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)

Once upon a time in the Middle East

The recent slew of films on Lebanon has focused on the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country: Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2009) both dealt with Israeli soldiers' experience. Incendies (2010) is a high-profile film from a Lebanese perspective, based on a play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, that is singularly uninterested in Israel (the 1982 invasion is mentioned in a throwaway comment), presenting instead an odyssey of civil war, family and reconciliation.

Québec, 2009: at the opening of the will, Jeanne Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and her brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) discover that their recently deceased mother wants them to pass on letters to their father, whom they believed dead, and their brother, of whose existence they were unaware. Simon, angry at his mother's unusual request, refuses to return to the unspecified Middle Eastern country, but Jeanne decides to find out the truth in a country whose language she doesn't even speak.

This is interwoven with the story of her mother, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), a Christian from the south of the country, who in around 1970 conducts a love affair with a Muslim refugee. Members of her community kill her lover, but Nawal is already pregnant. She consents, ath the insistence of her grandmother, to give her newborn son to an orphanage and is sent away to university. As the country descends into sectarian strife, she leaves in search of her son but finds the orphanage destroyed. Pretending to be a Muslim for safety, she travels in a group that is eventually massacred by Christian militias. Having escaped only by revealing she is a Christian, Nawal joins a Muslim warlord's forces to wreak vengeance on the killers.

For much of Incendies, I was confused by the film's refuseal to name its setting, for the fictional Middle Eastern country is clearly Lebanon, the place of Wajdi Mouawad's birth. The specific situation of a civil war between Christian and Muslim militias over large numbers of refugees in the south, interrupted by a 'foreign invasion', is not what you'd call vague. By the end I understood. There is a plot twist that is grossly unlikely 'in reality', but brings home the theme of the film:

Jeanne and Simon's brother (Abdelghafour Elaaziz) is also their father, Nawal's son who, rescued from the destruction of his orphanage by a warlord, became a soldier and, after switching sides, eventually a torturer in the service of the government. In this capacity he raped his mother, rendering her pregnant. Further, he no longer lives in Lebanon, having left the country for Québec after the conclusion of the civil war.

This twist, an allusion to Greek myth, necessarily throws the film into unreality. Nor, for a film about Lebanon, is Incendies terribly interested in judging that conflict: it is neither pro- nor anti-sectarian, but treats the events of civil war as fate. This attitude is best encapsulated in the retired Muslim warlord Wallat Chamseddine (Mohamed Majd, in a terrific scene-stealing performance), who is neither regretful nor proud of his actions, only wary of the possible consequences. Incendies depicts the civil war as terrible but nonetheless unalterable: its focus is on family shaped by conflict.

All the same, Incendies is a harrowing indictment of inhumanity. A number of scenes dealing with rape as prison torture and its aftermath are very difficult to watch, as is the massacre of a passenger bus by militias, including the shooting of a child. The acting is excellent, especially Lubna Azabal, who portrays Nawal as a person driven by love and, increasingly, revenge for her suffering that leads her to participate in the civil war on the 'other side'. The fluidity of her identity is signalled by a scene in which she quickly hides her cross necklace and puts on a headscarf to approach a group of Muslims.

The writing, adapted from a play, it is perhaps too 'literary': 'L'enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge' is great writing, but it rings false in the film's setting. (Incidentally, I was pleased to discover my French appears to have gone from abysmal to merely bad, as I was able to understand most of the French dialogue.) The often over-elaborate style points to the film's mythic quality: though rooted in the Lebanese Civil War, it becomes a parable of conflict in the region.

Why we shouldn't celebrate Osama's death

At 1am on May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was attacked at his compound in Pakistan by 20 to 25 helicopter-borne Navy SEALs. In a forty-minute operation Osama was shot in the face twice, killing him. The body was quickly dropped into the Arabian Sea.

The reaction in the West was euphoric. Celebrations broke out in the United States. The media were hardly more reticent and celebrated anything from the end of the 'War on Terror' to Obama's now allegedly guaranteed re-election. Osama bin Laden, that incarnation of evil, was finally gone.

I feel personally deeply uncomfortable with the cheering on of the targeted killing of a human being - any human being. At the risk of preaching: breaking forth in joy should never be our reaction to death. That we live in a world in which it may sometimes be necessary to kill other human beings is a terrible fact, one that ought to occasion a fundamental critique of the way we live on this earth. Joy at death is never justified, merely a symptom of our sickness. To gloat over the bodies of our dead enemies, of someone who has been hunted for years, is the opposite of humanity. Osama bin Laden, like Saddam Hussein before him, has been hounded to his grave and beyond, and that should lead to some deep soul-searching in a society that professes to be civilised.

