Tragic songs of atomic armageddon

The wonderful project Atomic Platters documents how the spectre of nuclear annihilation influenced American popular music in the fifties. From the frivolous to the apocalyptic, a great many artists dealt with the advent of the atomic age. In retrospect, a lot of those, er, contributions look rather naff. They're all pretty revealing, though. Here, I thought I'd discuss two entries into the genre - one terrifying, one hilarious. (Both, by sheer coincidence, are among my favourite songs.)

'The Great Atomic Power' by the Louvin Brothers sums up that act so well that it's no surprise Nathan Rabin chose the song as his introduction. Raised in poverty in Appalachia, Charlie and Ira Louvin were making self-consciously traditional country music in the increasingly pop-oriented market of the 1950s. But they were unusual in another sense, too: where pop stuck to love songs, their lyrics were marked by a harsh and unyielding backwoods fundamentalism that regularly threatened non-believers with the prospect of hell.

Do you fear this man's invention
That they call atomic power?
Are we all in great confusion
Do we know the time or hour
When a terrible explosion
May rain down upon our land
Leaving horrible destruction
Blotting out the works of man?

So far, so good. It isn't cheery, but neither is the nuclear winter.

Are you ready for the great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your Saviour in the air?
Will you shout or will you cry
When the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for that great atomic power?

Here the prospect of atomic war is conflated with the second coming of Christ. For pre-millenial dispensationalists like the Louvins, Christ's people will be spared the horrors of nuclear obliteration by being spirited away in the Rapture ('we... shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord', 1 Thess. 4:17). Applying religious imagery to the atomic bomb is common, of course, from Robert Oppenheimer's 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' to Dr. Strangelove's Doomsday Machine. What interests me about the Louvin Brothers is that their identification of Judgment Day with the nuclear apocalypse is literal.

There is one way to escape it
Be prepared to meet the Lord
Give your heart and soul to Jesus
He will be your shielding sword
He will surely stand beside you
And you'll never taste of death
For your soul will fly to safety
And eternal peace and rest

Yes, that's the song's message: the ICBMs might start raining down any time, and if you don't fancy dying of radiation sickness in a post-apocalyptic wasteland you'd best believe in Jesus. I'm not sure how effective this is as an evangelistic strategy. It might get some people to convert out of fear; but in the long term few might be able to bear a God who is both author of and saviour from atomic destruction.

There's an army who can conquer
All the enemy's great band
It's a regiment of Christians
Guided by the Saviour's hand
When the mushroom of destruction
Falls in all its fury great
God will surely save His children
From that awful awful fate

Here the mashup of secular warfare and apocalyptic destruction becomes confusing, perhaps deliberately so. In the context of the arms race, 'the enemy' is the Soviet Union; but the term itself is a New Testament euphemism for the devil. The militarisation of Christianity results in an apparent inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the cause of Christ and that of the United States.

(Applying military discipline to Christians is of course hardly foreign to the Louvin Brothers' fundamentalism. In 'Broadminded', they opine that 'that word broadminded is spelt s-i-n' and lambaste their fellow Christians for indulging in seemingly harmless pleasures like occasional drinking, gambling and dancing, long-standing fundamentalist bugbears all.)

But there's something else going on. Like a lot of the Louvin Brothers' songs, 'The Great Atomic Power' is uptempo and sounds downright cheerful. Behind the vicious apocalyptic detail of the description, there is a certain glee. Such language, as Jacqueline Rose notes, 'is rooted... in a fear; but it also thrives on the prospect of annihilation'. That prospect does away with pesky doubts and moral ambiguities. It allows for a stark message: turn, the brothers preach, or burn.

Tom Lehrer's 'We Will All Go Together When We Go' goes a different route, satirically pointing out that the highest technological development of humankind has bred the danger of total annihilation: 'universal bereavement and inspiring achievement'. The humour comes from the cheerful treatment of human extinction.

