The Omen (2006)

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Movie
German title The Omen
Original title The omen
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2006
length 110 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director John Moore
script David Seltzer
production John Moore
music Marco Beltrami
camera Jonathan Sela
cut Dan Zimmerman
occupation
synchronization

The Omen is an American horror film from 2006 and a remake of The Omen from 1976. It was directed by John Moore who, because of his admiration for the original version of the film, wanted it to be remade. The film was first titled The Omen: 666 to distinguish it from the original , but only given the original title The Omen upon release . At the beginning of the shooting, the film was already under massive time pressure, as it was announced in advance that the film would be released in cinemas worldwide on June 6, 2006 (666, an allusion to the biblical number of the animal ) .

action

When his child dies in childbirth, the American diplomat Robert Thorn, on the advice of the hospital priest in Rome , adopts an orphaned newborn as his baby, whose mother is said to have died at the same time as his own. He lets his wife Katherine believe it is their birth son. Soon afterwards Robert Thorn was appointed ambassador to London . Damien grows up well protected there, but there are increasing signs that something is wrong with him. His mother even goes so far as to assume that he is not her son.

Damien's nanny jumps off the roof of the property during the garden party on his birthday and hangs herself after announcing she would do this for Damien. The newly hired nanny, Mrs. Baylock, is overly caring. Further anomalies accumulate: Damien hardly comes near churches, he behaves very mysteriously and aggressively. When visiting the zoo, the animals around him are very frightened. Yet Robert Thorn continues to turn a blind eye to these signs, even when Priest Brennan shows up and claims that Damien is the Antichrist personified . The mysterious deaths continue, for example, the priest Brennan is pierced by an iron rod falling from the roof of a church after a lightning strike. Shortly before, he had warned Robert Thorn of a supposed danger for his again pregnant wife Katherine.

Press photographer Keith Jennings approaches Robert Thorn to show him anomalies in photographs he took at the birthday party and the priest's visit. Artifact-like light reflections can be seen in the pictures , which hang around the nanny's neck like a rope and seem to pierce the priest like a spear. Jennings discovers similar artifacts in a self-portrait and fears that the next person will be killed.

After Katherine Thorn has an accident with Damien involved and is seriously injured, Thorn and Jennings set out to Rome together to find out more about the mysterious child. When they discover that the hospital burned down shortly after Damien was born, they go to a remote monastery to visit the former hospital priest, who has been severely disfigured by the fire, who sends them to an old cemetery. There they discover the grave of Damien's alleged mother, which contains the skeleton of a jackal . In another grave they come across the body of Robert Thorn's true son, whose skull injuries prove his murder.

At the same time, Mrs. Baylock kills Katherine Thorn in the hospital in London. When Robert Thorn learns of his wife's death, he goes to Megiddo with Keith Jennings - as priest Brennan advised before - to meet Carl Bugenhagen there. He explains to them a rite of how Damien must be killed with seven knives on the altar of a church in order to break the power of the Antichrist. Thorn flees in disgust, but changes his mind when Providence comes true and the photographer Jennings is beheaded in an apparent accident.

Robert Thorn returns to London and, with horror, discovers the birthmark prophesied by Bugenhagen in the form of the number 666 under Damien's head hair . When trying to kidnap Damien from his cot into a church, the police take up the pursuit after Mrs. Baylock was run over by Robert Thorn. Just as he is about to give Damien the fatal blow on the altar, he is shot at the last second by a task force. He receives a state funeral, at which the President of the United States , Thorn's godfather, is also present. Damien stands next to him, holds his hand and turns around with a cryptic smile in the final scene.

Differences to the original

Temporal differences

There are thirty years between the original film and the remake, so the film is also adapted to the time in which it was shot. This is shown in the plot that Damien so z. B. is no longer on his mother's nerves by the bumping of billiard balls , but this time by the noise of a video game. The tricycle that Damien rode when he rammed his mother has now given way to a contemporary scooter, and the photographer is now viewing his pictures digitally. Robert Thorn did not learn of the priest's death from the newspaper, but from an email sent to him by Keith Jennings. In the original, Robert Thorn asks the photographer whether the 666 on the skin of the dead priest could have come from a concentration camp ; in the remake, this suspicion is not expressed because of the age of the priest, who could not have lived through the Nazi era . When analyzing the Apocalypse by the photographer, it is also said that the ascending Roman Empire corresponds to the European Union , which is significantly more important in 2006 than it was in the 1970s.

Representative differences

The plot of the remake hardly deviates from the original, some sentences were even taken directly from the original. Differences can therefore be found more in the details of the design, where some aspects are expanded or supplemented. If the “mother” Damiens only suspects that something is wrong with her “son”, the new version shows that she also has nightmares in which she sees Damien attacking her from behind or with a gallows rope in front of her his mother stands. While the original only shows that Robert Thorn is appointed ambassador to Great Britain, the new version shows that he should only become his deputy at first, but the original candidate is killed in a more than accidental traffic accident and so Thorn moves up. Thorn's wife dies in the original after being pushed out of the hospital window by Mrs. Baylock. The remake shows the nanny visiting the hospital with Damien and - while Damien freezes the guard with his haunted gaze - injects air into a tube with a syringe, so that Katherine Thorn dies of an embolism . The nanny, who was originally stabbed to death by Robert Thorn after a fight in the house, is now run over by Thorn with the car. The photographer is beheaded not by the sliding load of glass plates of a truck that has started rolling, but by a swinging sign that was released by a falling hammer of a roofer (the motif of the truck rolling back, however, now appears in the supplemented scene in which the originally intended ambassador is killed, but here an explosion occurs). Other minor differences are that the fight with the dogs in the cemetery now takes place in winter, Thorn can no longer reach his wife by phone shortly before she is murdered, and the aggressive primates in the zoo are now smashing the windows in an indoor building and no longer in an outdoor enclosure Damien and his "mother" ambushed in the car.

