Love/Hate: Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over one of the most obscure titles in this franchise, Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica! The original Survivor is, by far, one of the worst games in this entire franchise. However, this was largely down to the execution being really poor, so the prospect of seeing the concept of “first person shooter Resident Evil game” get another try was an intriguing one at least. Could Survivor 2 do what its predecessor could not? Read on to find out…

Note: I did not play this game with a light gun. This may colour my opinions on this game somewhat, but I honestly doubt it. This is not a game where precision matters (even moreso than the original Survivor), and I just can’t see how a light gun would make an appreciable difference compared to a controller as a result. All opinions here are made under the assumption that I’m experiencing this game using a controller.

Love

Umm… this is a first for the Love/Hate series. Nothing. There’s nothing I love about this game. In every other piece of media I’ve covered, no matter how much I hated that media, there was always something nice I could say about it. This is the first time where I sit down, try to think of anything nice I could say, and cannot. Any positive thing I can think of is then immediately spoiled as I remember some major caveat that pushes it into “mixed”.

So, yeah, buckle in…

Mixed

  • The Controls – Survivor 2 came out right before Halo: Combat Evolved released and nailed down how to design a shooter for console. Unfortunately, that means that Survivor 2 has a really weird control scheme by modern standards. Left analog stick moves your character, right analog stick… does nothing. No, you need to use L1 and R1 to turn your character, and then square to shoot. I kinda see what they were going for, and in a vacuum it’s a reasonably ergonomic layout, but it feels so foreign to a modern gamer’s mindset. In fact, I had to go into my emulation settings and change all my button inputs to make it more natural to me. Even then, I managed to break the R2 button on my RP4+ playing this game from the constant gunfire spam. All the more reason for me to hate it I guess.
  • AI Partner – Survivor 2 lets you have an AI-controlled partner with you at all times, which is helpful for providing some extra fire or drawing enemy aggro. I legitimately like having them there, but their AI is also dumber than a sack of bricks. In particular, if you end up against any kind of strong enemy (particularly against end-of-level bosses or Nemesis), they’ll run right into them and die very quickly because they don’t know enough to run.

Hate

  • Pathetic Playtime – Look, I’m not someone who rags on about gameplay length. I tend to prefer a short game so I can move on to something else. However, even I have my limits: Survivor 2‘s campaign lasts approximately 40 minutes. I’VE LASTED LONGER THAN 40 MINUTES! Like, I’ve legitimately lost more time in Fallout 3 forgetting to save and then dying than I would get from the playtime of this game. The reason it’s so short? There are only five levels and they all last mere minutes.* I had to think about how much I’d hold this against the game – it was, after all, designed as an arcade cabinet game first and foremost. There’s a different sort of design philosophy there and a shorter runtime would be expected. However, even with that in mind, I can’t give Survivor 2 a pass. First of all, it was released as a full boxed game in Japan and Europe, so it should be treated like any other full release title. Even taking into account its arcade game status, it’s not even good when compared to other arcade games. Furthermore, it’s not like they adapted the entirety of Code: Veronica in those five levels and that’s the length the game had to be as a result. No, they only adapt the first half of the game! We never even go to Antarctica! Did they develop this game in six months…? All I can say is “What the fuck?” over and over again.
  • Mindless Gameplay – Survivor 2 is about as mindless as a game can get. At least the original Survivor was trying to stick to the classic Resident Evil gameplay formula, but Survivor 2 is straight-up as mindless a shooter as you can get. Gameplay consists of going from point A, to point B, to point C, all while shooting every single thing in sight and trying not to get hit back. Levels are very short. There are no puzzles. There is no real reason to explore, other than finding gem collectables. The game doesn’t even want you to explore, as it has painted the floors with arrows pointing to your objective. It’s just a mindless gauntlet that becomes more frustrating as it goes.
  • Enemies Are Wasted – Perhaps the weirdest thing about Survivor 2‘s length is how much the game actively avoids stretching it out. For what it’s worth, Survivor 2 has a fantastic roster of enemy types which could easily support a much longer game’s runtime. However, most games will slowly introduce you to new enemy types so you can learn to get good against them. Survivor 2 is playing like a meth addict, throwing new enemy types at you every 30 seconds, only for them to die in mere seconds and then never be seen again. It’s baffling, I don’t know what else to say about it.
  • Feels Recycled – This is a weird thing to say about a game, but trust me, if you played Survivor 2, you would feel it. As far as I can tell, 99% of this game’s assets are taken directly from Code: Veronica and the Dreamcast ports of Resident Evil 2 and 3, with the menu UI and the map system being the only parts that I can see which are wholly original to this game. On the one hand, this is kind of a cool way for Resident Evil fans to see Code: Veronica up close in a way that was impossible before. However, this also means that every stage in this game is literally played on Code: Veronica’s existing maps. THEY’VE FRANKENSTEINED A SHOOTER OUT OF A GAME WORLD DESIGNED FOR SURVIVAL HORROR. This means loading screens every five seconds as you go through a door. This means constantly seeing in-game models which were never designed to be seen this close. This means finding yourself asking why the hell Lickers and Nemesis appear in this game. All I can think is that they just used what they had and didn’t do a single thing more than they had to to ship a minimum viable product.
  • No Voice Acting – It’s really awkward when you start playing this game and see Claire and Steve meet up and their lips are moving… but nothing’s happening. On the plus side, this does mean we’re spared Steve’s voice acting again, but it’s very jarring not being able to hear them speak after I just got done playing Code: Veronica proper.
  • No Stage Select – Much like the original Survivor, if you die in Survivor 2 and run out of lives, it’s game over, back to start. Even though you’re likely to only lose about 15 minutes of progress, that’s still 15 minutes of bullshit to get back where I was. You either get gud, or stop playing. Well, I’ll be honest here, I got through four levels and then died. I was done, I don’t even feel the need to see this final level. The whole thing’s the bloody same shit over and over, there’s no reason for me to believe it will change at all.

Despite all my rage, I honestly don’t think that Resident Evil Survivor 2 is the worst Resident Evil game. Umbrella Corps is still the reigning champion, due to how much more baffling it is that it was bad, and also because the state of its online mode even shortly after launch hampered it significantly. That said, when, in comparison, I find myself suddenly saying nice things about the original Survivor, you know you fucked up badly.

*Your mom lasted mere minutes.

Love/Hate: Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! It has been quite a while since the last entry, but I’m finally ready and able to continue the series with Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X! This is another one of those Resident Evil games that I owned and tried to play through several times (my most recent abandoned attempt being back at the start of 2023), but never made it more than an hour in. However, much like REmake, those failed attempts all made this final attempt go much more smoothly – I knew more-or-less what I needed to do at the start of the game, which allowed me to get over the early game hump of not wasting ammo and health. Practice from previous attempts also meant that I didn’t struggle with the tank controls either and acclimated to them very quickly. Having played through the whole thing now, how does Code: Veronica X hold up? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Classic Gameplay – Code: Veronica is the oldest mainline Resident Evil game with no remake, which means that it also has the most “classic” gameplay formula for anyone wanting to play through the story of the series’ main entries. This also means that it’s the only mainline entry where tank controls are mandatory. While this will definitely be a hang-up for some, I had fun acclimating to them and, after a couple short attempts, they finally “clicked” and I had basically no issue with them through the entire experience. It makes me excited to go into the PS1 Resident Evil games and Outbreak now that I’ve got this down pat. Code: Veronica is definitely less polished and refined than REmake, but the classic Resident Evil formula is still executed well and is really fun.
  • Wesker – Albert Wesker was a decent villain in the first Resident Evil game, but he got clowned on by his own monster. The Wesker we know today though? He came into his own in Code: Veronica. This is the first time he really became King Shit as he laughs maniacally and monologues while beating the tar out of Claire and Chris Redfield. He gets some classic lines and cool new powers that helped establish him as the franchise’s greatest villain.
  • Claire – I really like Claire’s character design here, it’s probably my favourite look for her in the whole series. You can really see how her experiences in Raccoon City have jaded her and turned her into a full-on action heroine badass, best exemplified by the Matrix-inspired opening cinematic.
  • The Story – I almost always rag on the stories in Resident Evil games, even in the franchise’s best-regarded games. They just tend to be poorly told, disjointed nonsense when you apply any thought to them, or they have an interesting story happening in the background which the main story barely bumps up against. However, Code: Veronica seems to have struck a good balance between a story that’s relatively simple and straight-forward (escape the prison/Antarctic base), while also weaving the series’ larger lore into the main plot in a way that makes it all more interesting. Towards the end, Code: Veronica turns into a full-on succession war between the Ashfords and Albert Wesker to see who will control the BOW market in the wake of the Raccoon City incident, and seeing that play out in front of us instead of through optional files is pretty exciting to see play out. On top of that, there are a few good, unexpected twists that keep things interesting and a fairly coherent narrative throughout. All-in-all, it makes for a story that is easily one of the most interesting and memorable in the whole franchise.
  • Nosferatu – If we’re being honest, this boss fight is kind of bullshit. The boss has a poison spray attack that is nigh-on unavoidable and very long-ranged attacks that mean you can barely even see the boss before he can damage you, and he can instant-kill you if you’re too close to the edge of the platform. However, I don’t mind too much in the end because Nosferatu has an awesome, exceptionally creepy creature design – easily one of the coolest monsters in the whole franchise. On top of that, the fight has fantastic atmosphere, taking place in a blizzard as you try to find Nosferatu in first-person view and shoot him in his weak point. Even though I kept dying cheaply to this guy, I couldn’t help but have a good time each time I replayed the fight.
  • Checkpoints – Code: Veronica has added a checkpoint system which makes dying against bosses less of a pain in the ass. Instead of being kicked back to the last save room (however long ago that was), most bosses will have a checkpoint sometime before the boss that you can start at, making these showdowns less frustrating. The game also doesn’t kick you back to the main menu every time you die, which makes dying slightly less rage-inducing.

