The Hollywood Reporter has released the first trailer for Damien, the A&E series that ignores all the previous sequels to The Omen and imagines what the boy who was destined to become the Antichrist might be like now as an adult.
Along the way, the Reporter interviews showrunner Glen Mazzara, who makes some statements that bring out the continuity nit-picker in me. Consider:
How does the series work in terms of filling in the gap between a 5-year-old Damien in The Omen and the 30-year-old we meet here?
We see the series as a sequel to that original movie. We’re not using the second and third movies as part of our bible. Fans of that first movie will also be interested in finding out where Damien’s been for those missing 25 years since the last time we saw him when he was a boy and meeting him now. We’ll definitely give fans information on where he’s been.
So… if the original film came out in 1976 and this series shows what became of Damien 25 years later, that would mean the series takes place in 2001, right? Or are they retroactively suggesting that the original film took place in 1990?
Of course, the original film series had its own timeline issues. The third film takes place in 1982, when Damien is a 32-year-old adult, which would ordinarily mean that Damien was a boy in the 1950s — but the original film, which showed the birth and early childhood of Damien, sure seemed to be taking place in the 1970s.
I must say, though, that I am intrigued by the possibility that Damien might wrestle with the fact that he has an evil destiny to fulfill, as per this quote:
How different would you say this character is from the 5-year-old we knew in the movie? Is there still that innocence? The raw footage I saw looks like a kind of upstanding guy who’s kind of mortified to find out what he really is.
That’s the whole story. Damien is trying to hold on to his humanity but clearly has the devil inside him. It’ll be an interesting road for him to travel. Once you see the show, it’ll make sense. There’s a lot of twists and turns. We do some very unexpected things with this character and we make it our own.
The Omega Code, for all its faults, did something similar with Michael York’s Antichrist — he only becomes aware of his evil destiny gradually in that film, as I recall — and one of the earlier Omen sequels also showed the teenaged Damien being distressed for a moment when he learns about his role in the end times.
Anyway, here’s the trailer. Enjoy, if that’s the word:
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