Doomsday Reels: Left Behind II - Tribulation Force

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002)

The Director

Bill Corcoran

The Actors

Kirk Cameron (Buck Williams), Brad Johnson (Rayford Steele), Clarence Gilyard Jr. (Pastor Bruce Barnes), Janaya Stephens (Chloe Steele), Gordon Curre (Nicholae Carpathia), Lubomir Mykytiuk (Rabbi Tsion Ben Judah)

The Trailer

The Cause

The Rapture

The Story

"It's been a week since the greatest disaster the world has ever seen. A week since people all around the world simply vanished off the face of the Earth. People everywhere are still struggling to come to terms with the reality of what has happened. Actual numbers may not be known for years but initial estimates are in the hundreds of millions. Even more unbelievable and terrifying is the fact that every child from every country is among the missing. For those of us who have been left behind, we are living in a world of chaos and confusion. Physical devastation is catastrophic and the cleanup process has only just begun. With everything from driverless cars to crashing planes inflicting their destruction across the planet, the death toll is sure to be astronomical." - Buck Williams, opening newscast.

The Rundown

Way back in 2014 I reviewed the first Left Behind movie (titled Left Behind: The Movie) as the third entry in this column but that was back before I had figured out how I would handle franchises of movies and to be perfectly honest I had no desire to watch more at the time. But now 3 years later and in this the holiest month when we honor our lord and savior Saturn, let us dive back into the regressive horseshit that is the Left Behind series. (Full disclosure: I am a Christian myself so I say the things I say not out of hatred toward religion or Christianity, but in firm disappointment in a large group of people who need to grow the hell up.)

I'm going to cannibalize the summary of the series from my original review: Left Behind is a series of 16 books (Plus 40 young adult books and 7 spin-offs) by authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins based around the (sort-of) biblical prophecy of the end times. This series spawned three straight-to-video movies produced by Cloud 10 Pictures (a Christian-themed indie company) and starred former child star and Crocoduck denier Kirk Cameron.

So, what is the rapture? If the wild-haired woman in the denim skirt shouting on the street corner was too difficult to understand, the rapture is a fringe theory in Christian theology involving the idea that after a certain period of time (arguments about that have been heated) Jesus will return to Earth but only for long enough to pick up his true believers, the rest of humanity will be left to fend for itself, four horsemen will ride across the land laying death and devastation to everything and the first of the horseman will be The Antichrist. The Antichrist is a powerful and charismatic man who will win a third of the people to his side by promising peace, a one-world government (complete with one-world currency), and a single religion that unites all. It is up to the remaining people to accept Jesus into their heart so that when he comes back to see if anybody has changed their mind they can go with him. Also a giant meteor will turn all the rivers and streams poisonous, the seas will boil, earthquakes will ravage the land, and the scorpion wasps with human faces and the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse from the book of revelations turn up to hang out. So, patronizing, but metal as fuck.

Now you may be saying "That sounds like a hare-brained scheme to keep a group of people from believing that people outside of their very specific version of a single religion might have good ideas and can be listened to." You are correct, hypothetical reader. Actual belief in The Rapture started only about 200 years ago and regardless of the intent of the person who came up with it, it quickly became a tool to keep people in line with the religion. It taught that those seeking peace, tolerance, and unity are actually servants of the devil sent to pull you off the straight and narrow and that only by staying close to your faith (your faith meaning, what the church tells you your faith is) can you hope to not be left when the rapture comes to face The Tribulation with all the other poor little sinners. It's cult bullshit 101 but it's a ideology that has worked gangbusters in the last couple centuries. It's really just a mix of stuff from the book of Revelations (widely contested amongst even other Christians to be literal or even relevant to our religion) and a bit in Thessalonians where Jesus makes some end-time prophecies (prophecies that came true a long time ago, by the way.) And that's all I'm going to go into on scripture at this point because that's a much longer and more detailed article, I'm here to talk about Left Behind II.