Mixed

  • Graphics – On the one hand, Code: Veronica is a pretty big step up from the PS1 trilogy in terms of its graphical fidelity. Technology had also increased enough where backgrounds were no longer pre-rendered and were now being done in real-time, which means that the camera can also freely move at times and there’s no more “loading stutter” whenever the camera angle shifts. However, this is a bit of a mixed bag for me in the end. For one thing, being a Dreamcast and early PS2 game, Code: Veronica is, graphically, in the transition period between what PS1 games were doing and what PS2 games would end up looking like. As a result, it looks kind of pathetic in comparison to REmake and 0, which came out only 2 years later (or 1 year if you played Code: Veronica on PS2). That’s not really the game’s fault, but what is the game’s fault is that the ability to move the camera isn’t really explored at all. Fixed camera angles were a necessity of PS1 technical limitations and pre-rendered backgrounds, but if you have this world entirely rendered in real-time, there isn’t really much of a reason for this game to continue sticking it fixed camera angles. The camera just kind of works within the general framework of fixed angles, moving on occasion, but then switching angles as needed because that’s the expectation for the series. This makes all the occasions where you get damaged by an enemy your character could see, but you can’t because it’s off-screen, all the more egregious than they were in previous Resident Evil games.
  • Alfred Ashford – Our initial antagonist in the game, Alfred Ashford, is a foppish, annoying, effeminate, borderline-offensive cartoon villain… but I can’t really bring myself to hate him like I do the Leech Controller in Resident Evil 0. I think it’s because it was entirely intentional for him to be eccentric and pathetic, so he ends up being almost endearing as a result. Definitely one of the worst Resident Evil villains, but he’s at a level of derpiness that I could see me really leaning into the character someday.

Hate

  • Steve – Sigh. As soon as I heard this guy’s vocal performance, I knew I was in for a rough ride. Steve sounds like an early 2000s Final Fantasy/shonen anime hero, complete with squeaky, nasally voice, melodramatics, and his obsession with dual-wielding guns at all times. Unfortunately, it’s not just his vocal performance that does him in. The writers clearly want you to like Steve, giving him a very tragic backstory, moments of over-the-top badassery, and forcing a romance between him and Claire. Uuuuunfortunately, this all fails miserably because you can’t take his vocal performance seriously and the writing of the character just doesn’t work. Like, that “romance” between him and Claire? The “build-up” for this romance is him trying to kiss Claire when she’s sleeping, then telling her he loves her when he’s dying. It just doesn’t work and there is little indication that Claire looks at him with anything more than pity. All that said though, Steve makes for a goldmine of memes. Going into a PTSD meltdown because he has to shoot his zombie dad? Hilarious. Being told that “Steve is suffering” as we try to free him from a room full of poison gas? I’m literally on the floor laughing. Steve gets distracted staring at Claire’s ass, causing their getaway vehicle to crash, releasing a cloud of poison gas that Claire gets stuck dealing with? Comedy gold.
  • You Kind of Need a Walkthrough – Code: Veronica is one of those games where you can find yourself screwed over through no fault of your own because of a sudden difficulty spike or completely unpredictable change in the way that the game works, and you just are expected to deal with it. If you’ve already played through the game, this isn’t a big deal, but if you go in completely blind, you might find yourself having to replay massive chunks of the game, if not restarting entirely.
    • The first big instance of this is the Tyrant fight on the plane. It’s a sudden and massive difficulty spike that is beyond anything else you faced in the game to this point (and, arguably, at any other point). This sonofabitch can stun-lock you to get off two colossal hits in succession. Given that it only takes three or four hits from it to die, this is incredibly frustrating. Your goal in this fight is to launch it out of the plane by activating a catapult system to throw a crate into it. Each time this is activated, you need to wait about thirty seconds for it to recharge before you can launch it again, during which time you need to avoid getting hit and launch as much damage as you can at the Tyrant to wear it down enough for the next crate to take it out. This can take anywhere from two to five launches to pull off, and if you used all your grenade launcher or explosive arrow ammo earlier, then sucks to be you. This difficulty spike can straight-up soft-lock you if you didn’t conserve your ammo and healing well enough up to this point.
    • About halfway through the game, you switch from playing as Claire to Chris. Chris has access to Claire’s item box, but I sure hope you weren’t holding onto your best weapons and all your healing items when you were playing as Claire (which is quite likely, because you switch right after the Nosferatu boss fight). Chris can get by without Claire’s best weapons, but it definitely makes playing as him harder than it needs to be, purely because you had no way of knowing that this switch-up was happening.
    • Likewise, later in the game you switch back to Claire, briefly. Once again, you don’t have access to any weapons or items Chris had and, when you switch back to Chris, any items you take with you will be gone for good. This sequence also has a nasty action sequence against mutant-Steve where you die in only two hits, and you’re going to be hit at least two or three times (if not more). Again, I sure hope that you have enough healing items, or you are literally screwed here.
    • On the smaller end of things, there’s a metal detector early in the game where you have to stash all metal objects on you before you can enter. Not only can you easily forget any important items you left here, but there’s a fire extinguisher you’re likely going to put here after using it, which you actually need to bring with you to Antarctica as Chris in order to get the strongest gun in the game and make the final boss fights significantly easier. This one’s kind of easy to miss, but it’s also kind of bullshit that they’d hinge the best endgame weapon on whether you remembered to grab a seemingly-useless key item hours earlier and put it in your item box until it became useful again. The ID Card sure as hell didn’t do anything after its one short usage (in fact, I accidentally mixed it up with the Security Card, so it actually was a pain in my ass that I still had it at the end of the game)…
  • Bandersnatches – These ugly bastards are a pain in the ass. On the one hand, I appreciate that they don’t do much damage to you, but they will constantly attack you from long range, will stagger you with each hit, and are almost-always doing so from off-screen. They’re just a massive pain to deal with every time you see one and are often not worth the ammo and health you’d need to waste to actually kill them.
  • Unmemorable Locales – Compared to the Spencer Mansion and RPD, the locales in Code: Veronica are not particularly memorable. A prison and an Antarctic base should be really cool areas for a Resident Evil game, but the way they have been designed here doesn’t really do the premise justice. I think the main issue is that the Spencer Mansion and RPD have a main, central hub area that all paths branch outward from and then loop back to. In contrast, Rockfort Prison, the Palace, and the Military Training Facility are three separate compounds which you cycle between (and which take about a minute of travel time each time you go to change areas). On top of this, when you play as Chris, a lot of your routes you memorized suddenly change and get blocked off, making it really hard to remember where exactly you need to go to get to a particular destination.
  • Chris – This one is a bit unfortunate. On the one hand, I think that Code: Veronica might be Chris at his most likeable. He’s straight-up the all-American action hero that he should be, actually getting to interact with Claire also makes him the world’s best big brother, and he also gets a personal antagonist in Wesker. Unfortunately, the mid-point twist where you start playing as him and then realize that they’ve transported you back to the prison right after we’d gotten all excited about escaping was not a great decision. It ends up dragging the prison section out for another hour and a half and feels completely superfluous, like they were stalling for time and reusing as many assets as they could. It also rubs me the wrong way that, as soon as Chris shows up, Claire is completely upstaged for the rest of the game. She basically gets turned into a damsel in distress from that point forward and lets Chris do all the work. I remember when Kaya Scodelario said that Claire doesn’t get to do much after Resident Evil 2 and wanted to change that if they made more sequels to Welcome to Raccoon City, to which Resident Evil nerds went “umm, have you not heard of Code: Veronica and Revelations 2?!” To which I can now confidently say: Claire gets shafted halfway through this game and is easily the most superfluous character in Revelations 2. Kaya’s right, and if we do get more movies with her as Claire, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing some changes made.

I’ll be honest, I went into Code: Veronica not expecting to like it too much. It’s one of those games that has been hyped up for me for years by certain people, but I’d also heard other people who said really mixed things about it. As a result, I went in with a more critical bias against it. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really did dig it. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the best in the whole franchise by any means, but it is a really fun, solid entry that is well worth playing through when you’re ready to dive into the “classic” Resident Evil entries.