Lehrer, too, regularly mixes religious language with that of the atomic age: 'when it's time for the fallout and St. Peter calls us all out', 'just sing out a Te Deum when you see that ICBM'. A sceptic, Lehrer has none of the brutal earnestness with which the Louvins approach the topic. But it's only natural our notions of all-out atomic war should be shaped by end-times fears, and vice versa. The unprecedented possibility raised by nuclear weapons - the sudden end of all human life on earth - was too large and frightening to be easily accommodated into comfortable public discourse. It always had to break those bounds and take on theological dimensions.

A thousand shall fall at thy side

It's rare for a film to preach an imaginary moral as zealously as Red State does. Director Kevin Smith, known for indie comedies like Clerks (1994) and Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), fancies himself the voice of one crying in the wilderness warning of the dangers posed by... what exactly? Red State (2011) is a transitional film, if a transition to not much: Smith swears his upcoming two-part Hit Somebody will be his final feature.

It's no wonder Smith struggled to find the funding for the production or that he was subsequently unable to find a distributor, leading to the director's infamous 'implosion' at Sundance and the apparently spontaneous decision to self-release the film instead of auctioning it off. During its limited theatrical release, Red State sank like a stone (its total domestic gross stands at $1.065 million) and was eventually foisted on a reluctant public through the uninspiring means of video-on-demand, Blu-ray and DVD.

The director's puzzlingly ill-informed invective against 'belief' will, sadly, turn out to be very much the most charming of Red State's flaws. We open with a teenager, Travis (Michael Angarano), being delayed on his way to school by fundamentalists protesting the funeral of the latest victim in a series of homophobic murders. Clunky plot-dumping reveals that the protesters are members of the insane Five Points Trinity Church, pastored by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).

That's by the by for Travis, though, for he is a teenager in a Hollywood film and thus concerned only with fornication. His opportunity comes when he and his friends Jarod (Kyle Gallner) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) drive off to meet an older woman Jarod has connected with online for group sex. On the way they scrape the car of Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), who's engaged in a homosexual affair, but they flee before recognising the lawman. Arriving at the trailer of Jarod's floozy somewhere in the backwoods, the hapless teenagers are drugged by the supposed sex partner, Sara (Melissa Leo).

When Jarod wakes up, he finds himself in a cage at Five Points Trinity Church, where Cooper preaches an impromptu sermon on the role of homosexuals as Satan's agents on earth straight out of a Chick Tract. This scene, by the way, is genuinely quite good: it's an exaggerated portrayal but still a terrific evocation of folksy fundamentalism. Then the children are led outside by Sara's daughter Cheyenne (the lovely Kerry Bishé, in shorts of a length no God-fearing Christian would abide), and Cooper's sheep kill another prisoner (Cooper Thornton) by wrapping him in plastic and shooting him.

Travis and Billy-Ray, locked beneath the church, manage to escape and find the Five-Pointers' massive underground weapons cache, but Billy-Ray is killed in a firefight with the fundamentalists while Travis hides. The gunshots, meanwhile, attract the attention of a Sheriff Wynan's deputy (Matt Jones), whose investigation is cut short by a shotgun blast to the chest. Before long, a tactical team of the ATF, led by Joe Keenan (John Goodman), has surrounded the church compound, and a siege and vicious gunfight ensue as the agents attempt to force their way in while the surviving teens are trying to get out.

Our plot rests on an impossibility: we're supposed to believe that the church - whose members proclaim the imminent outpouring of God's wrath on the LGBTQ community - has been secretly stockpiling hundreds of automatic weapons and murdering homosexuals without raising suspicion. (Cooper blatantly confesses to these crimes in front of his captives, in the best tradition of Bond villains.) What's more, I daresay that if the Five-Pointers are actively ensnaring horny teens to murder them, they'll have their hands full; yet this, being the reason our heroes are at the church, is the conceit underpinning the whole film.

