![]() ![]() Of course, I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. My apologies for not yelling, “Spoiler Alert!” You cannot spoil something that’s already quite rotten. Here’s the plot: people in New York City sit around and talk for quite a while and some of them get on a plane to London a bunch of them disappear into thin air, thus upsetting those “left behind” chaos erupts on earth and on airplanes and certain people have strained conversations about God and the Bible some more stuff happens and then one character, gazing upon a burning New York City, says, “So this is what the End looks like” and another character responds-gaze squarely fixed on potential sequels: “This isn’t the End this is just the beginning.” Thirty minutes in, I wondered, “If there really is a loving God, would he allow movies this badly written, acted, directed, and produced to exist?” And, an hour in: “If this movie were played in an empty forest, would the trees die from direct exposure to excessive cinematic stupidity?” But, at the end, I did utter a short prayer: “Thank God, it’s over!” True, the film did challenge my faith, but in all the wrong ways. The movie is being promoted as a “faith-themed movie,” which is like saying Annabelle is “a doll-themed movie”: it’s meaningful for those who are in on the central premise, but confusing or annoying to everyone else. Eliot, “This is the way the Left Behind series ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” And that, honestly, isn’t fair to sincere whimpers everywhere. Focus on the truth.” Okay, here’s the truth: the first Left Behind movie with Cameron is a much, much better film, if only because Cameron and the rest of that cast appeared to be trying. It’s so bad that a part of me wishes I’d gone to the horror flick, Annabelle, so that I’d stop having nightmares of a blank-eyed Cage (who plays slimy airplane pilot Ray Steele) uttering lines with all the conviction and sincerity of a DoD spokesperson: “It’s about the truth. It’s so bad that Nicholas Cage-apparently the “Hollywood” in “Hollywood version”-looks embarrassed to be in the film, and I’m guessing that Cage has rarely felt embarrassed about much of anything. I can safely say, with my right hand on a Bible and a stiff drink in my left, that the new movie is not first-class, high-quality, grippingly interesting, or true to the biblical storyline. Two nights ago, I took two friends to the opening night of the Left Behind “reboot,” the so-called “Hollywood version” of the series. ![]() ![]() 1926), a high profile Fundamentalist pastor based in San Diego who has authored or co-authored some fifty books, should know that it’s impossible to make a good Rapture movie-or so it appears, based on all available evidence (including the three previous Left Behind movies).īut LaHaye was persistent, saying, “My dream has always been to enter the movie theater with a first-class, high-quality movie that is grippingly interesting, but also is true to the biblical storyline – and that was diluted in the first attempt, but Lord willing, we are going to see this thing made into the movie that it should be.” And so LaHaye had agreed, in 2010, to allow Cloud Ten Pictures “to make a Hollywood version of the New York Times bestseller series.” “That’s a serious number of people learning the secrets of the Book of Revelation,” I wrote, “Unfortunately for them, the secrets are stale, recycled, and false.”įour years ago, Christian Post reported that Cloud Ten Pictures, the company that produced the first Left Behind movie in 2000, starring Kirk Cameron, had finally settled a lawsuit with Tim LaHaye-creator and co-author of the mega-selling novels-that was based on LaHaye’s claim that “the producers made a lower quality film than the contract demanded.” That is funny in its own right, since LaHaye (b. I feel fortunate that I live at a time when someone finally figured out what the Book of Revelation really means.” I noted that the novel, The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon, which was the most recent Left Behind book at that time (it was #13, and three more followed between 2003-2007), had a first printing of 2,750,000 copies. A dozen years ago, I wrote an article, “No End In Sight”, for First Things, in which I wrote, perhaps with a dash of sarcasm: “Only two more Left Behind books to go and we’ll finally know how the world ends. ![]()
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