Love/Hate: Ape Escape 3

Welcome back to the Ape Escape Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be looking at the final, mainline Ape Escape game, Ape Escape 3! For whatever reason, despite loving the first two Ape Escape games, I never got the opportunity to play this game as a kid. I remember hearing that it had made some pretty big changes to the formula though, so I was always intrigued to find out how it played. Could it live up to its predecessors’ legacy? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Two Playable Characters – One of the bigger changes in Ape Escape 3 is that you now can play as either a boy or a girl character, Kei and Yumi. This is already pretty cool just for being able to play as the character who appeals most to you, but they’ve gone way further with this than they really needed to. The character you play as gets unique cutscenes and dialogue, they get wildly different costume designs (for example, Kei’s fantasy knight costume is a knight with a sword and shield, whereas Yumi’s is a wizard with a wand and arcane shield), and different gadget designs. Furthermore, Yumi’s character is a popstar in this game’s universe, and some monkeys you will encounter can become star struck when they see her, making them easier to catch. It’s a cute bit of extra differentiation, and it gives some extra incentive to replay the game.
    • I also really want to emphasize how much this change broadens the appeal for Ape Escape. Kei is very much in the vein of a traditional Ape Escape protagonist, with a cool, kid-friendly, edgy look. Yumi, on the other hand, gets to indulge in cuteness, while simultaneously being strong and sassy, making this game more appealing and approachable to girls as well.
  • Gadget Quick-Swap is GREAT – Easily the simplest and best change in the whole game is that you can now quick-swap equipped gadgets. Simply equip a gadget and then press that button again to start cycling through all your gadgets on the fly. Not only does this eliminate the pace-halting menu diving of previous Ape Escape games, but it also means that being forced to use less-used gadgets is less annoying too! This is a fantastic bit of design and I wish it could be retroactively put into every prior Ape Escape game.
  • Costume Designs Are Adorable – A variety of selectable costumes are this game’s main feature and the effort put into their aesthetic design really shows. The aforementioned fantasy knight costume is absolutely adorable, the miracle ninja outfit is really cool, and I like how the cyber ace costume turns Yumi into an anime magical girl (think Sailor Moon). Special shoutout as well to the genie dancer costume – I don’t care as much for the actual costume, but its ability is incredible. You can use it to force everyone to dance: apes, enemy creatures, even the coins and cookies littering the area will dance! You just can’t help but get a huge grin on your face every time you use this thing.
  • Some AMAZING Level Designs – After how derivative most of Ape Escape 2‘s levels were, I wasn’t expecting much from this game. However, imagine my surprise when this game had not one, but two of my favourite levels in the entire franchise.
    • First off, Monkey Expedition Sets Off! is incredible. Starts out fairly unique (for Ape Escape) with a mountain-climbing-themed first area. This results in a vertical level design, which is pretty fun to navigate on its own, but it also shows off the newly-acquired Sky Flyer gadget. Then it moves into a mysterious temple area, which then continues upwards until you end up in the clouds at ape heaven, complete with flying angel monkeys and further vertical level design! An absolute delight of a level, I was blown away with every new twist and turn this level threw at me.
    • Secondly, there’s Ape, Ape, and Away! This level is breath-taking, with the entire level taking place across the backs of a squadron of flying airplanes. You’d think that they’d run out of ideas pretty quickly and force the level to progress to the ground at some point, but no, there are some very creative and unique uses of this space and concept.
  • Mesal Gear Solid – As a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, I was totally primed to love this cross-over, and man did it deliver. The team here have straight-up gotten assets and music from the three Metal Gear Solid games that had released up to that point, they’ve got homages to the games, they mimic the gameplay and style of those games, while also making it simpler and accessible. The referential humour in Ape Escape 3 can be pretty shallow, but they’ve gone so hard into it here that it works great and a lot of effort has clearly been put in to make this a full-fledged experience. My only real complaint is that the controls are really weird (right analog stick to prime your gun, but then you need to use left analog stick to aim it and hold L1 or L2 if you want to aim in first person).

Mixed

  • TV Show Theme – Ape Escape was themed around time travel, Ape Escape 2 was a global ape hunt, and Ape Escape 3 is themed around a bunch of TV show sets. While this gives us a few really cool levels, it only really seems to exist as a vehicle to allow the devs to make a bunch of movie references. The referential humour of this game is very of its era and it reminds me of the sort of “comedy” that I was making back then, where the “joke” starts and ends with “oh hey, that’s Darth Vader monkey”.
  • Apes Can Steal Your Gadgets – Ape Escape 3 goes a step beyond Ape Escape 2‘s nerfing of the Stun aton. Not only can they shrug off a hit from it, but now they can get pissed off and then whack you, knocking whatever gadget you have equipped out of your hands. Not only does this force you to have to grab them back, but they can then steal your gadgets and use them on you. It is objectively hilarious the first time an ape catches you with your own Monkey Net, sending you back to the starting hub. However, it gets old quick and it REALLY sucks when it happens late in a level, forcing you to replay big chunks of a level to get back where you were. It makes the basic “capturing apes” gameplay a lot more dangerous, but not in a particularly fun way.
  • The Shops – The Gotcha Box is gone, and its replacement is a mixed bag. In its place, we get a suite of shops which give you all the same items as the Gotcha Box, but you get to pick and choose what you want. On the one hand, you’ll always be able to get what you want, but on the other hand, given the choice, I’m never going to spend my coins on the silly bonuses (concept art, enemy photos, monkey fables, etc) which made the Gotcha Box so charming. In addition, the prices of the shop items tend to be pretty high, so it makes splurging on these bonus items even more ill-advised.

Hate

  • Costume Implementation – On a conceptual and aesthetic level, I really like the costumes in Ape Escape 3. However, the way that they’ve been incorporated introduces a lot of issues and becomes major flaw for the game at large:
    • First-off, the energy/time limit sucks. You get 30 seconds per charge to use your costume, which immediately turns these things into anxiety-inducers. You can get up to 10 charges to ease the anxiety and extend this time limit, but I’m not convinced that this is entirely necessary because the game showers you with energy pickups whenever it expects you to use the costumes (think the useless oxygen upgrades in Dead Space: the game still has to be balanced for anyone not using the time limit upgrades, making them kind of pointless). The simple solution to all of this is that the game should just let you use your costumes at all times, buuuut…
    • The costumes are game-breakingly overpowered. All of them give you some sort of powerful, room-clearing attacking option, some sort of additional mobility option, and can capture apes at a distance and some even let you capture multiple apes at once. The cyber ace in particular can literally just fire off attacks and fly across an entire map in the process, making entire platforming sections trivial. Which leads to the further problem that…
    • The gadgets are completely invalidated by the costumes. The core gameplay of Ape Escape revolves around chasing apes and using gadgets to deal with challenges. With the way costumes have been introduced, they feel like they’ve been stapled awkwardly on top of the existing system, while also making the conventional gadgets feel entirely outclassed. Why would I risk using my Stun Baton and Monkey Net to catch an ape (who might dodge the attacks or steal my gadgets), when I can just stand in their general vicinity and automatically capture them in a fraction of the time with one of my costumes? The core gameplay has been shot in the kneecap by this decision. They REALLY should have just removed the gadgets entirely and made their functionality a part of each of the costumes’ abilities. That way you would still be incentivized to switch between costumes and you wouldn’t need the time limit.
  • AWFUL Vehicle Gameplay Sections – Ape Escape games tend to have short sections in levels where you need to use some sort of vehicle (rowboat, tank, robot, etc) to get through an area. The row boat and tank actually control a bit better than previous games, but there are two recurring, gimmicky set pieces which absolutely suck:
    • Firstly, there are racing sections which are abysmal. You drive a car where the left analogue stick controls the speed and direction of the car, but then the right analog stick controls the rear wheel steering. It’s supposed to facilitate easier drifting, but in practice it makes you want to throw your controller at the wall. Any section with racing requires you to hunt down two or three apes in cars, and you’re better off sitting and waiting for them to pass you and then ram them three times. This is a tedious waiting game, but it’s far preferable to actually trying to drive this stupid car.
    • Secondly, there’s the robot, which also controls awfully. To illustrate what I mean: WHY THE HELL IS “JUMP” DONE BY PUSHING BOTH STICKS OUTWARDS!? WHY CAN’T I JUST PRESS A BUTTON!?!!! Making matters worse, one of the late-game bosses is fought in the mech, making the entire boss fight pure agony. Thankfully, you can just hop in another mech when yours inevitably explodes, but it doesn’t make the fight any more fun.
  • Weak Story – Story is one of the least-important elements of Ape Escape, but my God, Specter is the least-threatening he ever has been in this game. He was at least sinister and legitimately threatening in prior games, but here he seems like a cartoonish moron… despite basically having already won by the time the game starts.
  • Super Monkey Throw Stadium & Ultim-ape Fighter – The other two mini-games in Ape Escape 3 are, unfortunately, very weak and uninteresting. Super Monkey Throw Stadium is an awkwardly-controlling hammer throw game. On the one hand, it’s like Monkey Soccer, where the apes you catch while playing have different skills you can use in the game. On the other hand… you’re throwing a hammer every time. It gets boring after your first throw. Ultim-ape Fighter, on the other hand, has some potential. It’s basically a simple fighting game, and even has a mini-story mode. However, the controls are really strange, with all actions being input on the left and right analog sticks… I wasn’t a fan of this and dropped it really quickly.

Ape Escape 3 is fun, but it’s a pretty big step down from its predecessors. This is mainly due to the half-baked inclusion of costumes, which compromise the core gameplay and end up making the whole game feel gimmicky. If they had integrated these costumes into the core gameplay more organically, then Ape Escape 3 could have had a shot at being at least on-par with the first two games. As-is, it’s enjoyable, but flawed.

