Hold on to your clothes and place your seat tables in the upright position. Left Behind is imminently returning and this time with Nicolas Cage. Exciting, right? I can hardly contain myself.
Since we have had two reviews for Left Behind, and the rest of the internet seems to hate the film as well, I decided I would explain some of the history behind the legal battles between Left Behind creators (Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins) and the Left Behind filmmakers (Cloud Ten Pictures).
Cloud Ten Pictures ‘ the motion picture company that has graced us with every Left Behind series ever made ‘ is run by Peter and Paul Lalonde. I firmly believe that the Lalonde brothers are incredibly intelligent businessmen. Years ago, they managed to win the film rights to the Left Behind series before the Left Behind books topped the charts. This was a brilliant move because they grabbed the rights super cheap and before all the major studios that know how to make good movies could bid for it.
For those who don’t know, Cloud Ten has created a market for terrible, apocalyptic, pre-tribulation pictures. These are the guys who put Mr. T and Gary Busey into end times movies. They know what it takes to make a borderline profitable movie and have figured out that being good is not part of that equation. Their audience, who can’t discern that those who are taken in Matthew 24 are not believers but receivers of God’s wrath, are also unable to discern things like story arc, narrative, terrible acting and apocalyptically bad script writing.
Cloud Ten has never made a good movie. Not even once.
This bothered the Left Behind creator Tim Lahaye so much that he sued Peter Lalonde for breach of contract. Yes, the original Left Behind movies were so terrible that they were taken to court.
LaHaye and Jenkins said they naively sold the movie rights to “Left Behind” too early and ended up with what Jenkins called glorified “church basement movies.”
The original Left Behind films were supposed to have a budget of $40 million dollars. They were to be Hollywood blockbusters. They were to fill the theaters and break box office records for Christian cinema. After all, Left Behind sold more copies than The Hunger Games. This was our Harry Potter.
But thanks to Cloud Ten, Christianity never got its epic franchise. The film wasn’t made for $40 million. It was made with only $4 million. Instead of raking in hundreds of millions in the box office, the film was released straight to DVD. This made the box office numbers only barely surpass the budget of the film at a measly $4,224,065.
The original film was a complete flop and destroyed the extremely lucrative Left Behind brand.
So for the past decade since Left Behind 3, the Left Behind film rights have been tied up in legal battles. Eventually Cloud Ten Pictures earned the right to make more films and that brings us to today.
The newest rendition of the Left Behind series is so bad and so much worse than the others that it is its own self contained proof for Dispensationalism.
The entire plot centers on Nicolas Cage trying to stop an unruly group of passengers on an airplane and land safely. Yes, I know, that is exactly the same plot as Con-Air.
But Con-Air was smart. This film is insultingly stupid.
In one scene Cage is flying an airplane whose wing bursts into flames as it leaks fuel, only after they miraculously managed to survive an actual collision with another plane. Nicolas Cage calmly asks which direction the fuel is leaking and assures the flight attendant that the ignited fuel will simply burn out, defying all known laws of physics.
At this point, I immediately paused the video and called my brother who is training to be a pilot and asked him what the procedure was for a plane that is spewing ignited fuel from the wing.
He replied, Speak into the black box and tell your family you love them.
Just because your movie is fiction doesn’t mean the writing can defy reality.
Unfortunately for the audience, the plane doesn’t crash. It stays up in the air for the entire film. Stretching the first few chapters of the first book in the Left Behind series into a two hour long film that never ends.
Cloud Ten was sued for making a bad Left Behind movie. The newest rendition of Left Behind is not just bad. It’s act of vengeance on Tim LaHaye for the years of courtroom battles.
Is there any other way to justify using Nicolas Cage, an actor who makes a living and namesake for starring in terrible movies? Is there any other way to explain the terrible movie posters, ridiculous meme’s from the Facebook page, and awful film trailers?
Left Behind has all the signs of a movie made by the atheists of Reddit to mock Christianity. It’s as if Cloud Ten decided to turn the pages of Tim Lahaye’s book into toilet paper.
Sure, making bad movies to prove that you legally can might upset the people who tried to stop you from doing so, but more importantly it’s a blight on the creative abilities of Christ’s Church. Christians should be known for more than bad straight to VHS films. They should be known for declaring the creative excellencies of Jesus Christ in their creative works. The newest rendition of Left Behind isn’t just bad; it’s a blasphemous reflection of the creative nature of God.
The film itself is a weird eschatological dilemma. On one hand it proves that Christian cinema is truly getting worse ‘ pointing to Dispensationalism. Since, however, Left Behind really is one of the worst movies ever made, any and all future Christian films can only get better ‘ pointing to Postmillennialism.
Hopefully, this means all future eschatology films will disappear in a puff of logic.
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