New scenes

Completely new, however, are the scenes in which Damien is caught by his mother in the kitchen making a toast. Just like the prologue that takes place in the Vatican and in which the Pope is announced that the events described in Revelation are about to occur, using modern events such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , the tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is attested, which correspond to the biblical descriptions. The death of the Pope at the end of the film does not appear in the original either.

background

Tribute to other films

After Father Brennan has ended the call with Robert Thorn, can be seen passing by a red hooded figure significantly in the background, giving a nod to the film do not look now ( Do not Look Now ) is the 1,973th

In her interview as a nanny for the Thorn couple, Mrs. Baylock (played by Mia Farrow ) mentions that she has been raising children "for almost 40 years". The film Rosemary's Baby was made in 1968 and set in 1966. 40 years before the remake of The Omen was filmed.

Before the boy throws his mother off the chair on the scooter, the camera takes a reminder of Stanley Kubrick's Shining .

actor

Rachel Weisz was originally intended for the role of Katherine Thorn, but she had to cancel because of her pregnancy and was replaced by Julia Stiles .

Mia Farrow was cast as Damien's nanny Mrs. Baylock on the recommendation of Julia Stiles. In the film Rosemary's Baby , which Roman Polański made in 1968, she played the mother of the Antichrist in the lead role.

Harvey Stephens , who played Damien in the original, got a small side appearance as a reporter in The Omen .

Naming

The meaning of the name Damien is derived from the ancient Greek Damianos , which means something like "the mighty man". The name was generally found by St. Damian Spread, a doctor and martyr .

Often the name is erroneously with the Greek god Daimon associated, from which in the English language of the devil's name " Demon " (English. Demon derives) and the sound is also related to the name "Damien".

In the New Testament the word daimon appears only once (Matthew 8:31 ), where it is used to denote the devil, for whom the word daimonion is usually used.

Locations

Most of the shooting took place in the Czech Republic , especially in the area around the capital Prague . Other locations in the Czech Republic were Kuttenberg , Kladrau and Eisgrub . The Jerusalem scenes were filmed in Matera ( Italy ).

Reviews

“So far, as devilishly old as new story. But not only the story is copied practically to the exact setting, the so-called creative deaths also correspond to the original. [...] The murders are carried out with imagination, mood and a sense of comedy. The sporadic shock moments seem coldly calculated and therefore work exactly to the point. [...] So what could be said about the old “Omen” for good and bad also applies to the remake by and large. And in view of the success at the time, that can only be a good omen. "

- kino.de

"Old-fashioned, but gripping horror film that draws the tension so much at the end that you feel like you're on a roller coaster."

- cinema.de

“Why you had to remake Richard Donner's The Omen from 1976 remains the filmmaker's secret. Only the start date 6/6/06 is not enough to justify this boring Schmu. Because anyone who knows the 76er film is in danger of falling asleep here, as the makers have absolutely nothing new to say. Mia Farrow is of little use as a bad nanny! "

- prisma.de

"The film, which is located in the wake of relevant conspiracy theories, primarily relies on tangible, always superficial genre entertainment, but above all the committed actors are convincing."

- Lexicon of international film

synchronization

The German-language dubbing was carried out at Film- & Fernseh-Synchron GmbH, Munich , based on the dialogue book and the dialogue direction by Lutz Riedel .

role actor Voice actor
Robert Thorn Liev Schreiber Marco Kroeger
Katherine Thorn Julia Stiles Ranja Bonalana
Father Brennan Pete Postlethwaite Roland Hemmo
Bugenhagen Michael Gambon Otto Mellies
Steven Haines Marshall Cupp Lutz Riedel
Damien Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick Johann Hillmann
Dr. Becker Nikki Amuka-Bird Peggy Sander
Dr. Greer Richard Rees Marcus Off
Jennings David Thewlis Udo Schenk
Mrs. Baylock Mia Farrow Dagmar Heller
Secret Service Agent Curtis Matthew Thomas Wolff
Tom Portman Reggie Austin Robin Kahnmeyer

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for The Omen . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2006 (PDF; test number: 5C 106 C).
  2. ↑ Age rating for The Omen . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ IMDb - start dates
  4. ↑ The Omen film locations . movie-locations.com. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
  5. ↑ The omen on kino.de
  6. ↑ The omen on cinema.de
  7. ↑ The omen on prisma.de
  8. ↑ The omen. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  9. ↑ The omen. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing files , accessed on April 16, 2020 .

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