Love/Hate: Ape Escape 2

Welcome back to the Ape Escape Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be looking at the PS2 sequel, Ape Escape 2! I remember seeing this game on shelves when it was new and immediately snatching it up for more ape-catching fun. Did it live up to it predecessor? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Monkey Soccer – I’m not even kidding, this mini-game elevates Ape Escape 2 so much in my eyes. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a basic soccer mini-game with apes, but it is so much more than that. You see, your teams are made up of apes that you capture throughout the game, so every captured ape is expanding your roster. This both incentivizes capturing every ape you can find so you can get new players, while also incentivizing you to check-in on Monkey Soccer every once in a while to see what new options you’ve caught for yourself. In addition, each individual ape has their own unique stats, so there’s lots of room for personalization and team-building. My brothers and I used to spend hours playing against each other with our hand-picked teams of simian strikers and it is by far the best memory we all have playing this game… and I don’t even mean that in a way to disparage the rest of the game, it’s just that Monkey Soccer was that much fun.
  • HUGE Graphical Leap – Compared to the very rudimentary PS1 graphics of the original Ape Escape, Ape Escape 2 is simply breath-taking. Between the much-improved graphics and the expressive, fluid, and charming animations, Ape Escape 2 straight-up feels like a Saturday morning anime brought to life. Further reinforcing this feeling, they even managed to get the English voice actors for Ash and Misty from Pokémon involved!
  • Gotcha Box – Fostering addiction in children since 2002! The Gotcha Box is an inspired addition to the formula and a major upgrade from the stars and Specter coins you collected in the original game. Here, coins you collect can be spent for a capsule from the Gotcha Box, which gives you some sort of random reward: extra lives, cookies, coins, concept art, mini-games, new RC Cars, etc. There are also rewards, like monkey fables, which are strangely compelling. Like, they’re usually just monkey-based parodies of popular fables and fairy tales, but I always legitimately finding myself reading them and looking forward to my next Gotcha spin to see if I’ll find out the next part of the story.
  • Themed Monkeys! – In addition to the colour-coded apes we got in the previous game, Ape Escape 2 introduces a slew of monkeys whose appearance and actions mirror the stage they are in. For example, in the Spain level you can encounter a matador monkey, the haunted castle has knights, the Vegas level has disco dancers and clowns, the winter level has Monkey Claus flying on his sleigh, etc. There are plenty more cool variants and it’s always fun to see what sort of new ape type you might encounter.
  • The Magnet – Ape Escape 2 brings back all the gadgets from the original and adds some new ones, but the best of these is definitely the Electro Magnet. This basically lets you attach to, or pull in closer, certain metallic objects, which is utilized in several creative applications to facilitate traversal, open up enemies to attack, or solve environmental puzzles.

Mixed

  • Really Leans into the Anime Elements – Look, I know I praised the game for looking like an anime, and your mileage will definitely vary on this one, but Ape Escape 2 leans harder into anime tropes than its predecessor. Like, for some reason, you now have a flying, baby monkey companion named “Pipotchi” who is basically just Pikachu (a feeling which is reinforced since the main character is, again, voiced by Ash’s VA). Then there’s some of the bosses, whose designs and characterization just scream “anime”. For one thing, there’s Pink Monkey, who’s this demure little pop-star wannabe, but when she gets angry, she glows with energy and becomes this psychic monster. Worst of all though is Yellow Monkey, who is… problematic, so say the least. Like… just imagine the gay/drag queen anime stereotype character. That’s what Yellow Monkey is… which brings me to…
  • Freaky Monkey Five – Specter has some help in this game in the form of a group of monkey bosses. On the one hand, it’s not a bad idea to give him some henchmen who can give you more regular, and varied, boss fights. On the other hand, they just kind of show up, fight you, and then go down, having very little time to actually make an impact. They also side-line Specter for most of the game’s runtime, reducing the importance of the game’s actual villain.
  • Dance, Monkey, Dance! – Basically a monkey-based Dance Dance Revolution, Dance, Monkey, Dance! is functional, but was not particularly compelling to me. Again, there’s enough here that someone might want to dedicate more time to getting good at it, but I find that these sorts of frame-perfect timing mini-games don’t hold my interest.

Hate

  • The Story – Unfortunately, the story of Ape Escape 2 doesn’t work quite as well for me as the original game did. For one thing, the stakes are far lower, with the apes just causing mischief around the world, instead of threatening to change history if they aren’t stopped. For a lot of the game, we’re basically just cleaning up the mess we made. It’s not until late in the game when Specter re-enters the picture and we get information that he’s building a super-weapon to take over the world once and for all, but this “lethargy laser” is barely elaborated on. As a kid, I sure as hell didn’t know what “lethargy” meant, so I was really confused about why exactly everyone was so worried about this weapon.
  • Control Changes – Ape Escape 2 seems to have been rebuilt from the ground up for PS2 and, as a result, it doesn’t play quite the same as the first game, much to my chagrin. I know that some of this is just me being grumpy that “It’s not the same!”, and that I wouldn’t even have an issue with it if I hadn’t played the original first, but… shut up. I can be annoyed that the Stun Baton has shorter range, that you have to spin the stick faster to actually do a Stun Baton spin successfully, that your jump doesn’t travel as far, that the Sky Flyer doesn’t let you travel as far, and that you have to jump up every set of stairs you come across.
  • Apes Can Shrug Off a Stun Baton Hit – That’s right, my mainstay strategy from the first game got nerfed and I’m salty about it. That said, is there any real justification for them to have even the timid monkeys be able to take a hit from a Stun Baton and keep going? I’m not even exaggerating – in the second level of the game, I nailed one timid monkey six times as I was chasing him around the level and he didn’t get knocked over once, it was really frustrating and just artificially makes capturing apes take longer.
  • Rehashed Stages – Look, I get that there’s only so many types of levels you can do in your platforming game, and the original Ape Escape covered a lot of them already, but does it not feel a little derivative when we visit another ninja temple, sandy beachfront, icy tundra, spooky castle… and a dinosaur level…? Again, this game is supposed to just be apes running around in the present day, why the hell is there a dinosaur level?
  • Bananarang and Water Cannon – Unfortunately, the other two new gadgets, the Bananarang and Water Cannon, are kinda useless. The Bananarang acts as a mid-range weapon that you can use to draw in monkeys closer… but it’s rather difficult to use accurately and we already have the Slingback Shooter, so you’ll only really ever use it during the tiny handful of situations where the game explicitly forces you to. Similarly, the Water Cannon just kind of… exists. There are a couple parts of the game where you’ll be encountered by a bonfire… that you could very easily just fly over, but the game arbitrarily prevents you from doing this. There are also water wheels which you occasionally have to shoot the Water Cannon at in order to progress. So… it’s basically as useful as a progression-gating Key Card from Metal Gear or Resident Evil. Oh joy, another gadget that I’m never going to use unless you force me to.
  • Monkey Climber – Okay, this mini-game straight-up FUCKING SUCKS. It describes itself as “extremely hard”, but it’s only “hard” in that it controls awfully. I’m sure you can get better at it and get your monkey to climb higher, but the time investment is not worth it.

All-in-all, I really enjoyed Ape Escape 2. Ape Escape 2 is basically the same as the original, only with some higher highs, but also more things that annoy me at the same time. I think I prefer Ape Escape overall just a bit more, since it’s a tighter experience, but you really can’t go wrong with either.

Love/Hate: Ape Escape

It’s time for a new Love/Hate series on IC2S! For those who have been following my Resident Evil playthroughs, don’t worry – I intend to resume the Resident Evil entries this year. In the meantime, we’re going to look at one of my childhood favourite franchises which has been dormant for far too long now, Ape Escape! And what better place to start this analysis, than with the game that started it all?

Also, just a note: there are a ton of random Ape Escape spin-offs. Maybe I will get to those someday, but at this time I’m only really intending to cover the mainline games.

