MovieChat Forums > The Final Conflict (1981) Discussion > WTF ending

WTF ending

posted a year ago by Drooch (5333)
15 replies | jump to latest

All this build up to ‘The Final Conflict’ and… there wasn’t one 🤷🏻‍♂️

Damien arrives at the old ruins. The priest tries to stab him but he used the kid as a human shield, killing the poor tyke, and the priest barely reacts. Worse, his mother barely reacts to her only child being accidentally skewered and killed by the priest. She has no words for the priest… or Damien?

Now, all this time we know the second coming of Christ is a baby, so when Damien is looking for his nemesis I’m thinking ‘is some baby going to toddle out from behind a pillar??’ (and ‘How did the Christ-baby escape Damien’s mass infanticide project??’) We never get to know because Kate backstabs Damien with the dagger and kills him.

There was no ‘Final Conflict’. The previously invulnerable, supernaturally cunning Damien murdered a child and expected the mother to shrug her shoulders and go home? Damian would have eyes on the back of his head! But no, he strolls up some stairs, gets stabbed in the back by the distraught mother, and keels over dead.

That’s it!? The iconic, terrifying villain from the ultimate movie series about the antichrist is defeated like this??

Then the film decides to include Jesus after all by having him appear as some kind of angel - doesn’t do anything, just appears then disappears. Again, hardly the ‘Final Conflict’ the title promised.

The priest walks in with the dead body of Kate’s only son and they walk off together, not saying a word. It’s very strange, and quite bleak for what is otherwise a ‘happy’ ending.

I’m glad Damien was finally defeated, the evil little shit, but I can’t believe the ending got past the proof-readers, it’s lame, confusing and entirely anticlimactic 🤦🏻‍♂️

[–] [deleted] a year ago

Yep, pretty anti-climactic, isn't it? It's like the budget ran out or something(!)

Another thing that always bothered me about the trilogy: the strange (lack of) passage of time. Damien is supposed to be 33 or so years old when he passes, but there's very little passage of time at all, no advance of technology (or not much) between movies and all three have the feel of the decade in which they were made, only spanning about 10 years!

I was born 50 years ago and I've seen such technological advancements in my time, let alone massive societal changes, and progress in many areas has been rapid and swift. The three Omen Trilogy movies feel like they're in a time warp, stuck in the late 1970s or something and yet Damien ages normally... OR... the passage of time is normal and that Damien has aged very quickly, it's just plain weird.

[–] pjl69 (2435) a year ago

That's not strange at all. If they made the movies futuristic/scifi/speculative of the future, people would be now ridiculing them for getting it all wrong.

[–] [deleted] a year ago

They could've gone the other way and had Damien born in the late 1940s.

[–] pjl69 (2435) a year ago

True, but maybe they didn't plan The Omen to be trilogy originally? Setting the story in the past is also a budgetary question...

[–] johnmiller (3376) a year ago

It was a truly terrible movie on all accounts, except for Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score. They just ditch everything in this last one, making it feel that they just wanted to get the darn thing over with. From the first film, you know that the seven daggers have to be used together, spread out like a cross on the Anti-Christ's body to fully kill him. Using one only kills physical life, it doesn't kill the evil within.

https://omen.fandom.com/wiki/Daggers_of_Megiddo

[–] [deleted] a year ago

Apparently one was enough. Didn't you see?

[–] johnmiller (3376) a year ago

TFC was an awful movie and didn't pay a second's attention to the original. Like you.

[–] [deleted] a year ago

The movie is canon therefore one dagger is enough. Keep fighting those windmills.

[–] johnmiller (3376) a year ago

"Canon." Who gives a fuck? And who honestly cares about the "canon" of "The Omen" series? I pointed out a simple point set out by the creator of the first film and you had a meltdown. Typical 4chan behavior.

[–] Jeepster (1028) a year ago

Have a friend & he tried to convince me that in the original “The Omen”. Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) when he dragged Damien to the altar in the church to kill him, he said that he “had already stabbed him once” with the knife meant to kill the body. When he was getting ready to stab him again to extinguish the soul then the cops came & shot & killed him before he could do it. They ordered him to halt but we knew he wouldn’t. This is what my friend SWEARS happened that Damien in the first movie was already successfully stabbed once by his dad.

We’ll I let him have his way since he was so sure of it, I was going to argue “If that’s the case then how is he going to go through society with his body being dead? How’s he going to go & get a checkup from the doctor, get bloodwork done, etc where no one is ever going to find out? How is he even going to grow, hit puberty or even be a normal man if his body is “dead” by the time he was a child? Eh, he’d only wind up telling me I”m wrong & it didn’t matter if I know him.

This is why in “The Final Conflict” I fully understand the “getting stabbed in the back once” & Damien being a goner. After all if you HAD to do it as prescribed in the first movie then that would have been IMPOSSIBLE to do. Get the adult Damien & hold him down on a church’s altar while you try to accomplish this. That would’ve been even more BS than this ending. At least I think so.

[–] johnmiller (3376) a year ago

I can see how tough that would be to do. That was why killing Damien as a child was preferred.

[–] Drooch (5333) a year ago

Your friend is full of shit, Thorn failed to get one dagger into kid-Damien. If he had then the film would have shown it, and the kid would be dead as per the 7 Daggers lore.

There was no excuse for TFC to rewrite that lore. All they had to do was either surprise Damien and drive one dagger through his heart, or somehow capture him (his power was draining since the birth of the Christ-child anyway so shouldn’t have been too difficult), hold him down and skewer the bastard.

The real villain in TFC is whoever OK’d the script, made even worse by the fact that some of it is pretty good. Any goodwill it has built up, though, is washed away by that unforgivable ending.

[–] ss5mmyers (158) a year ago

All the interesting plot points got pushed aside for a romance story that didn't go anywhere. That's my main issue with it. Armageddon shouldn't be boring.

[–] ss5mmyers (158) a year ago

I think he's confused. Robert had stabbed the nanny, but not Damien.

[–] Jeepster (1028) a year ago

Well the nanny was in the house that she was killed, not the church. Don’t think he was THAT much confused but thanks anyway.