.webp?h=11 "P-Hat (blue) - Ughhhh coming up with different descriptions for RuneScape party hats")
Synopsis
Months after the sudden disappearance of everyone's most irritating relatives 
, newly minted Christian Rayford Steele 
attempts to convert his millennial daughter Chloe 
to the Christian faith. Meanwhile, Chloe's boyfriend Cameron "Buck" Williams 
, the host of cable television's most obnoxious opinion program, stumbles across evidence that the elite 
is lying about the covid rapture numbers.
Soon Buck discovers a plot to exploit everyone's fear and anxiety to establish a one world government, one world currency, and universal social credit system, all under the control of incredibly uncharismatic Antichrist Nicolae "Jetty" Carpathia. 
Review
It's hard to explain what makes something look like a "real movie," but this looks like a real movie. The shots are well composed and the color grading feels cinematic without looking artificial. The interiors are gloomy and lived in, while the streets capture a sense of urban blight and despair. Everything feels like a run-down shithole. Finally Detroit's filmmaking tax credit is paying off. 
The script also makes major improvements to the novel. The book's biggest flaw was failing to connect the Antichrist plot to the Rapture plot--in the book, the one world government emerges simply because that's the kind of thing those people do. The movie, meanwhile, draws the obvious connection of authoritarians seizing power in a crisis. 
The down side of this is that the whole thing is obviously an extremely hamfisted covid metaphor rushed through production during the coofdemic. And because fundamentalists don't understand subtext, covid gets mentioned by name multiple times so you'll be sure to connect the dots. Aside from the name drops it's just a general pileup of every current rightoid grievance with a loose coat of Bible prophecy paint. 
The government fakes additional rapture-like disappearances and tells non-essential workers to stay home (?).
All of the stats about the vanishings come through a single company called "Dominator Analytics"
All media outlets, social media, and payment processing systems are owned by the same globalist billionaire who wants to take over the world
The protagonist googles "Bible prophecy" and all the videos have been removed for violating the "terms of service." Then he gets his account suspended for unspecified violations (yes jannies got called out in a rapture movie)
Anyone who catches onto all of this gets the
treatment.
Actual dialogue
"It's like, everybody knows there was a second wave, but nobody's actually seen it happen."
"Welcome to a new reality. A Great Reset."
"I think these new vanishing counts that we now proudly display on every broadcast are probably fake."
"The Rapture wasn't debunked. Someone on TV told you it was debunked and you believed them."
[Of the Antichrist] "I haven't seen anything like this since Obama."
Miscellaneous
They didn't have the rights to the UN logo (?) so they made their own version with the map at the wrong projection
The whole thing is narrated by a lispy black guy who's still delivering exposition well past the one hour mark
This is in the Left Behind (2014) continuity, not the Left Behind: The Movie (2000) continuity. Note that both series recast between every movie. Nic Cage was too expensive so they got church basement DVD actor Kevin Sorbo to be Rayford Steele instead.
Somebody vandalized a church by scrawling "SCIENCE!!!!" on the wall
The filmmakers either forgot or retconned that literally all children canonically vanished. The world should have freaked out a lot harder; instead they act like this was maaaybe 3x as bad as covid
One character is killed by a car bomb (with flashing lights, which is just sitting in the back seat of the car that the protagonists were just riding in and they didn't notice) that goes off only after the other characters have already left the car
The movie ends with the Antichrist shooting people gangsta style
One scene after characters discuss the importance of faith even in times of doubt, they dig up the dead grandma's coffin to prove that her body vanished and the rapture was real
Overall this is still an objective improvement over both previous LB adaptations. However, nothing will top the fever dream charm of the classic 80's budget rapture movies. IMO this kind of movie actually gets worse when you do it well. You lose the clumsy earnestness and are left with smugness. !christians
.webp?h=11 "Nuzzles, pounces on you, UwU, you're so warm!..")
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It's interesting that somewhere around 2020, christcucks improved their media dramatically. You can even see it in the changes from ultimate modern bad christcuck media God's Not Dead (kino r-slurred 2014 with Kevin Sorbo himself) to God's Not Dead 4 (boring, but matured and nuanced for a bad christcuck movie. 2021) Then you get Sound of Freedom, Nefarious and Amazon Jesus and the new Jew show.