The bizarre behaviour of the church is a direct function of Smith's total confusion as to their theology. That excessive 'belief' is bad, stated baldly by Goodman's character at the end, is the film's moral; but there doesn't actually seem to be too much content. Cooper's church appear as a wacky combination of Westboro Baptist Church and the Branch Davidians: fearful of the government, which it believes is under the control of homosexuals, suspicious of the 'Zionist media' and awaiting the Rapture, Five Points Trinity isn't like any religious group in the real world. Sure, there's a general paranoia underlying the various groups of the religious right, but Smith's liberal bias leads to him simply conflating every cliché he can think of into a chimerical menace.

That leaves Red State oddly crippled in its ambition to be the earnest message picture Smith intended. Is it supposed to warn us of Westboro Baptist? But they're not armed. David Koresh? Dead. Fundamentalism as a whole? But Red State's church is a grotesque, largely unrecognisable caricature of the real thing (which, for the record, I oppose). There's an element of liberal chauvinism to this. The painfully awkward Southern dialogue, used exclusively by Cooper's faithful, suggests Smith believes some rather ugly things about everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Smith's mess of a script leaves us no-one of the huge cast to root for, although Goodman comes closest. Michael Parks strains mightily against the millstone Smith has put around his neck, and his is the standout performance of the film, mixing ruthlessness with real affection for his congregation. In the second tier, there are a couple of actors familiar from vampire TV series (Marc Blucas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kevin Alejandro of True Blood). Ultimately the efforts of the capable cast are undone by the wanton cruelties of a script that delights in killing off characters just for the hell of it.

Smith is relatively new to directing action, but he acquits himself well with some rapid camera movement and Snorricam during chase scenes. Such flourishes, however, can't help stretch out the essentially shapeless plot - despite the large cast, Red State comes in at just 88 minutes including credits. Whatever Smith's intentions, it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing whatsoever. There's little as irritating as being lectured by an ignoramus, especially one moralising from a privileged position.

Standing in the afterglow of Rapture with the words the Rapture left

On her terrific second album Virtue, Emmy the Great deals with the break-up from her fiancé, who found Jesus and went overseas to become a missionary. She investigated Christianity, but ultimately realised she could not follow him on his path. In 'Paper Forest', she likens his departure to 'standing in the afterglow of Rapture with the words the Rapture left', while in 'Trellick Tower' she sees herself as a 'relic [Latin relictum, "left behind"] and you're so so high':

You propel yourself into the arms of God
And Christ and all the angels
Now you're high above the people
Who you used to call your equals...
You left me as a witness
Who can tidy up your business...

There's bitterness, confusion and longing in those songs, but they're tightly controlled poems too. It's no accident that Emma-Lee Moss uses the imagery of ascension and Rapture here. Her former lover removed himself and, when she found she didn't believe as he did, well: there's your cherubim and flaming sword. In declaring himself committed to a holy purpose, he claimed she - and everything they'd built up together and valued - was unholy. By ascending he'd counted his entire former world but dung.

That hurts. I don't think Christians usually appreciate how painful our conversion can be for others. 'Come out of her, my people', we hear, and we may even believe others' distress is evidence of their unredeemed nature. We've changed, in ways our loved ones could never foresee: we're open about the fact that we've died, after all. We've got a whole new set of priorities, and we disown everything that used to matter to us, the world they were a part of. What's more, our relationships with others suddenly seem conditional on a set of beliefs they find baffling, even repugnant.

When Emma-Lee Moss's fiancé became a Christian, he moved out of their shared house and broke off their engagement. That would make anyone feel not just rejected, but dirty: as if he thought she wasn't good enough to be with him. When she says that this shock was 'an odd and nasty thing I wanted out of my life', I believe her.

I have no answer to this, but the Rapture metaphor haunted me and caused me to think. Those who believe in the Rapture long for the final separation of Christians from non-Christians, much like Emmy's fiancé thought that breaking off his engagement was the godly thing to do. Among end-times believers, the Rapture isn't just an eschatological tenet: it is an event soon to be expected, to be longed and prayed for, dominating their lives. They can't wait for the moment when they'll be whisked away, leaving everyone else behind in the winepress of the wrath of God.