That much is, I hope, uncontroversial; controversy follows. Osama bin Laden was not a demon, not evil incarnate. Fighting him was not some sort of historic challenge the West had to pass. He was a human being with hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations. His millennial outlook stemmed from an understanding of the history of the Middle East - specifically, the history of Western imperialism in the region. As he said in 2004, in the video address in which he first admitted to planning the 9/11 attacks:

Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example...
God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed - when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US sixth fleet.
In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

 Of course this is propaganda. But at its bottom is undoubtedly a real situation: namely, the Western partition of the Middle East that followed the First World War ('Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated', Osama said in 2001), and the sordid history of imperialism (first predominantly British, then chiefly American) that continues to this day. Osama's analysis is flawed: he assumes imperialism constitutes a 'crusading' assault on Islam, when it is really a question of economic interests and strategic paramountcy. From this incorrect analysis stems the viciousness and futility of al-Qaida's struggle. That real Western domination and subjugation of Muslims lay at the bottom of the Jihadist attacks was of course never acknowledged by the United States and its allies, who preferred to ascribe their enemies' determination to blind fanaticism. All this, of course, while massively adding to the grievances with the hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced from Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

So here's my second reason for rejecting the joy at Osama bin Laden's death: it is another act of silencing the voices crying out in protest against the violent and continued suppression of the people of the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was never worthy of our respect. He was a ruthless mass murderer, but he became so in reaction to real injustices. We should feel uneasy about joining in the celebrations when the world's greatest power - the power that turned Iraq into a graveyard and even now aids in the suppression of pro-democracy uprisings in the region - kills one of its enemies. Osama was never a threat to 'the world'. Throughout the 'War on Terror' Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were always the weaker party, hunted with the most modern weaponry. al-Qaida's weakening was always the likely outcome.

There is, however, hope in all this. As al-Qaida is becoming less relevant, the Middle East is being overtaken by democratic uprisings. Terrorism was the political and military expression of Middle Easterners' impotence and oppressed state; Tahrir Square is the expression of their coming to freedom - real popular freedom, not 'governance' at gunpoint, almost everywhere in defiance of the United States' wishes. It is good that Jihadism is taking a back seat; it is better that democracy has a chance of taking its place.

Childhood and carnage

Confession first: I know not a thing about Iranian cinema, although I should. The Iranian New Wave, the interweb tells me, is all kinds of important. So I’m glad that I was introduced to Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand). The Kurdish-Iranian director’s 2004 feature was the first picture to be filmed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and it serves as a very fine advertisement for the Iranian film industry. Even though it’s all in Kurdish.

The film opens in the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Turkish border, a boy nicknamed Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) is trying to bring colour television to the camp since the elders are anxious to follow the news. Satellite is the sometimes tyrannical, but usually good-hearted leader of the local children, whom he commands in clearing minefields. Children, some of them crippled by stepping on mines, selling the very same to survive: this isn’t exactly cheery stuff. Among the newer arrivals is the armless boy Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) with his sister Agrin (Avaz Latif), who take care of a blind toddler. Satellite falls for Agrin in the way of pre-pubescent boys. Hengov, meanwhile, appears to be able to predict the future, and Satellite begins to stake his personal authority on the truth of the boy’s dreams.

Turtles Can Fly is an odd film by the narrow standards we usually apply. It has no villains for a start. The dreadful conditions of war and poverty in which the children (there are a few adults in the background, but all the main characters are children) find themselves are seen by them as given, almost natural conditions. In this Turtles Can Fly reminded me of Takahata Isao’s 1988 animated film Grave of the Fireflies: both films are about children who have never known any life other than the inhumane situation in which they are forced to exist, and they adapt.

This brings me, inevitably, to one of the criticisms levelled at Turtles Can Fly: the accusation that it is pro-American and condones the US conquest of Iraq. This seems to me amazingly wrong-headed. First, it is downright perverse to condemn Saddam’s victims for rejoicing in his downfall, and indeed the Kurds suffered terribly under the Iraqi dictator; there is little doubt they are freer and more prosperous now than they were before 2003. I opposed the invasion of Iraq then and still oppose it now; but it is a simple truth that Saddam’s enemies, the Kurds among them, are now generally better off. Second, Ghobadi is not interested in the sort of argument his critics would have him engage in here. He instead explores the experience of childhood, not in its wide-eyed wonder but in its innocent acceptance of the world as experienced.

Terrible things are done by children in Turtles Can Fly. But it’s difficult to condemn them. The conflict of the film is between characters who all want what’s best, but do not agree on what that might be. Its world is limited: the Americans and Iraqi Arabs only make very short non-speaking appearances. This deliberate self-limitation is Ghobadi’s greatest strength here. He refuses to create a world larger than what its characters experience. The repeated attempts to perceive and understand the outside world through the medium of satellite television are thus both a poignant and humorous reminder of the problems encountered on the way.

Let the word ‘humorous’ not mislead you. Turtles Can Fly is a brutal and bleak experience, a devastating examination of the ways in which war victimises and brutalises children. That’s what the jingoistic cultural output of the western world, from Saving Private Ryan to Remembrance Day speeches, misses: war isn’t combat for some noble goal, it’s children with their arms blown off. That was true in World War Two, and it’s true in all our modern wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq and Somalia. We gave Saddam the weapons of mass destruction he no longer had when we invaded his country and killed tens of thousands of his people.

But if the film is dark, it isn’t a dreadful watching experience. There’s the talent of the director, which creates beauty in unexpected places; what’s more, the movie is suffused with a humanistic faith in people’s ability to choose good in the darkest of times. You’re left wondering what will become of the protagonists after the film’s close, and desperately hoping they will prosper.