Armageddon bored of the antichrist now.
By the time we reach The Final Conflict, the Omen trilogy has expended much of its original sense of impending doom. Gone is the chilling inevitability of the first two films, replaced instead by a fully actualised Antichrist who, ironically, makes for a far less compelling protagonist. Directed by Graham Baker, this final chapter shifts the focus fully on to Damien Thorn (Sam Neill), now an adult and fully aware of his destiny, but in doing so, reveals him to be a rather banal sort of evil. An empty suit at the heart of a mendacious global corporation the likes of which are ten a penny these days. Big whoop, another billionaire nepo baby running a huge company while using his influence to manipulate governments and world events. At least the antichrist doesn’t stay up until all hours posting on his own failing social media network.
The Final Conflict – a title which promises far more than the film itself even comes close to delivering opens with Damien as the CEO of Thorn Industries, his corporate empire an extension of his dark influence. He’s also eyeing a political career – naturally – with ambitions to be appointed the U.S. Ambassador to the UK as a stepping stone to the presidency, as well as assuming the leadership of the UN Youth Council. His rise to power should feel unnerving at least but it feels flatly bureaucratic and all too easy. Where the previous instalments built a sense of overwhelming dread as the Antichrist grew into his destiny and set it against the tension of whether he would be thwarted by those around him who gradually came to understand his true nature. Here, he’s virtually unopposed, unchallenged, and, as a result, not that interesting. Sure, Sam Neill gives a great performance (what else would you expect), but there’s scarcely anything for his menacing efforts to gain traction against. Worse still, there are plenty of hints from snippets of dialogue that we’re missing a much better film – and a much better articulation of the scale of the antichrist’s mendacity – as it would appear that Thorn Industries is virtue signalling by turning up with recovery crews and aid at natural disasters and terrorist atrocities which Thorn himself is orchestrating to create the occasionally mentioned but never shown “world in a state of unprecedented chaos”.
The inversion of the series’ structure – we’re now following Damien’s perspective, not those arrayed against him, undercuts much of the dramatic potential. The notional threat to his ascent comes from a group of priests who have come into possession of The Daggers Of Meggido, a MacGuffin that’s been present since The Omen but has apparently grown in power as now only one is needed to kill the antichrist rather than all seven in a specific order and configuration as it was back when he was a beelzebaby. The daggers may be a danger to Damien but the priests themselves are anything but, making the Keystone Cops look like Seal Team 6 as one ineptly planned and even more ineptly executed stabbing plan after another fails in almost Inspector Clouseau level incompetence.
Perhaps recognising that the will he/ won’t he succeed horse is well and truly dead and beyond flogging, The Final Conflict leans more heavily into biblical legend than any of its predecessors. Increasingly obsessed with the impending culmination of his works in a showdown with JC himself, due to be reborn thanks to an unprecedented (and surprisingly unalarming to the world’s cosmologists) alignment of three otherwise unrelated stars in the skies over Sussex or possibly Kent. It even takes its most daring narrative swing directly from the King Herod playbook but it’s too late to spark the film into life.
There’s a drab, dreary quality to The Final Conflict from the first frame that the movie never manages to shake off. Sure, much of it is derived from the environment and fashions of early 1980s London (which mercifully seems to have been spared any of the chaos and disorder sweeping the globe) but director Graham Baker never finds anything interesting to do visually and there’s a flat, cheap, televisual feel to the whole thing. The Final Conflict may or may not be the only film to ever have an infanticide montage as its big moment but I’m betting it’s the only one where somehow the most horrific thing you could image is pretty boring?
Ultimately, despite Sam Neill’s best efforts, Damien Thorn comes off as an over-ambitious junior executive who thinks he’s about to take over the whole boardroom only to get slapped down by the chairman’s son (who doesn’t return as a baby, of course, but as a briefly seen glowing vision in the sky). For a film series that has always explicitly been building towards Armageddon, the final battle is an almost incomprehensibly brief letdown. Neither God nor Satan himself could endorse concocting a movie trilogy which promised a denouement of biblical proportions only to end them like this. Even Jerry Goldsmith seems a little embarrassed by this threequel, his soundtrack a little too noisy and overpowering as if trying to compensate for the lack of incident on screen.
Thus the rise of the antichrist ends not with a bang but with a whimper. The second coming of Christ is a literal deus ex machina and The Omen trilogy comes to an ignominious and inglorious halt (I can’t even dignify it by calling it an ending).