Love

  • The Core Gameplay – First, and most importantly, it has to be said that just playing Ape Escape is a blast. Chasing apes around and trying to catch them is fun and compelling in a similar “gotta catch ’em all” manner to Pokemon. Levels have been constructed so that each ape you encounter is a mini-puzzle you have to approach and overcome using the terrain and tools you have at your disposal. This is the foundation that Ape Escape really had to nail in order to even become a franchise, and this original perfected it out of the gate.
  • The Gadgets – The second key, fundamental piece of the Ape Escape puzzle is the variety of gadgets it puts at your disposal. All of them are really useful, with only the R.C. Car being somewhat situational, but it’s such a cool gadget to have at your disposal that it doesn’t even matter.
    • Special mention needs to go to the Sky Flyer. Video game power-ups that upgrade mobility and traversal are always 10/10, and the Sky Flyer just feels amazing to use.
    • Also, I really need to give props for how well-designed the Stun Baton and Time Net are. The Stun Baton is your all-purpose, close-attacking weapon, while the Time Net is what actually catches 99% of the apes you encounter. In a worse-designed game, you’d just run around with the Time Net to catch every monkey, but the swinging animation for the Stun Baton is much faster. As a result, it is actually better to stun the apes first and then quickly swap to the net to catch them, incentivizing more strategic gameplay than just wildly flailing about with your net.
    • I also want to give a shout-out to the Monkey Radar, which allows you to switch to a “Monkey camera”, which shows you what each ape is doing, its stats, and gives you a little description for every single one. It lends each individual ape a bit of personality, which is a nice touch and incentivizes getting a peek at each ape to learn a bit of their story… before you chase ’em down and catch them in your net.
  • Innovative Controls – It’s easy to overlook this now, but Ape Escape was the first dual-analog console game and was largely intended to be a showcase for the brand-new Dualshock controller. So many games designed to demonstrate new technology end up feeling like tech demos which get in the way of actually playing the game (looking at you, Uncharted: Golden Abyss), but Ape Escape absolutely succeeded in demonstrating that dual-analog controls were not just a gimmick. Moving with the left analog stick, and using gadgets with the right stick feels natural and works very well at facilitating this kind of gameplay.
  • Iconic Character Designs – The cartoonish ape design in Ape Escape is instantly iconic. That said, there has to be special mention for how much thought went into the way that each ape is designed and how this conveys information to the player. For one thing, the colour of their pants denotes how they will behave and gives you information about how they should be approached effectively (yellow pants are “standard”, blue are extremely fast, light blue are timid, red are aggressive, white have high alertness, black have submachine guns, and green have high alertness and missile packs). This also extends to the lights on the monkey’s helmets, which communicate their level of alertness, as well as letting you know whether they’re on the lookout or not. It’s an extremely efficient and effective way in which to communicate complex information to the player so they know how to deal with each monkey they come across.
  • Stage Variety – Levels in Ape Escape are usually split into three “zones”, which share a unifying theme based on whatever time period you’ve travelled to. Despite sharing the same theme with two other levels, each individual stage tends to be very distinctive and well-designed to provide platforming and capturing challenges.
  • Music – Ape Escape was in that era of really evocative and iconic video game soundtracks, and stands strong amongst its peers.
  • Galaxy Monkey – Ape Escape established a precedent that these games will always have some mini-games and easily the best among these is Galaxy Monkey, which is a simple-yet-fun twin-stick shooter.

Mixed

  • Very Basic Story – On the one hand, it’s as functional and unobtrusive as it really needs to be, giving you the setup of “Apes messing with time travel to change history, go catch them” and only interrupting for more story infrequently. On the other hand, it starts venturing into some really generic anime trope territory (one character literally says “You didn’t need the gadgets, you were strong all along!”). Like, I get that it’s a game for kids, but even as a kid I thought this message was really corny.

Hate

  • The Camera – During the first couple generations of 3D console games, developers were still “figuring out” how to effectively do a camera in a 3D environment. Unfortunately, Ape Escape often suffers from this as well. The camera is sufficient during about 95% of gameplay, but that remaining 5% can really stand out in your mind. Camera manipulation is mapped to the D-pad, which is really inconvenient to use unless you stop playing in order to move it around. There is also the ability to re-orient the camera with the L1 button, which works most of the time, but every once in a while you’re going to be chasing an ape into a corner and the camera will completely lose track of everything, which can lead to some frustration.
  • Magic Punch vs Stun Baton – The Magic Punch is an endgame gadget you get, which effectively replaces the Stun Baton: it’s twice as strong, has longer range, and can break more objects. However, the one thing it cannot do is be spun around to hit things repeatedly… which is a pretty frequent thing you need to do to turn wheels throughout the game’s environment. It’s really annoying to give me a straight-upgrade gadget, but then have it be massively inferior in one particular way, necessitating me menu diving to go get by Stun Baton and then swap back immediately every time. The devs clearly agreed, because this was changed in Ape Escape 2 so that a hit from the punch would make wheels spin faster.
  • Boss Fights – Bosses are very basic in this game. They almost always require you to do some sort of action twice, then move to a second phase where you have to do some other action twice… that’s it. Very simple and boring affairs.
  • Ski Kidz Racing & Specter Boxing – Unfortunately, the other two minigames in Ape Escape are not very fun. While you could potentially dedicate time to them trying to improve your skills, they are ultimately brought down by really annoying controls which make them more frustrating than they need to be.
  • Goggle/Missile Pack Monkeys – Oh my God, these types of monkey are SO ANNOYING. You either have to slowly crawl towards them, or you get constantly bombarded. If you get spotted, missiles fly incessantly, making these by far the toughest enemies in the game.

And that is Ape Escape in a nutshell! Easily one of my favourite games of all time, I heartily recommend it if you have never played.

Retrospective: Left Behind – Rise of the Antichrist (2023)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! We have finally reached the most recent entry in the franchise, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist. After the critical and financial failure of the Left Behind reboot and the embarrassing, putrid mess that was Vanished, surely Left Behind couldn’t get any worse, right? Well… Kevin Sorbo’s here and he’s gonna do his damnest to make sure this Retrospective ends with a long, wet fart sound. Will I be able to keep my sanity if I watch one more Left Behind movie? Read on to find out…

Side-note: I would find it funny if some evangelical boomer tried to watch this movie and accidentally exposed themselves to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist instead. If anyone has any stories about this happening, please share in the comments.

Once again we have another “trendy for its release date, but extremely-overdone” kind of poster. Not awful, but extremely boring. (Although, that said, what the fuck is wrong with Chloe’s hair/head…?)

Production

Despite the financial failure of the Left Behind reboot, Cloud Ten were undaunted in wanting to move forward with a sequel. However, due to not making back their money on that movie when it was in theaters, they had to resort to an Indiegogo campaign to try to raise funds. The goal for this campaign was set at $500,000, but they only ended up raising $80,699… however, because this campaign was set with a flexible funding goal, they ended up keeping all the money anyway! Backers were then left with a very, very long wait for any news on the movie. After nearly three years of nothing, they surely must have felt that they had gotten swindled.

However, the silence would eventually be broken in 2017 when Paul Lalonde announced that he had officially acquired the rights to adapt all the Left Behind books – as mentioned previously, until now they had only had the rights to the first two books. This would now mean that they could adapt the entire series going forward, and planned to do so over the course of at least five more movies. During this time, a script for a sequel to Left Behind had been written, once again by Paul Lalonde and John Patus (although this time they would also share writing credits with newcomer Jessica Parker). Kevin Sorbo was approached for a role in the movie at this time. Given this information, it seems likely that, even at this time, Nicolas Cage was out of the movie. Either Cloud Ten had not secured his commitment to potential sequels, or they could no longer afford him (reportedly, his salary for Left Behind was $3.5 million, which would end up being the entire budget for this second film). According to Kevin Sorbo, due to the close proximity of Left Behind and God’s Not Dead, Cloud Ten became inundated with questions about why Nic Cage was cast a Rayford Steele rather than Kevin Sorbo, which may have also contributed to the attempt to recast. Whatever the case may be, Sorbo actually passed on the sequel initially, leaving the film without a lead.

Despite having a script ready to go in 2017, Rise of the Antichrist wouldn’t actually enter production for several more years. I wasn’t able to find confirmation about why exactly it took so long to actually enter the pipeline (I searched through years of Facebook updates from the official page and the sort of shit they were posting there not only didn’t clarify things, it actively made my brain want to melt out of my ears), but if I have to speculate, I would imagine that they had difficulty finding funding. However, this may have been a blessing in disguise for Cloud Ten, because 2020 brought with it the COVID-19 pandemic and a massive wave of conservatives rallying against public safety measures. In the midst of this environment, Paul Lalonde and John Patus updated their script to better reflect “current events” and, as the film finally went into full production, Kevin Sorbo accepted roles as the star and director of Rise of the Antichrist.

If you are unfamiliar with him, Sorbo is definitely worth exploring a bit to understand what sort of energy he was bringing to Left Behind. The man was in a career resurgence (of sorts) off the back of God’s Not Dead, which had type-cast him as the “recognizable has-been who will star in any Capital-C Christian movie” guy. He would soon appear regularly in these sorts of films, including Joseph & Mary, Let There Be Light, and The Girl Who Believes in Miracles. Sorbo would claim that Hollywood “blacklisted” him for being a Christian, but it seems like he was getting steady work, just no “massive” roles. That said, we’d be remiss to not mention the real reason he wasn’t getting big roles starting in the early 2010s, and that is because he is a massive, outspoken, conservative dickhead. Like, don’t take that wrong – I don’t mean that people hated him because he was conservative, but more the way which social conservative beliefs made him into an insufferable prick and social media troll (with such highlights as saying that The Passion of the Christ wasn’t anti-Semitic, because the Jews did kill Jesus, or calling black people “animals” during the Ferguson riots).

Sorbo’s entry into the Christian media landscape marked a change in how these movies tend to be made. As I mentioned in my reviews of the God’s Not Dead movies, God is almost entirely absent in these movies – their actual focus is clearly on conservative politics and culture war bullshit. They aren’t trying to change minds, they’re made to rile up a conservative audience and disparage their ideological enemies. That’s why I expressed surprise in my reviews of Left Behind and Vanished that these two movies weren’t leaning into these contemporary trends, but instead were focused on a more traditional Christian movie approach of trying to actually appeal to non-Christian audiences. Sorbo’s post-God’s Not Dead films tend to be moreso conservative than they are Christian, so his involvement in this film definitely painted the picture that this new Left Behind might hew more in that direction for the first time in the franchise’s history.