We rejoin intrepid reporter Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron) and boring-airline-pilot-with-an-action-hero-name Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) a week after the events of the first film. For a refresher course all the good Christians/children disappeared, leaving only their clothing and personal belongings to mark that they were ever there, pilot Rayford Steele returned home to find that his religious wife and young child were missing but that his rebellious by faith-based-movie standards was not. They went to his church to find that his pastor believed in God but not enough to be raptured so he doubled down on the preaching and with the help of intrepid reporter Buck Williams discovered that the antichrist was a man with the improbably menacing name Nicholae Carpathia who talks in a Bela Lugosi accent and incidentally (but hilariously) is the spitting image of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

After finding God, Buck Williams was easily able to see through Carpathia's ruse but it was in vain when Carpathia used his undefined but plot-convenient Antichrist powers to seize control of the United Nations by killing all who opposed him and making it look like a murder-suicide.

Now, despite my thoughts on The Rapture as a thing that people actually believe I do think it is solid ground for a story. The events as described are suitably chilling and even dealing with the non-believers angle has fertile ground for even secular audiences. The concept of belief and spirituality is an interesting topic when discussed in the right way and it can be made to appeal to anyone without being navel-gazing proselytizing. But this isn't that, this is a movie just giving a certain subset of people a story that they want to see and like all faith-based movies it loves to whack the audience overhead with scripture because it has no idea how the concept of subtlety works.

So the story this time is that two prophets have appeared at The Wailing Wall. Attempts to remove them have been met with people being burned to death so Nicolae Carpathia closes the entire place off. He seeks the help of Buck Williams, who happens to be a face that everyone recognizes in a post-rapture world, to help spread his message of peace and acceptance (actually to create an oppressive one-world government.) So Buck and Rayford cook up a convoluted plan that will allow Buck, with a news camera that is broadcasting live on all stations, to go to The Wailing Wall with a Rabbi who deals with messianic prophecy and grill these prophets, ostensibly so that he can disprove them but actually so he can prove that they're real to the whole world, ruining Nicolae's plans to have the Rabbi name the Antichrist himself as the Messiah. Also some boring stuff happens at home with Buck and Chloe, some people get saved, a lot of Sunday school lesson-caliber preaching gets done, and then some goofy looking prophets breath fire.

Like the first one, if you take the entire subject of the movie to be pure fantasy it's okay. There's a lot of wheel-spinning as far as plot goes (there's 16 of these books, I have no idea why they couldn't pick up the pace a bit) and the movie resists action and excitement as often as possible. There's a couple tense scenes, a good dystopian scene at the beginning, and the prophets breathing fire is wonderful, but the rest of the movie is dull and lifeless. Gordon Currie remains fairly un-menacing despite his Aryan appearance, harsh cheek bones, and Hungarian vampire accent. Most of the performances are still pretty mediocre to terrible (especially Kirk Cameron) but Clarence Gilyard Jr. remains a pretty good performer despite the fact that his character is basically scripture-machine and nothing more.

So Left Behind II as a movie alone is okay, but what about as a cultural phenomenon? I've made my thoughts on Rapturephobia clear above and in my review of the previous film but even removing the religious element I think we can all agree that a movie that tells people not to listen to those who promote peace, understanding, and unity is a shitty message to deliver to people and the person or people who would willingly do that is garbage, yeah? This movie is so littered with the more toxic elements of Converatism and Evangelical Christianity that it feels like I'm investigating a crime scene. This is a movie just filled with human ugliness masquerading as affirmations of hope and love. (The movie weirdly has a very strong stance on keeping the free press and not murdering looters that probably isn't held by its major fan-base at the time of this review.) There's an alternative way to view these movies where we're watching a splinter cell of religious extremists sabotage a man trying to restore order to the world, and the bits where we see him being evil or all scary CG-face could just be hallucinations by the villain protagonists. I don't like to be too harsh on movies because they're hard to make and a lot of times they don't turn out like people want them to but Left Behind II and Kirk Cameron's smug little face can go right to hell.

Don't bother with this movie, don't bother with the books. I'm doing the rest of this series for completionists' sake but these movies aren't bad enough to watch for pure enjoyment and they're just filled with horrible special effects, bad acting, and abhorrent messages.