(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)
Why were there so many Christian movies in 2014? In part, because writer/producer Paul LaLonde finally raised sufficient funds to get a new adaptation of Tim LaHaye's sixteen-volume Left Behind series off the ground. A previous trilogy of films about the exploits of RAYFORD STEELE and BUCK WILLIAMS in the wake of the faithful's physical Rapturing to Heaven saw increasingly weak critical and financial success, and Kirk Cameron's continued slide into Evangelical nutjob-ery made his return impossible, so LaLonde instead snagged up a paycheck-desperate Nic Cage, a few vaguely recognizable character actors, and set about with his readaptation. Unlike his fellow Christian filmmakers, he didn't finish his movie in time for the lucrative Easter season, and evidently didn't feel like holding back for a month until Christmas, so the final product wound up dumped in early October and quickly forgotten.
Side note: In spite of a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel failing miserably, LaLonde has announced plans to adapt all sixteen books of the Left Behind series. Maybe he'll actually get around to filming something interesting on one of these future outings.
I'm incredibly disappointed in Left Behind. You hear the plot summary of the books and think to yourself, "Well, it might not sound GOOD, but they at least commit to spouting some absolute lunacy." Millions upon millions of good Christians bodily vanish in an instant, and the whole world instantly falls into rioting and chaos. A select number of survivors form the Tribulation Force to defend and convert the remaining unfaithful during seven years of hardship. There's conspiracies and redrawn national borders and armies of millions and a ceaseless war against the Antichrist against a backdrop of flame as the sun ejects half its matter onto the planet's ever-quaking surface. The whole thing's predicated on the notion all non-Christians need to hurry the hell up and get with the program lest they experience untold suffering for their staunch refusal to believe, but it's sort the sort of thriller where Russia can form a union with multiple European nations to simultaneously nuke Israel, only for God to vanish the nukes and plant them in the capital cities of the aggressors seconds before detonation. If the piled up nonsense still isn't tantalizing enough, I remind you this new adaptation has Nic Cage as a man whose faith is tested in the first hours after the Rapture. We have open invitation to completely lose our shit here.
Instead, it seems LaLonde and director Vic Armstrong decided the "try to act like we're normal people who believe normal things so the conversion message sells better" part of the job was more important than the "Lean into a full sixteen books of increasing fantasy insanity" aspect. A film starring a paycheck-cashing Cage and supporting actors in starring roles from a stuntman director never had much chance of achieving a great deal of depth, but relegating the action to Captain Steele's attempts to land his plane and nothing else smothers the film. With such a limited scope, all the movie has space for is characters with one-note personalities getting into arbitrary conversations/arguments in a confined space, while those whose book-counterparts are presumably more developed suffer through having to solve a conflict totally unrelated to their later apocalypse ministry. There are exactly three people who matter in this movie if my interpretation of the Wikipedia summaries for the books is correct, and their movement throughout the film can be easily boiled down to "is not a Christian" for 95% of the runtime, and "is a Christian" for the final 5%. That's not a heck of a lot to hang a "land the airplane" thriller on.
They could offer up SOMETHING here, but even if I set aside my disappointment at not seeing Nic Cage wage psychological warfare against the UN-leader Antichrist, there's nothing. The other passengers on their airplane occasionally set-up possibly interesting conflicts, like the pissing match between the Muslim and the little person, or the guy convinced everything is happening because aliens, or the woman who resorts to threatening everyone with a firearm after she becomes convinced they're all in on an act to steal her child. These situations are universally defused within two minutes of their introduction, and wrap back around to the same ol' "where did the other people go?" question without fail. Buck Williams is a total wash of a character, despite the half-hour prior to the Rapture taking its time to give him some connection to almost everyone onscrreen. Cage barely emotes as Steele, not even bothering with his trademark swaggering awkwardness, and favoring a bland, generically frustrated "ordinary man in a crisis" persona. Steele's daughter gets a lot of screentime wandering the post-Rapture world looking for her brother, which accomplishes nothing other than introducing a short cameo from another book character, and underscoring just how awful God is in this fictional world.
God seriously needs a better publicity guy. Throughout this review series, I keep mentioning how the Bible contains plenty of good messages and guidance for living one's life, so long as you read it critically and understand the cultural gaps between when it was written and the present day. However, across five films - four of which so far have served as not-so-covert attempts at converting nonbelievers - we've seen nothing but idle interventions, echoing silences, and a penchant for cruel torture, with this film representing the height of the final tendency. Were it not for Captain Steele's conversion in the last few minutes, I'd consider it a decidedly anti-religious film, what with all the focus on chaos and confusion and suffering as a result of his great gift to the world. I know and you know it's all MEANT as a time of hardship to sort out the worthy from the unworthy and grant the nonfaithful a final, true test of character before the End Times proper, but the movie never once mentions any of this. We're apparently supposed to watch all this destruction, see the devastation of parents who lost their children and good people deemed wicked sinners for a simple human failing, and think this a good and right part of God's plan because... well, because Nic Cage tells his passengers to pray before landing, I think.
It is, if nothing else, a spectacular self-own: You realize your source material has a little too much crazy religious fundamentalism to effectively work as propaganda, so you expunge everything but the inciting incident and "thrills" of trying to land a plane in a panic, only to also leave out all clarification for why the audience should take these developments as beatific, thus making the deity you worship look even crueler than his book-counterpart's relentless hammering upon the earth. Nothing works in Left Behind, unless you want to count the unintended comedic value in scenes like the bait-and-switch electric toothbrush, Nic Cage's last second attempts to avoid collision with a wholly-Raptured plane, or the sheer speed with which polite society descends into petty thieving and murder once there aren't any TRUE Christians left. I'm only giving it 1.5 stars because it does such a thorough job of scrubbing out the truly hateful parts of its ideology as to work against its own purposes, and argue the virtues of agnosticism. Nic Cage's performance barely rises above sleepwalking, so why bother?
Next time, Ridley Scott does some whitewashing, but still makes a real movie.
1.5/5
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