This parallel accounts, I think, for the similarity between Emmy's lyrics and a work like Therefore Repent! by the Canadian anarchist Jim Munroe, which deals with the experience of being left behind in a decaying post-Rapture America in a way that affirms the intrinsic worth of these people's stories. The radical turn of the Rapture-ready away from the world, on the other hand, denies human life on this earth any place other than scenery to be swept away by the coming deluge.

Such an anti-human ideology may be based on social despair, but ultimately an explanation that reduces accepting Jesus as 'your personal lord and saviour' to disaffection with society is simplistic. A key aspect of religious conversion (for me as for anyone else) is that it's unexpected and irreducible: that, while grounded in our own historical, real, material lives, it nevertheless transcends them, becoming fundamentally, almost by definition inexplicable.

This messianic convergence between the now and the not-yet is the basis for the great tension in the Christian life explored by St Augustine. In his fusion of history and theology, he traces 'the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find... interwoven, as it were, in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another' (City of God X, 1). Unlike earthly kingdoms, '[t]he safety of the City of God... can be possessed... only with faith and through faith' (XXII, 6).

Interwoven though they are, we mustn't confuse the two. Our country or even 'western civilisation' is not the City of God, no matter what its imagined 'Christian foundation'. Likewise, it won't do to pretend we're not still living in this world by fleeing into separatism or eschatological fantasy, or to feign fanatical certainty while secretly knowing we still see through a glass, darkly.

The incarnation - God choosing to become flesh and dwell among us - is the clearest indication that our lives are not merely the waiting room before heaven, a present-day purgatory: that, rather, God believes in life before death, as the old Christian Aid slogan has it. Until God wipes away all tears from their eyes, Christians are a part of this world, and we're called to be salt and light: to live with our neighbours, and draw out our lives to them.

Wars and rumours of wars

Left Behind: World at War (2005) caused consternation on the 'boards because it took a lot of liberties with the source material. This is tremendously wrong-headed. It is almost universally acknowledged that the Left Behind books are, in fact, extraordinarily awful, and boldly deviating from the written word should thus improve the product to no small extent.

So it turns out: World at War is far and away the best installment in the series. It's not Shakespeare, but it is a fully functional, at times legitimately exciting film - despite or perhaps because of the fact that its nominal heroes do virtually nothing throughout. With TV veteran Craig R. Baxley the series finds a director with actual visual flair for the first time, and in Lou Gossett, Jr. there's a seasoned actor to do some of the heavy lifting Cameron & Co. can't.

The opening scene - set inside a partially destroyed and burning White House - is clichéd and a little stupid, but it works well enough, and in that it's a microcosm of the film. Inside the Oval Office, President Gerald Fitzhugh (Lou Gossett, Jr.) videotapes his confession. There has, apparently, been a massive war, Fitzhugh and the United States have lost, and the president feels responsible. Can I say how nice it is to get a cold open instead of the laborious exposition of the previous films?

A week earlier, at a Global Community compound, a group clad in balaclavas break in and steal a shipment of bibles. Ambushed by GC forces, one of the burglars is captured. He turns out to be Chris (David MacNiven), who was converted in Tribulation Force. When he refuses to renounce Jesus at gunpoint, Chris is executed. We find out it's some time after the events of the last film. Individual nations still exist, but are largely disarmed and overshadowed by the one-world government of Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie). Armed resistance to the Global Community comes mainly from the militia movement; Christianity has been outlawed and driven underground.

The first time we meet the Tribulation Force, they're literally hiding in the basement beneath the ruins of New Hope Village Church, which doesn't seem particularly stealth. Pastor Bruce Barnes (Arnold Pinnock, taking over from Clarence Gilyard) is presiding over a double wedding: Chloe Steele (Janaya Stephens) is marrying Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron), while her father Rayford (Brad Johnson) weds Amanda White (Laura Catalano). Getting married together with your dad may be slightly creepy, but this scene is quite well done and somewhat touching, though cheesy.