Chad Michael Murray, Cassi Thomson and Nicky Whelen were originally contracted to reprise their roles as Buck, Chloe, and Hattie, respectively, but given how much time had passed since the last film, they were unable to fit the film into their schedules. As a result, Rise of the Antichrist had to be fully-recast (like some other crowd-funded sequels I can think of). Sorbo aside, the new cast included Greg Parrow (of… nothing fame) as Buck Williams, Sarah Fisher (of Degrassi: The Next Generation fame) as Chloe Steele, Sam Sorbo (Kevin’s wife) as Amanda White, Charles Andrew Payne (also not particularly famous despite being in lots of small roles over the years) as Bruce Barnes, Corbin Bernsen (known for lots of things, among them the Major League movies) as Steve Plank, and Bailey Chase (who has an extensive history of pretty prominent TV credits) as Nicolae Carpathia. The other big name in the cast was Neal McDonough. It’s worth noting that, by this time, Neal McDonough has kind of earned a reputation for being the best, lowest-rent villain actor available, after turns in garbage such as Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. I definitely thought that he was going to be cast as Nicolae Carpathia, which would have legitimately been pretty spot-on casting, but instead they cast him as… Jonathan Stonagal!? This is baffling enough, but it makes me realize that they absolutely missed an opportunity by casting Nicolas Cage as Rayford Steele – can you imagine if they had cast him as Nicolae Carpathia instead!? That sort of move could single-handedly buoy any Left Behind movie to greatness if they had the balls to do it.

Filming would get underway in Calgary in late 2021 and wrap up after 19 days of shooting. Kevin Sorbo and Paul Lalonde would go on press tours to promote the film, which only furthered my concerns about a potential new direction for Left Behind. Sorbo and Lalonde both said in interviews that they truly believed that the Rapture is imminent (funny side-note: in the aforementioned Facebook page posts, Lalonde would get very angry at people who suggested that the Rapture might occur after the Tribulation; for the record, this is the same sort of nerd energy you’d get watching someone getting frothing mad about a fanfic shipping two characters they don’t like). Lalonde would confirm that the 2014 Left Behind reboot was top-down intended to preach to a broad audience, whereas this film was intended to “wake up” Christians about the state of the world. He also added that “I think it may be our last real opportunity to ride a wave before [end times prophecy] all comes to pass”. On a completely unrelated note, those people who were saying the same thing in the midst of truly apocalyptic events like World War II, World War I, and the Black Death must have been a bunch of self-centered losers, eh?

Anyway… Rise of the Antichrist would release in theaters January 26, 2023 and grossed at least $3.6 million. It was successful enough that Kevin Sorbo has confirmed that a sequel has been greenlit and that he will be returning to direct it. He had claimed that it was going to start filming by the end of 2023, but I have seen no updates since then, so we’ll see when, and if, that happens…

Plot Synopsis

Rise of the Antichrist picks up six months after Left Behind. Buck is skeptical about the “official” stats about the vanishings and causes a stir at GWN when he grills a UN representative who suggests that a second wave of vanishings is imminent. When this predicted event does occur, Buck becomes suspicious that this latest event is being faked in order to keep people scared and compliant, since no one seems to actually know anyone who has disappeared this time. Despite threats from his boss, Steve Plank, Buck begins looking into this theory with his hacker friend, Dirk Burton.

Meanwhile, the Steele household is still reeling from the events of the vanishings. Chloe is traumatized about her mother and brother’s disappearance, is lacking direction, and is unconvinced that the Rapture was the cause of the disappearances. Rayford, on the other hand, is seeking answers, which brings him to the vandalized remnants of New Hope Village Church, where he finds Bruce Barnes. Rayford’s earnest searching is enough to pull Bruce out of his depression and they endeavour to begin preaching the word to the lost.

Jonathan Stonagal announces that the world financial system is on the brink of collapse in the face of the most recent wave of vanishings, and moves to complete the consolidation of all currencies into a single, unified currency through his social media platform, Eden. In response to this, an anonymous contact provides Dirk Burton with access to Eden’s servers, where he discovers that Stonagal is going to use Eden to enforce unprecedented control over all people and all nations. He informs Buck about this and the pair begin preparing to gather more evidence to expose the truth. Steve gets wind of this and fires Buck on the spot. However, Buck still has some access to the building and tries to make one last broadcast with Dirk, but before he can, Dirk is killed in a car bombing. Buck manages to escape and then sneaks into Dirk’s apartment to steal his laptop, and the evidence on it, before the assassins can discover its location.

While this has been happening, Rayford and Bruce manage to convince Chloe that the Rapture is the cause of the vanishings. She tries to share this with Buck and warn him about prophecies associated with the Antichrist, but Buck is dismissive. He needs to get the evidence to Nicolae Carpathia, the UN Secretary General, to help him Stonagal before it’s too late. When he gets there, he hears about plans which line up with the prophecies Chloe had just been telling him and realizes that she was right. He converts right before the UN delegates meet with Nicolae, Stonagal, and Todd-Cothran. Nicolae shoots Stonagal and Todd-Cothran to usurp their power and then mind-controls everyone (except for Buck) into believing that the pair were killed by assassins instead. However, Buck leaves the room and immediately hacks into GWN’s broadcast to declare that Nicolae is a liar and that Jesus is Lord. He is pursued by the assassins, but manages to escape on a private plane with Rayford, Chloe, and Bruce, and they fly over the city to drop leaflets about the Rapture.

Review

I really hoped that I’d get to use the Kevin Sorbo “DIS-AP-POINTED!” meme in this review… but, honestly, I can’t really justify it being used organically. I watched a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie, and I got a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie. Don’t take that as me going into this biased and looking for reasons to hate it. I had heard that this movie actually wasn’t bad, so I was legitimately going into this with an open mind to see if that was true. Plus, I had just watched Vanished, so I was absolutely primed to be far nicer to this movie than I might otherwise have been. However, after years of dealing with culture war bullshit on social media, I’m just so exhausted when I encounter that kind of content. That’s what the experience of watching Rise of the Antichrist is like – like reading some fuckin’ conservative grifter’s post on X and just feeling all the energy drain out of you at the thought of having to make a response to this shit yet again. Rise of the Antichrist makes me want to not waste time thinking or writing about it, but… well, here we are. I did this to myself, after all…

We’ll get the good stuff out of the way first: Rise of the Antichrist is easily the second-best looking Left Behind movie, second only to the 2014 reboot. However, that movie also had a budget that was almost five times greater than this one, so the fact that it looks comparable is pretty impressive. It also absolutely puts the reported budgets of Left Behind: The Movie and Tribulation Force to shame (again, if you assume that those reported budgets were accurate, which I absolutely do not). Sorbo’s direction is very workman-like, but it’s still miles ahead of what we’ve seen from most movies in this series. In fact, after this entry I’d be willing to bestow upon the Left Behind franchise the prestigious distinction that they have now achieved the quality level of “theatrically-released evangelical movie”. That doesn’t sound impressive, but hey, it took them 22 years to get to that point.

And, uh, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about this movie. Suit up, we’re about to wade into the sewage…

Predictably, the big differentiation between Rise of the Antichrist and all the Left Behind projects that came before it is that this movie’s political message is overwhelming. If you agree with the fundamentally American, Republican party politics that this movie presents, then you’re probably going to have an easier time enjoying it, as it incessantly jerks you off from start to finish. If you do not agree with these politics, then they’re going to be a constant annoyance that makes engaging with the film on any other level an exhausting affair. This becomes apparent right off the bat, as the film opens with Buck interviewing a psychologist from the UN who claims that there is data to suggest that another wave of vanishings are coming. Buck spends this whole scene incredulous, asking her where she got her data from, and then where the people who got her the data got it from. Like, I get that he’s a reporter doing an interview, but what is he actually doing here? Dunking on this woman for not being able to personally verify the source of the information she has on live TV? She’s reporting the data that experts have apparently vetted. He has no actual reason to be skeptical of this data, he just is immediately hostile to the whole thing. It’s clearly intended to be a dig at “Trust the science” types, but there’s a certain point where you kind of have to accept what the majority of accredited experts are saying. You simply can’t look into everything yourself and can’t be educated enough for every important topic, so at a certain point you have to put trust in the community or you’ll drive yourself nuts. I’m not even saying to just blindly accept everything, or even to kowtow to what news media says. If there’s legitimate dissent, then there will be a sizeable counter-narrative which can be examined to see if it is accurate. However, if the vast majority of the people with knowledge on a subject are saying one thing, then there’s a pretty good chance that they’re right. Goddammit, the movie’s barely started and I’m already getting exhausted.