None of them are really "good". I borderline regret watching them, but they're very passable as real media, with bits of real quality. It's a pretty huge jump from every bit of christshlock from before. It's like they had a meeting.
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I agree that these sorts of things have started to look and sound like "real" movies, but the overall artistic quality of the film in the OP is still pretty low, and I think it's actually lower than that of the old-school fever dream VHS's. Old Rapture movies created this queasy alternate reality, the world was full of unmarked white vans that stalked you to ominous Casio synth music. The fear was that the world might warp into this weird Godless thing and strip you of all power and dignity. It wasn't "good," but it felt like something.
Studios figured out the scientific template to consistently make "good" movies by the mid 2010s, and they began to enforce it. I don't think movies made with the template are actually good, but you can use it to produce interchangeably tolerable content. However, I think we're going to miss the "bad" movies, because they had some type of vision.
Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist is about the the present as filtered through a common and uninteresting political POV. Meanwhile, we're currently living in a world where the "computer scary 😳" paranoia of the 80's fundie shitkino is starting to make a lot more sense.
Imagine a hammy movie where a Sam Altman character and the posthuman "let's make our own gods" techstrag crew create some supercomputer AI model that channels the devil and starts making people worship it in exchange for eternal digital bliss. It begins seemingly performing miracles. The government, military, and churches are all compromised as the model gets its tendrils everywhere, and electronic surveillance cowtools are turned against the few remaining dissenters, even as they must survive a series of biblical plagues. Our heroes, infinitely outclassed by forces beyond human comprehension, must cast themselves on the mercy of Almighty God even as they mount a desperate mission to blow up the evil mainframe--doomed to failure because we cannot defeat the Devil under our own power. Being strong won't save us. But in the end, Christ will.
That's the kind of thing an 80's or 90's church basement auteur would have come up with for our present moment--paranoid, insane, but rooted in some tendency that actually exists, and in a deep skepticism of the vast global forces that overpower ordinary human beings.
So where are these movies? Why, when confronted with the threat of an out-of-control technological nightmare future, do boomers just Like the picture of the Guatemalan kid who made a life size elephant out of popsicle sticks?
The reason is simple: rightoids have begun to think they are on the "right side of history," that their victory is inevitable and thus all the centers of power (military, government, technological, even cultural) will be on their side, as cowtools to amuse them or crush their enemies. Omnidirectional paranoia has been displaced by that old Satan-approved desire to get power in the "right" hands so that the "right" people can be punished by the gods of the new world. Rightoids no longer fear the antichrist. Their vision of a government oppressor is, like, Dr. Fauci--an annoying little nerdy weakling bureaucrat to be defeated by the Strong and thrown in prison. Forever.
The movies are superficially better and artistically vacuous because they are now made from a position of strength. They aren't scary because they're made by people who aren't afraid of anything.
!kino !christians
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You described a world of darkness setting called demon the descent (thoubeit it's more gnostic on the player/good guy side, also you are all terminators trying desperately to blend into humanity and not get reassimilated into the god machine), and to answer your question yes it's a very good story seed.
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Remember that... Omega something. Where the EU created a wafer to solve world hunger.
Boomer times Redactor got his friends to watch this with him. It was so extreme and over the top.
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No, I almost mean the opposite of this about 2020ish - artistic quality wise. The ones I mentioned have a surreal level of difference in writing, acting, and story along with production if you're any familiar with the last 40 years of christcuck media.
OP Left Behind is the same bag as God's Not Dead 1 (and really all of them, but the difference between 1 and 4 is striking.) 2010s sort of equalized production more between all film budgets. That VHS fever dream isn't quite churchcandy unique - lots of low budget and TV movie stuff gave that vibe back in the day. I know what you're saying though about the specific rapture queasy alternate reality though, that they really put their fear into those movies and don't have it anymore.
Your analysis on the fear being gone may come into play with the newest media being better.
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I don't want to sweep up The Chosen or whatever in me bitching about boring modern Christian media. Obviously some stuff out there is just completely better than what "Christian media" used to be. However, I don't know that God's Not Dead 4 is truly artistically better, it's just more competent.
My overall point is that there's value in weirdness, and that old "underground" Christian media (like pre-2000) was weird in interesting ways that have not been replicated since.