The plot mostly turns on President Fitzhugh, though. His vice-president (Charles Martin Smith) has discovered that Carpathia is developing biological weapons, but he's assassinated by unknown gunmen before he can tell Fitzhugh all he knows. The president decides to investigate and, teaming up with Carolyn Miller (Jessica Steen) breaks into Carpathia's biological lab. (Shouldn't he have minions to do this for him?) They discover that Carpathia is infecting bibles with a deadly virus to take out the underground churches. Before long, Christians all over the country are falling ill, including Bruce and Chloe. Meanwhile, the president is liaising with his British (Shaun Astin-Olsen, whose British accent is terrible) and Egyptian (Elias Zarou) colleagues in planning an all-out surprise attack against Carpathia's forces.

As I mentioned earlier, the protagonists don't do much: Rayford and Amanda mostly spend their time fretting, Buck meets the president twice, and Chloe looks after the infected before falling ill herself. Actually moving the plot forward falls on Lou Gossett's capable shoulders. This is to the good although Johnson, Catalano and Stephens also continue to create strong, believable characters. I can't help feeling a little sorry for Gordon Currie, a competent actor looking for an angle on the villainous Carpathia the script just doesn't provide. Similar praise, hower, can't be lavished on Kirk Cameron and Chelsea Noble in the role of Hattie Durham: Mr and Mrs Kirk Cameron, the only True Believers in postmillennial dispensationalism among the cast, are far and away the worst actors, and I can't help feeling these two facts must somehow be related.

In contrast to previous installments' obsession with racing through the end times checklist, World at War's script benefits greatly from its interest in what it might be like to live in the earth's last days, and how Christians mightr persevere under Antichrist's persecution: That gives the film an emotional heft its lesser brethren simply cannot muster.

Of course, there's a great deal of wish fulfilment in there: the underground churches' activities allow the audience to feel like bad-ass guerrillas for the Lord. Like previous installments, World at War's plot suffers by running headlong into problems of divine sovereignty versus human free will: if the Antichrist's reign has been foretold, what point is there in fighting him? (The film also engages in a baffling Zwinglian polemic by insisting that communion wine 'is to remind you of the precious blood Christ shed for you' [emphasis mine] and is not, say, the blood of the covenant.)

What really elevates World at War above its predecessors, however, is the direction. In the hands of Craig Baxley, the film finally shows rather than tells: that initial shot of the ruined New Hope Village Church is shocking and communicates in one image what a film ago would have been established by ponderous dialogue. Although Baxley uses too many close-ups for comfort, his visual language is generally uncluttered, efficient and exciting. Further praise goes to the production design: with a limited budget, Rupert Lazarus creates tremendously satisfying sets, especially of Carpathia's headquarters, which are just the right combination of Lucifer and paranoia techno-thriller. The awkwardly inserted Christian songs are gone, too, praise Jesus.

World at War is superior to its predecessors in every way: wherefore, of course, it sank the franchise and destroyed any notion of another sequel. Six years on, though, it seems a reboot/remake is on the way. One can only hope Cloud Ten Pictures will scorn the tedium of the books and take their inspiration from the dark, effective and bold third film, faithfulness to the source material be damned.

In this series: Left Behind: The Movie (2000) | Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) | Left Behind: World at War (2005)

The trouble with pre-tribbers

I didn't expect it after the dire Left Behind, but Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) is one of those things you hear so much about but never encounter: an improved sequel. To be sure, it's still cheaply made, poorly written and outrageously idiotic; but it is all these things to a lesser extent than the first film was, and it even adds a couple of legitimately watchable scenes.

You may recall that Left Behind gave us the Rapture as foretold by premillennial dispensationalists. In the blink of an eye, God snatched away every single child as well as every born-again Christian on earth. The remnant of the still-corporeal seemed to take this in their stride and soon had bigger things on their minds: the rise of obviously evil Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie) to power at the United Nations.