Anyway, this scene ends with Buck telling the audience “Don’t accept what the so-called experts tell you” and “Don’t sign up for a vanishings vaccine”…

Of course, we soon find that, “Oh my God!”, there has indeed been a second wave of vanishings! People’s phones start alerting them and they all head home in a panic. However, Buck soon discovers that this “second wave” was entirely fabricated and all of the people who were reported to have vanished never existed. I don’t even need to state explicitly that there’s a COVID-19 allegory here, do I? Hell, I have personally met people who believed that the pandemic was “fake”. Again, this is exhausting to even talk about – what good even is it for me to say that I personally knew a guy who died from the disease, that a lady at my church died of it, that several public figures were confirmed to have died of it, that the OG Rayford Steele freaking died of it? They can just go “Oh, those ones may or may not be legitimate, but the numbers are exaggerated.” Or they can pivot to the direction this film goes, that they’re manipulating the stats to control the public. Todd-Cothran’s role in this film is to manipulate the UN’s data to say whatever they want it to. Stonagal, on the other hand, has bought up media conglomerates and social media to push whatever narrative he wants, which will be backed up by Todd-Cothran’s data to seem convincing. Steve Plank, as head of GWN, goes along with this, saying that scared people will stay in their homes and be easier to control as a result. Hell, they call out “The Great Reset” in the movie by name multiple times as this sinister initiative to allow Stonagal to control the world. The funniest part about all of this is that Stonagal’s closest analogue in real life, the richest man alive who bought up a social media app with the intent of making an “everything app”, is goddamn Elon Musk – a man whose dick could not be further down Kevin Sorbo’s throat. Of course, this is because there is no principled stand going on here, it’s just Kevin’s political grift in action. Who would have thought that the man famous for celebrating January 6 while it was happening and then immediately saying that Antifa did it when it failed would be a man who just kowtows to whatever the popular conservative narrative is right now?

As you can expect, Rise of the Antichrist continues like this throughout its entire runtime. I don’t have the energy to try to address every single point, nor would it really be worth anyone’s time for me to do so. The important thing to note is that this movie does to Left Behind exactly what you’d fear a Kevin Sorbo Left Behind movie would do. Gone are the sincere attempts to change hearts and minds, instead replaced with masturbatory screeds of “Wow, can you believe how stupid those other people are?!”

In a lot of ways, the religious aspects of Rise of the Antichrist are comparable to previous Left Behind films – there’s still lots of altar calls, attempts to convince people that this was actually the Rapture and Jesus loves them, etc. For most of these prior films, it’s an element I barely feel the need to address (unless there’s some particular noteworthy fuck-up, like Ray Comfort’s awful evangelism tactics in Tribulation Force); usually, you either agree with what they’re saying, or you don’t and it completely falls flat. However, the confrontational tone that Rise of the Antichrist takes riles me up enough that it compels me to be more critical of the religious aspects than I otherwise would be: both for this film, and for Left Behind as a media franchise.

We’ll start with this film’s not-so-subtle message that real, true Christians (and the conservative Republican sorts who fall into that category) are the moral fabric of society. Buck’s opening monologue goes on about how, six months after the Rapture, the rates of murder, suicide, rape, robbery, vandalism, etc have skyrocketed by hundreds of percent each. This is supplemented by the assertion that America’s law enforcement and military have been “decimated” due to the Rapture (sorry, I can hear the intended audience making that wanking sound again). Nevermind that civilian vanishings should proportionately lessen the number of people to deal with for the police and military left behind – realistic speculation isn’t the point. The point, obviously, is to assert the common belief amongst fundamentalist types that you can’t be moral without being religious, a belief which has (unsurprisingly) been found to be false. When you remember that this film is intended to be turning its attention inward to preach to Christians, it’s really hard to deny that this film is doing anything other than fellating its audience. Like, I know I keep repeating this in such graphic terms, but it’s so annoying to me how, since God’s Not Dead, we’ve gotten this same routine over and over again, where so-called “faith-based” movies reinforce Christian prejudices in such a fawning, ham-fisted manner and encourage scorn of non-Christians.

So what is the actual sermon that this particular Left Behind movie is preaching to its audience? Basically, it boils down to “You can’t trust science and government to be arbiters of the truth. You can only trust The Bible for truth.” Kind of a standard evangelical sermon, but it’s particularly sinister in Rise of the Antichrist. Why, you may ask? Because this movie inadvertently shows the flaws in this lesson through the very premise they’re preaching. Let me explain: there are multiple scenes in this movie where some character will say “Oh yeah these events are terrible, but they were predicted right here in the Bible. And here’s what’s going to happen next, the Bible laid it all out for us!”

Here’s the thing: the Rapture isn’t real. The “Biblical prophecy” that these people claim is “right there in The Bible” is cobbled together from hundreds of verses across dozens of books of the Bible, stripped of their context and recontextualized into a new, unified narrative. Like, at one point in Rise of the Antichrist, Bruce Barnes saysThe Bible told us a one-world currency and government were coming.” Okay, but did it though? The “one world currency” idea comes from Revelation 13:16-17, where the Mark of the Beast is described: “It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” That’s it, that’s the entire basis of this inevitable one-world currency that they say is clearly stated in The Bible. As for the one-world government, there are lots of verses about figures who will conquer the world, but Daniel 7 is one of the main ones. Go ahead, read it and then tell me how clearly it is telling you about a coming one-world government. Now, tell me which of these readings makes more sense:

  • That the Book of Daniel is intended to be a story to the Jewish people, who had been conquered and subjugated by multiple empires at the time, and remind them that, in the end, God would deliver them to freedom.
  • That the Book of Daniel is of no value to the places and times in which it was written. It’s actually a story for future people about the end of the world, an event so well-laid out by God that we didn’t even interpret it this way until the 1800s.

Shit like this is prevalent through Rise of the Antichrist. At one point, Rayford is trying to search his Bible app for information about “The Rapture” and “vanishings” and gets frustrated because they’ve been censored so he can’t find this information! How awful! Oh, what’s this? The Rapture isn’t even in The Bible, so he wouldn’t have been able to find it anyway? The movie even directly addresses this, when Chloe asks Bruce “What about all the people who claim the Rapture isn’t even in the Bible. Can you show me where it is?” Bruce responds with 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” Again, this is ignoring the context around the verses – this is describing the final return of Christ, not some event where the unrighteous get left behind. It’s not the irrefutable “proof” of the Rapture that they seem to think it is and it only really exists so Chloe and Buck can go dig up grandma to find that her corpse also got Raptured, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!!!?! I actually find this theologically offensive – are you telling me that her corpse is the vessel for her soul and she couldn’t go to heaven until Jesus took her body? Has grandma’s soul just been chilling down here all this time waiting for Jesus to get his ass in gear and return? I’m serious, this scene legitimately offended me and it’s about as Biblical as any other shit they spew in this movie.

This brings us to my issues with Left Behind and the prophecy industry as a whole. It’s founded upon beliefs which didn’t even exist until a couple hundred years ago. Hell, most denominations and sects of Christianity don’t even believe in The Rapture or the codified end-times theology Left Behind spews. However, because evangelicals have a virtual monopoly on the popular Christian media industry, it has become something which simply gets described as “Biblical prophecy” with zero pushback. Let me be clear – Left Behind is no more Biblical than Dante’s Inferno. You know what this sort of attitude actually is? Trusting the opinions of “experts”. End-times theology as we know it isn’t “right there” in the Bible for us all to see, we only believe it because people who subscribe to it have been preaching it for decades, to the point where evangelicals just kind of assume that it’s true now by default.

Furthermore, every single one of these movies has a big “She was right!” revelation, which causes the characters to turn to God. However, these moments always ring hollow for me. Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins, Peter & Paul Lalonde, etc act like “She was right!” proves God’s love for the characters, to the point where they are always left crying at the revelation. Simply put: it doesn’t. I’ve said plenty of times throughout this Retrospective that, in the face of the Rapture, you could quickly accept that this was God’s doing. People aren’t so stubborn that seeing literal, unexplainable miracles wouldn’t cause them to second-guess their position as an atheist. I just went on a tirade against end-times theology, but if the Rapture happened tomorrow and I got left behind, I’d reconsider my position on these beliefs and try to convince others to do the same. However, I wouldn’t be trying to save people because I’ve been convinced of God’s love and mercy. I’d be doing it because I now know that He’s real and that He’s about to go on a seven-year tantrum where He’s going to send people to hell for eternity. Legitimately, the world of Left Behind paints a reality where I am more righteous than God and His followers are a bunch of cultists suckered into believing He is good, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. And people wonder why some people absolutely hate Left Behind

Also, there’s a scene in this movie with white boy dream-Jesus where it looks like he’s about to announce that “IT’S MORBIN’ TIME!”

That’s a whole lot of words dedicated to politics and theology in this movie. You could look at all that and go “Oh, you didn’t like this movie because you’re biased against it!”, but I wrote all of that because the politics and theology are easily the most interesting aspects of the movie to dig into. For the most part, Rise of the Antichrist is a rather dull movie where little of consequence actually happens. The cast are mostly wasted here. Kevin Sorbo himself could maybe be an alright Rayford Steele, but he’s sleepwalking through this movie, even moreso than Nic Cage was. Neal McDonough could make for an entertaining villain, if he had more than like two minutes of screentime. His higher-profile within the cast is not even an effective red-herring either, since Nicolae is such an iconic villain in his own right, and because Nicolae’s presence in the narrative is completely superfluous unless he is the “twist” villain. For that matter, Bailey Chase gets barely any time to make an impression as Nicolae, isn’t even trying to sound Romanian, and is very dry in the role. Worst of all though is Greg Parrow’s Buck Williams. It’s not a bad performance per se, but it is insufferable. Parrow plays Buck as relentlessly smug, constantly talking down to people, combative, and dismissive of those he disagrees with. He comes across less like a relentless truth-seeker and more as a massive, know-it-all tool.

