Nutshell: I’d give Left Behind a B-. It’s heart is in the right place, and it walks the fine line between Sunday school and pop culture nicely, but it’s movie-of-the-week look may put folks off. Director Vic Armstrong needed a stronger hand guiding his actors to quality performances, but it’s the amateurish soundtrack and clunky bits of dialogue that hobble a promising film.
Christian fiction usually gets ignored by the gen pop. But the apocalypse is everywhere right now, and folks are eating it up. So why not hit folks with the apocalypse classics? The Left Behind series, 16 books in all, deals with the Rapture, The Antichrist, Armageddon, and basically the end of the world as we know it. But can Nicolas Cage, Lea Thompson, Jordin Sparks and Chad Michael Murray reboot the series and get the masses into the theaters with stuff like The Walking Dead and The Hunger Games already firmly entrenched? Depends on how much you’re into the premise, and how forgiving you are of low budget cinematography and dialogue that can sometimes feel forced. If you’re cool with that kinda stuff, Left Behind is actually kinda fun. If you’re hoping for a finely tuned film that makes the most of a big screen? Well….
For folks who are wobbly on the premise, Left Behind is a story about airline pilot Rayford Steele (Nicolas Cage) his wife Irene (Lea Thompson), son Raymie (Major Dodson) and grown daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson). Mom decided to become a Grade-A bible thumper about a year ago, and it’s put a strain on the rest of the adults in the family. But guess what? She was right, and as Ray flies from JFK to London, a strange sonic-implosion sound occurs and suddenly, poof! A bunch of people — men, women, kids, babies — vanish. Human beings being what they are, everyone stops, rationally discusses what happened, and decides to make the world a better place. Gotcha! Looting, fear and mistrust become the rule of the day, with empty cars crashing off the roads, parents frantic to find their missing children, and planes falling out of the sky. Lucky for Ray’s passengers he didn’t get caught up in the rapture-boom. But how’s he gonna land that plane when all airports are one big cluster-rapture? And how’s Chloe going to go on when the world around her is literally going to hell?
I can say this about Left Behind; it’s a whole lot better than Left Behind: The Movie. (A’yup, there was a trilogy of films based on the book series, and they were a doozy. Sorry Kirk Cameron. #notsorry) Luckily, this Left Behind not only jettisons the reverential tone of the original films, it understands it’s budget limitations. So instead of Ghostbusters-level mass hysteria, there’s a bus crash here, an unmanned plane falling there. That could be due to the $16 million budget, which had producers focusing on story rather than shelling out for spectacle. (It could be worse; it could have had Sharknado-worthy graphics and really gakked things up.)
Let’s get to the not-so-great. There’s a “family photo” of the Steeles, and it’s about the worst bit of Photoshop I’ve ever seen in my life. They couldn’t just get the actors together during the read-through and have ‘em pose? And then there’s the dialogue, which can get clunky at times. “You’ve never spoken about God before.” Yeah, a twenty-something atheist talks like that. Then there’s the mind-numbingly bad soundtrack, which cements that Lifetime-movie vibe.
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Atomic Fangirl 