At a UN meeting behind closed doors, Carpathia appointed ten lackeys to run the world for him. He also murdered two men in front of witnesses he then brainwashed - all except for Buck Williams, who was shielded from his mind control by 'accepting Christ' - and proclaimed the dawn of a single global government and the disarmament of the nations. This, it seems, was accepted by the international community without a single complaint - surprising, you might say, since Carpathia has no military force at his disposal to threaten anyone into compliance. This isn't your run-of-the-mill idiot plot: the very premise of Tribulation Force requires not just its protagonists, but pretty much everyone in the whole world to be a wretched moron.

Everyone, that is, but the ragtag bunch of American Christians who call themselves the Tribulation Force. As the film begins, we're told that in Israel, Tsion Ben-Judah (Lubomir Mykytiuk), the world's foremost religious scholar, is about to announce 'the single biggest piece of news in history'. (What, bigger than Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection? The filmmakers think so.) It seems that after careful study of the scriptures, Ben-Judah has determined the identity of the Messiah, and Nicolae Carpathia, who's just proclaimed a one-world religion, wants to make sure it's him.

Through personal connections - his ex-pseudo-mistress Hattie Durham (Chelsea Noble) is Carpathia's personal assistant - Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) becomes the pilot of the Antichrist's personal plane. Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron), meanwhile, is sent to cover Ben-Judah's proclamation in Jerusalem for the Global News Network, and decides to take the scholar to meet the two extraordinarily shaggy witnesses (Les Carlsen and Louis Negin) who are preaching Christ at the Western Wall. The problem: Carpathia's UN soldiers have sealed off the area and have been ordered to shoot any trespassers.

This plot point is mind-bogglingly stupid. Recall, perhaps, that the United Nations don't have a standing army; recall further that Israel, which controls Jerusalem and is the only sovereign nation that has not been integrated into Antichrist's empire, isn't exactly known for its cooperation with international institutions, especially when said institutions are inflaming religious tensions by gunning down pilgrims. Even so, this is the plot we get. My recap in fact skips most of the film: for two thirds of its running time, Tribulation Force is treading water.

That wheel-spinning at least gives us the series' first gospel talk. For a Christian film, Left Behind was curiously devoid of Jesus, befitting the authors' reading of the Bible as a mass of coded prophecies. In Tribulation Force, though, we get the new character of Chris (David MacNiven), who's lost his family to the Rapture. He shares a pretty nifty scene with Rayford, which feels almost raw and human, and although the gospel as preached by Tribulation Force is all about sin and judgment and not about Jesus' attractive qualities, as well as being curiously free of reference to the world-shattering events of Left Behind, this alone makes Tribulation Force better than its predecessor.

There's also a contrived romantic subplot between Buck and Chloe Steele (Janaya Stephens), involving one of those misunderstandings we all love so much when Chloe mistakes Buck's sister Ivy (Krista Bridges) for his fiancée. (This trope is virtually never gender-flipped.) Because women are irrational, it's perfectly all right for Rayford and Buck to join forces in patronising and manipulating Chloe in amusing and heartwarming ways until the misunderstanding is resolved. Although I do love some sanitised, subtext-heavy romance, it's still a bit much to take, especially when Buck and Rayford go off to Israel and leave Chloe behind. (This, however, gives us several hilarious scenes of unmistakeable sexual tension between Chloe and Ivy. I don't think that was intentional.)

That sort of relief makes Tribulation Force rather more enjoyable than its dour predecessor. Directed by the hack Bill Corcoran, the film trumps the books by considering what would actually happen to the world in the wake of the Rapture - although it still does so much less successfully than, for example, Jim Munroe's terrific comic book Therefore Repent!, which wisely focuses on the human element. The film also ends in the wrong place, going for a limp warm glow where a shock setback at the close would have worked much better.