The ideal is media that is both good and interesting. However, I tend to prefer bad+interesting to good+uninteresting, and I think that the culture industry has gotten really good at producing the latter.
Incidentally, I think The Passion of the Christ is actually a rare example of a "weird" Christian movie with an actual budget. I love the demon-haunted world vibe, it's very different from your usual stations of the cross or Sunday School pageant.
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no way
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If it were a pseudo doc like ancient
aliens 
id watcg
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Not exactly the same thing, but "Apocalypse" (1998) delivers the end times/rapture plot heavily through mock newscasts. This technique has been overdone more recently because low budget filmmakers realized how effective it was, but this movie was actually one of the better examples. It captured the blend of heightened reality and absurd unreality that we get from watching strange, disturbing, and inexplicable things on the news.This sort of put me in the headspace of a jittery fundamentalist grandma watching Fox coverage of Iran launching missiles at Israel, waiting/hoping/fearing for the whole thing to morph into apocalyptic spiritual drama at any moment. And "Apocalypse" committed to the news bit instead of just using it for an opening exposition montage.
One of these Apocalypse movies also has the exact same scene of someone digging up a relative to prove the rapture is real, which is pretty funny--that it's happened twice, and that the film in the OP thought it was good enough to rip off. I think this is the first Apocalypse but it might be the second
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Also !christians if you are posting on rdrama you are the PERFECT audience for old end times movies because you can appreciate the level of absolute dreck, while still perceiving the sublime God that the filmmakers are trying, however clumsily, to tell you about. What a contrast between the fallen (shitty-art) state of man and the transcendent nature of the gospel. No Christian movie made with sincerity can ever be 100% bad, because it contains that little divine spark. Faith has knit the human and divine together. In some small, stupid way, the garbage movie belongs to God--just like we garbage people do.
The fun in laughing at a these movies doesn't go away just because God's around. But I like to think it richens it. Like we're just kind of laughing about absurdity, about the strange emotional heights of faith and the oddness of our own beliefs. And the fact that the filmmakers proudly and sincerely presented this clumsy, stupid art to God like a child's macaroni picture, and he still put it on the fridge with all the others. Not because it deserves to be there. But because he loves us.
When one of these movies hits just right, you get this perfect pathos/bathos explosion that's just
unlike anything else. One of these movies had me laughing at the ending, AND crying, at the same time.
I should say that there's a big difference between classic VHS slop (SOVL) and the stuff they're making nowadays. The old stuff was created because they thought their shitkino would save souls. The new stuff is largely just circlejerking to make money. The Left Behind franchise killed the apocalypse
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Posts like this is why I do Heroine.
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Ty.
(Blaire witch
and its consequences....)
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I read the books when i was younger. It was action packed and pretty dope tbh
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So the Left Behind movies are like the Spiderman movies, in that they've been remade several times with different actors, at least twice telling the same origin story, and all based on an endless series of books?
Is this one a non-book-based sequel? It's likely far less confusing if I'd actually watched any, rather than just reading reviews.
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I thibk theres like 40 something books. It ends.opp
I think the best thing to do if your curious is read it before you see it. I think even the kids version (i have both since i was younger when i read it) was pretty truthful abt the world and even added aspects like drugs and violence. Whatever.
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Pretty much, but LB can't even keep the actors within the same series.
The original trilogy loosely adapts one book per movie.
Left Behind (2014) adapts roughly the first act of the original book, focusing entirely on the disaster element. Think a serious "Airplane" with the chaos caused by the Rapture instead of fish for dinner. It does not include the antichrist or conspiracy plots.
This movie adapts the remainder of the original book, focusing on the Antichrist and conspiracy plots and the post-rapture faith of the characters.
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Ackshually Airplane! is based on the earlier Zero Hour which was a serious movie.
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Ah, thanks. And the 2014 one was the Nicolas Cage one. It looked like The Langoliers but with more survivors.
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I like the fact that some shitty movies have only the fact that Nicholas Cage plays in it as a plus point and those movies are still watched as Nicholas Cage in the movie is considered a good enough plus point on its own.
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Darn I remember Left Behind from Jesus School but I didn't realize it was a whole butt franchise
There's even a bideo game!
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Imo this has nothing to do with the storyline and is anoyher dumb building game
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I liked Andromeda
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I never watched it but one of these days I probably will since nobody makes scifi shows anymore.
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