwood actually is supposed to be the same character or not. But perhaps the closest parallel to The Omen trilogy is Coppola’s Godfather Saga; a solid opening movie, and sequel that improves on and expands on the original but arguably remains consistent in quality, and then… it just shits the bed.
The biggest problem I have with Omen III: The Final Conflict is that, to put it bluntly, it’s really fucking boring. Nothing happens and the stakes are depressingly low. Considering the potential of the plot — which sees a now adult Damien Thorn, having fully embraced his lineage as the son of Satan, enter the world of politics and set about preventing the second coming of Christ — you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Final Conflict might actually feature some kind of… well, final conflict. I guess it does, but not in the way you would expect. Gone are the Final Destination-esque kill sequences (which is like… the entire fucking point of the franchise. What the hell is the reasoning behind this decision?), and in their place we get serious men talking in shadowy rooms about serious things, while Sam Neill does his best shifty-eyed villain impression.
I’d be inclined to call the shift to a more serious and less schlocky tone admirable if it actually worked, in one sense you could argue that the series kinda perfectly captures the attitudes and approaches of its titular character in different stages of his life; child Damien in the original is unknowable and mysterious, yet to be fully formed, prone to slight tantrums but also long periods of calm, which the film reflects nicely, while teenaged Damien is a hormonal, angry, and confused little prick who’s violent outbursts and frustrating descent into puberty the second movie matches in manic, over-the-top death sequences and grisly, gory murders. The third, then, takes a more ‘adult’ approach for the now adult Damien, who has spent seven years running a business and now understands that it is better to manipulate and control through his words and the mechanisms of the society around him rather than outright violence. In a sense, it’s a smart move, but the film fails to really build any kind of intrigue, suspense, or tension through this, and ultimately we wind up more Parliament TV than we do Game of Thrones.
Maybe this was inevitable, after all, part of what made the first film work was the ambiguity of what happened next, and its direct sequel managed to somewhat maintain that ambiguity by keeping Damien in his childhood years. This film promises an actual ending, which it then fails to deliver because… well, of course it does. Audiences have been wondering what the hell that final conflict would look like ever since little Damien Thorn turned to face the camera in 1976. It was literally never going to live up to the horrors of our collective imaginations. But that doesn’t necessarily excuse the movie for its failures. Despite its woefully tiny scale and lack of grandiose threat, the disappointment is huge. After the one-two punch of The Omen and Damien: Omen II, this just feels underwhelming and sad. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I’d quite like to see this one tackled again with some kind of remake. Look what I’ve been reduced to! After the utter clusterfuck that is The Omen 2006, I’m sitting here actually wishing that someone who reboot The Final Conflict. I feel like I’m playing with fire, but here we are. I mean… that premise alone is filled with awesome potential, let’s see if someone else can make it work and give the series a proper send-off, yeah? 2/5.