Then there's the questionable theology. 'We can't stop [Carpathia], we can't change the events of the Bible', Bruce Barnes (Clarence Gilyard) suggests. Well, that's all dramatic tension gone; but despite Bruce's claim, the Tribulation Force does manage to foil Carpathia in this film. It throws up a much larger question, though: in the rigid end-times chronology of premillennial dispensationalism, what space is there for human beings to act and affect events? What exactly is the TF to do? Ultimately, dispensationalism has a flawed understanding of the relationship between God's sovereignty and human free will, and that's a millstone around the neck of a series that already has a considerable number of strikes against it.

In this series: Left Behind: The Movie (2000) | Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) | Left Behind: World at War (2005)

What hath God wrought?

There's something oddly fascinating about end times mania. You may remember that the Rapture was supposed to happen earlier this year, as predicted by Christian radio host Harold Camping. Virtually nobody believed Camping's arcane numerology, but the media lavished undeserved attention on him, and Facebook was awash in mockery.

When the apocalypse failed to occur, Camping retired. The real story, though, wasn't that somebody claiming to have deciphered a secret message in the Bible had once again been wrong: it was that people cared, if only to ridicule. In 2011, billboards announcing the imminent fiery destruction of all life seemed to be a visible sign of the extraordinary times of economic and political crisis we're living through.

And where there's a cultural obsession there's a market. Enter Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins with their Left Behind series of novels. Left Behind deals with the end of the world, all according to the teachings of premillennial dispensationalism. The books became a publishing phenomenon and would have turned their authors into millionaires if they hadn't been already. They mostly sold in the States, though: I've certainly seen Left Behind volumes prominently displayed in English Christian bookshops, but they remained largely unknown on this side of the pond.

It was inevitable there should be a film; and what a film! Left Behind promised to be the biggest, most ambitious Christian production of all time. Cloud Ten Pictures threw $17.4 million at the film despite realising it would go straight to video, as indeed it did: but strong sales led to Left Behind being thrown into cinemas after video release. Even so, it lost money and led Tim LaHaye to sue the producers, claiming they'd promised him a $40 million film. (Two direct-to-video sequels were produced, and there's supposedly a reboot in the offing.)

We open with a ludicrous fauxlosophic narration by Buck Williams (noted banana expert Kirk Cameron), followed by credits over stock footage of Jerusalem. Then we see something ominous: CGI warplanes approaching Israel both from the east and the west - and, for some reason, disgustingly fake-looking CGI tanks driving east across the Syrian border. Now it's time to meet Buck Williams, Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time, standing in the Israeli desert (played by a quarry in Ontario) where, thanks to a miracle formula by Dr Chaim Rosenzweig (Colin Fox), corn is being grown. Dr Rosenzweig refuses to sell his formula, but he'll exchange it for peace for Israel, yada yada yada -

- and then Israel is attacked by planes from all directions. A great deal of silliness ensues, but the gist of it is that the massive, overwhelming attack is defeated by the hand of God pretty much swatting the planes out of the sky. (The identity of the attackers is never clarified, by the way: in the book it's Russia and Ethiopia, thus supposedly fulfilling Ezekiel's prophecy about Gog and Magog. Miracle!)

The film's special effects budget thus blown in the first five minutes, it's time to meet the Steeles. They're Rayford (Brad Johnson), a pilot; Irene (Christie MacFayden), his devoted born-again wife; and their children, twenty-year-old Chloe (Janaya Stephens - Lacey Chabert was originally attached to play this part) and pre-teen Raymie (Jack Manchester). Chloe has a nose ring, and dialogue establishes this means she's rebellious & unsaved. Blah blah, Rayford is emotionally unavailable and misses his son's birthday, Chloe is displeased, Irene is saintly, and Raymie is annoying. Then Rayford goes off to work.

