The third in a series of movies about how God’s supposedly gonna play magnifying-glass-and-anthill with the unrepentant.
And yet they’ve made a third one. This one isn’t even from one of the books, either; it’s an entirely made-up one supposedly based on book 2, Tribulation Force, which was supposed to be the basis for the last steaming pile of corn-infested poo they made (which I was forced to watch with my junior high students as part of their chapel).
Expect the Christians to win at the end, even though that’s not how ">Darbyist premillenial dispensationalism is supposed to work. I have enough problems with that particular branch of lousy End-Times theology, but if you’re gonna base a movie on it, you should at least be consistent with it. But no. The filmmakers go along with it only until they reach the ending, which has to be happy, so they chuck it and there’s some kind of minor victory involved in which the forces of good-but-stupid succeed somewhat.
Christianity Today bothered to interview the clueless director, Peter Lalonde, and I call him clueless because he has no idea why his previous movies did poorly. Listen to the excuses:
- He actually thinks the bad reviews of his previous two movies were because of the message. “We pretty much knew that mainstream critics were going to hammer us just because of the message,” Lalonde said. Then why do most of the reviews complain about the one-dimensional characters, poor writing, lousy special effects, and bad acting? James Bearardinelli wrote the review I agree the most with; but you can also find less-than-enthusiastic reviews in Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 16% rating.
- He thinks if people could have done a better job, why didn’t they pony up the dough to get the rights? Well, if you’ve ever read these novels, you’d realize there’s not a lot to work with.
- He thinks the first movie did poorly (making $4.2 million) because it had been pre-released on video. “We were asking theaters to do something they had never done before,” he said, “We were asking them to play a movie that was already out on video.” Obviously he’s forgotten about George Lucas, whose re-release of the first three Star Wars movies didn’t do too shabby. But there’s a big difference: Poor writing aside, Lucas can make good movies.
Instead of distributing his new piece of crap to the theaters—who, considering previous ticket sales, likely won’t bother unless they’re owned by Christians—Lalonde is distributing this movie to churches, who will inflict it upon their unsuspecting congregations. Sadly, it ought to do well. Not because it’ll be any good, but because Christians are overwhelmingly forgiving about their entertainment when it’s produced by well-meaning Christian producers. That’s why
And I could expand this into Christian pop, Christian fiction, Christian magazines… but I’ll be ranting too long.