LEFT BEHIND
US, 2014, 105 minutes, Colour.
Nicolas Cage, Chad Michael Murray, Cassi Thomson, Nicky Whelan, Lea Thompson, Gary Grubbs, Alec Rayme.
Directed by Vic Armstrong.
This is a version of the bestselling novel by Jerry B.Jenkins and Tim La Haye. There were very popular, especially during the 1990s amongst American religious readers with the coming of the millennium.
The original film was sponsored by Kirk Cameron, an evangelist for the books and the films, with two subsequent sequels.
This version is a star vehicle for Nicolas Cage as an airline pilot, captaining the plane where people disappear, the clothes remaining. The phenomenon happens all over the world. The language to describe this was “The Rapture�, where God took millions of people who are faithful from this earth to heaven.
While the rapture was popular in the 1990s, it also defied credibility of beliefs in the vast majority of people. The rapture seems to have been a particularly American interpretation of some quotations from the New Testament.
With the Kirk Cameron films, there was a strong emphasis on the religious dimension, on the nature of faith, belief in God and in the rapture, in the need for repentance. This is not so much to the fore in this particular version.
The first 30 minutes are much like any other action film, the establishing of characters, a young student (Cassi Thompson) coming home for her pilot father’s birthday, the problems of her very religious mother (Lea Thompson), separation from her husband, his having affairs with flight attendants. At the airport is the very popular television journalist, played by Chad Michael Murray who befriends the young student, meets her father, is a passenger on the rapture plane. There are suggests some suggestions of religious faith, especially with an intrusive woman arguing apocalyptically at the airport who is contradicted by the student.
At various times throughout the film, sceptical attitudes towards religion, towards God, towards the rapture are expressed, the point of view of many who might be watching the film.
After half an hour, the rapture happens and in the following 30 minutes or so the audience sees the people deal with the experience, the bewilderment, people disappearing, the clothes remaining. While there is a lot of attention given to the passengers on the plane and how the pilot and the flight attendant with whom he was having an affair deal with the situation and the upset passengers, one even taking a gun and threatening, the other area of rapture shown is in New York City with the student out with her brother, his disappearing, the rioters’ reactions and looting as a consequence, deadly accidents with small planes crashing into cars, and her return home to find her mother has disappeared as well.
The last part of the film brings on the religious dimension more explicitly. The student goes to see the pastor who has not disappeared and finds that he did not have enough faith in himself. This makes her more sceptical and she is in phone contact with the journalist as well as her father. There are some heroics with the plane, the plane to land at Kennedy airport if possible given the low fuel and the damage to the structure of the plane. However, there are quite some heroics with the daughter, who climbs a very high tower, possibly to contemplating killing herself, but getting the phone call just in time, using quite some initiative in getting vehicles, finding an alternate highway for landing, clearing debris, setting a large fire to guide her father for the landing.
The message of this particular stage of the film might be “God helps those who help themselves�.
Audiences might find it rather difficult in hearing rapture language from Nicolas Cage, remembering what his wife had told him, very seriously expressing himself with belief in the rapture and urging prayer. There are also some other conversations amongst the passengers on the plane, with a very hardheaded dwarf who is continually complaining and sceptical, with a Muslim who wants people to pray, with a businessman who has neglected his family and talks with a woman who has realised what is actually happening.
Popular ingredients for an action film. Popular ingredients for an explicitly religious film. But, the explicitness will probably be too much for most audiences – and, the time of the rapture seems to have passed (and cynics commenting at the time that the two authors of the books had not been taken in the rapture but left on earth to profit by their bestseller status!)