Now, about half an hour in, we've finally reached the first page of the novel this is based on: we're on a flight out of Chicago. In the middle of the night, people begin to notice some of the adults and all the children seem to be missing. There's much panicking, and Rayford has to turn the plane around; there's chaos on the ground, too, as the disappearances, apparently global, have led to panic and accidents. (Chloe, for example, has to hit the brakes to avoid a pile-up caused by a disappeared lorry driver. This suggests Christians should not be issued driving licences.) Anyway, the cast realise that the disappearances are the supposedly foretold Rapture: God has whisked away his church, and a seven-year tribulation is about to begin on earth. At the same time, there's a charismatic young man, Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), rising to power at the UN with promises of world peace.

I don't believe in the Rapture. It's a nineteenth-century invention based on incredibly weak scriptural evidence. (Fred Clark has done excellent in-depth dissections of the books, by the way. His criticism is intelligent, Bible-based and, best of all, hilarious.) I find LaHaye and Jenkins's approach - cobble together bits of 'prophecy' from Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel and wherever else you can find it into a maddeningly elaborate, fragile whole - both silly and deeply misguided. I've always been told not to waste my time with end-times prophecy since 'concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven' (Matthew 24:36).

But even if I didn't have deep reservations about the film's happy-clappy attitude to the rivers turning into blood, it would still be a bad film. As directed by Vic Sarin and shot by George Tirl, Left Behind looks totally anonymous. (The 4:3 TV aspect ratio doesn't help.) It reeks of cheapness: apart from the initital all-out attack on Israel the rest of the film is talking, and the dialogue is very bad.So's the acting, by and large. Chelsea Noble, Kirk Cameron's real-life wife, is dispiritingly awful, acting mostly by blinking a lot.

But it's very rare for a film to achieve total worthlessness: the laws of probability dictate that something will almost always work out right. And so it is with Left Behind.

Imagine you're Brad Johnson. You may have been a Marlboro Man in the eighties, but for a brief time you were hot stuff after your roles in Spielberg's Always and Milius' Flight of the Intruder. It didn't work out, though: instead of becoming a star, you turned into the poor man's Tom Berenger. Now you're approaching middle age, you've got a mortgage to pay, and there's this part in a Christian film about the apocalypse. It's silly, it's low-budget, and it will go straight to video. How do you approach that role?

You and I would probably be phoning it in. But clearly, we're not Brad Johnson, because he takes one look at the dismal material and creates a believable, relatable character using nothing but good old-fashioned acting skills acquired over long, moderately unsuccessful years in the business. He turns Rayford Steele, obnoxious and vapid on the page, into an actual living, breathing human being. He could anchor the film, if only they hadn't decided to demote him to supporting cast.

This is worth mentioning because of the baffling contrast between Johnson and our nominal lead, Kirk Cameron in the role of Buck Williams. After his conversion to Christianity and the end of Growing Pains, Cameron became increasingly evangelistic and didn't do much acting in mainstream films anymore. As a fervent believer in 'prophecy' he wanted to do Left Behind and create the greatest/only evangelistic blockbuster of all time. They even rebalanced the material to make Buck the main character rather than part of an ensemble. But here's the thing: Cameron is terrible. He can't convincingly present things he actually passionately believes in. He is a very bad actor, and his presence is the equivalent of cement shoes to Left Behind.

It was a tremendously misguided enterprise from the start. Many of the scenes are laughable when they're meant to be sincere, and for some reason the filmmakers decided to shoehorn in contemporary Christian music whenever anyone shuts their mouth for more than a couple of seconds. Ultimately, though, Left Behind is tripped up by its theology as much as by the incompetence of most of those involved.

When Rayford Steele tells Hattie that '[i]t's not about us. It's about something bigger and something better', Left Behind's failure as a Christian work is laid open for all to see. Actually, it is about us; God does what he does because he loves human beings. We're not just ants to be slaughtered from heaven. It's no wonder LaHaye and Jenkins don't understand that, though. There is no Jesus in Left Behind, no cross and no forgiveness, only death and judgment; and I'm glad that's not the world we live in.

In this series: Left Behind: The Movie (2000) | Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) | Left Behind: World at War (2005)