While Sorbo’s direction here is fairly competent for the most part, there are still some weird and downright bad decisions which drag the film down. First of all, why the hell is this movie two hours long!? This movie is the exact same content which formed the last hour of Left Behind: The Movie, which means that they’ve effectively stretched it out to double the runtime. Remember how I said that Left Behind: The Movie largely succeeded because it was really well-paced, which kept the conspiracy plotline interesting? Well, now imagine what happens to that pacing when you double the time in which it has to be told. Suffice to say, Rise of the Antichrist absolutely drags and is a far more boring adaptation for it. The most illustrative comparison would be the titular “rise of the Antichrist” scene, where Nicolae reveals his powers to the UN. In Left Behind: The Movie, this scene was easily the best in the entire movie: it was tense, surprising, and it effectively established just how sinister and threatening Nicolae was. In Rise of the Antichrist, we’ve barely even seen Nicolae before. There is no threat to his words or actions. I don’t give a shit about Buck, because he’s a tool. There is no sense that he’s in any danger. It is such a limp version of this scene that it single-handedly begs the question of why we even got this movie to begin with when it is so inferior to what came before.

In terms of bad filmmaking choices though, there is absolutely nothing that holds a candle to this film’s goddamn voiceover. For some ungodly reason, they decided that this movie needed to have Bruce Barnes narrating everything. On the one hand, they probably felt like they needed to find an efficient way to get the audience up to speed, since it had been seven years since the last movie was released and they had recast everyone. On the other hand, does it make any sense for the narrator to introduce us to Jonathan Stonagal and describe his motivations and character in the opening speech of the movie? Every time a major new character gets introduced, Bruce has to give us some sort of description of them. It also intrudes into scenes that should be tense and completely ruins them. The most egregious example would be when Buck is trying to sneak into Dirk’s apartment to get his laptop. For some reason Bruce has to chime in about how Buck couldn’t mourn his friend’s death. WHY THE HELL DO WE NEED YOUR OPINION ON THIS, BRUCE?! It’s the very definition of the unwritten rule that you’re supposed to avoid in film: “tell, don’t show”.

This movie also has a funny hallmark of any bad movie, and that’s that no one knows how to pronounce the name “Stonagal”. I’m not kidding in the slightest, Bruce’s opening narration pronounces it like “Stona-gall”, and then, not even five seconds later, Todd-Cothran calls him “Ston-a-gal”. And then Buck, Haim, and several other characters call him “Stone-a-gal”… and then, at the end, Nicolae starts calling him “Stone-a-gall”! It’s kind of hilarious that no one had any fucking clue how to pronounce this guy’s name and the director didn’t even seem to care either, because if he did he would have made sure everyone was on the same page.

In addition, there are some narrative choices which are pretty questionable. For one thing, this movie (conveniently) forgets that Rayford, Buck, Chloe, and Bruce had all ended the first Left Behind movie accepting that the Rapture had occurred. Here, they’re having to completely relearn this, which adds probably an hour of bloat to the runtime. Another choice which really rubs me the wrong way is that Kevin Sorbo has made his own character, Rayford Steele, more “important”. In the books and all the other adaptations, Bruce Barnes immediately realizes what happened when he was left behind and immediately sets about preaching the gospel. He’s the spiritual center and leader of the Tribulation Force, which makes his death in Tribulation Force so impactful. However, in Rise of the Antichrist, he has apparently just been fucking around for six months, until Rayford Steele comes around and, in Bruce’s own words, saves him. Like, you could argue that he’s depressed about losing his whole congregation and being wrong for not believing, but having Rayford be the one to motivate and lead Bruce back to Christ fundamentally alters these two characters. This feeling really got cemented for me towards the end of the film. When the group are speculating that Jonathan Stonagal could be the Antichrist, Rayford pipes up “What about Nicolae?” Despite having absolutely no reason to even suggest Nicolae as an option, of course you’re going to make your character be the one who was right, Kevin. Bloody hell…

All this said, there is one really big narrative change which is… bold, to say the least. As we saw in Left Behind: The Movie, when Nicolae reveals himself as the Antichrist, Buck keeps his head down out of fear that Nicolae might realize that he was unaffected by his mind-control and therefore knows that Nicolae is the Antichrist. In subsequent books, he then takes advantage of his relationship to Nicolae to gather intelligence and undermine the Antichrist’s efforts against Christians. In Rise of the Antichrist, Buck immediately makes a broadcast announcing to the world that Nicolae is a liar and the Antichrist. I’m of two minds about this. On the plus side, making this announcement actually makes Buck look like a better journalist since his response to this event is to make the most important breaking news story of all time. On the more mixed side of things, this completely fucks up the narrative trajectory of the next several Left Behind books. Considering how bad these books can be, this may not be that bad of a thing, but I’m also not convinced that Cloud Ten will do them any better either. On the more negative side of things though, this change just isn’t worth it in my opinion. For one thing, I prefer the more subtle, intrigue-filled storyline where Buck has to be careful not to blow his cover while getting close to the Antichrist, while also constantly wondering whether Nicolae has any suspicions about Buck. It’s a much richer narrative territory than immediately having him be on the run and pursued by Nicolae’s forces. Secondly, this undermines everything they had tried to establish with Nicolae, immediately clowning on him the moment he’s introduced. He’s a lot less sinister and terrifying if you can just openly defy him without facing any consequences. Thirdly, it’s not like Buck keeps this information to himself, it gets spread throughout the Christian community and becomes common knowledge pretty quickly.

I complained a lot about the politics of this movie, but ultimately Rise of the Antichrist isn’t very good, whether you agree with the politics or not. Very little of interest actually happens in it across its painfully-long runtime. You are far better off just watching Left Behind: The Movie, which is a considerably more watchable and better-executed version of this story overall.

3/10

So what’s next for Left Behind? Well, like I said, Kevin Sorbo has threatened to direct another sequel, so if that is on-schedule we should be hearing about that any time now. Given how demoralizing this movie was for me, I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, and it just makes me even sadder that the Kirk Cameron movies didn’t get the opportunity to continue. Like, as bad as those movies could be, there was at least an earnestness to them which shines through when you compare them to the last three “efforts” we’ve gotten.

Here’s how I’d rank the series overall:

  1. Left Behind: The Movie – 5/10
  2. Left Behind (2014) – 3.5/10
  3. Left Behind III: World at War – 3/10
  4. Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist – 3/10
  5. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force – 2.5/10
  6. Vanished: Left Behind – The Next Generation – 2/10

Thanks for sticking with me for another Retrospective! This was a lot of work for the past month, taking up a lot of my free time during the week. I’m not sure when/if I’ll do another one of these, but I am intending on starting a new Love/Hate series and resuming the looks at the Resident Evil games soon. Stay tuned for these in the near future!

Retrospective: Vanished: Left Behind – The Next Generation (2016)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! In this entry we’ll be going over the fifth film in the franchise, Vanished: Left Behind – The Next Generation… and, guys, I’ve been stoked for this one. Storytime: I was already interested in reviving the Retrospectives series here for Left Behind and thought I already knew of every movie in the franchise, but when I was looking up information about these movies, I stumbled across this off-beat entry that I had never heard of. Is this… Left Behind meets The Hunger Games!? My mind raced with the possibilities that this bizarre entry could be holding and that was the point that I decided that I was definitely going to do this Retrospective.

A bit more background here is also worth mentioning: Left Behind: The Kids was (for better or worse) my introduction to Left Behind as a franchise. As a kid, I would peruse my church’s children’s library and check out the edgier, more exciting stuff, so there was no way I was going to miss this series about mass death and the end of the world. I got hooked on The Kids books and eventually moved up to the full Left Behind novels from there. It’s been more than twenty years since I last read them, but I recall them being far more exciting, well-paced, and well-written than the main series (although Jerry B. Jenkins was hammering several The Kids books out per year, alongside full Left Behind novels, so there are apparently major continuity issues in these books that I didn’t notice as an 11 year old). As I alluded to in the World at War retrospective, the main Left Behind novels make the somewhat bone-headed decision of having its two principle expies, er, I mean characters be incredibly important figures (one, a world-renowned journalist personally working under Nicolae, and the other, Carpathia’s personal pilot). As a result, they’re rarely caught up in any of the major disasters and these events kind of just pass us by. However, the Left Behind: The Kids books are what they say on the tin – it’s a bunch of normal kids and teens just trying to survive and who absolutely get swept up trying to survive in whatever massive disaster is afflicting the world this week. Look, I don’t recommend reading Left Behind, but if you really want to experience it yourself, The Kids books might be the most palatable way to do it.

Anyways, all that said, I’ve been itching to get to this entry ever since we started. What could a young adult Left Behind movie do to stand out from its various failed predecessors? Read on to find out…

Oh great, another really boring poster that communicates absolutely nothing about what this movie is about… that said, it absolutely nails the YA aesthetic, so it’s doing something correctly. The second I saw this I knew exactly what this movie was trying to be, even if there’s nothing “Left Behind” about this poster.

Production

Vanished would be the first Left Behind movie to be produced without the involvement of Cloud Ten Pictures. Information about how this happened isn’t clear, but I can see two possibilities for how this happened. Remember how a big part of the Tim LaHaye v Cloud Ten Pictures lawsuit revolved around control of the rights to Left Behind: The Kids? Well, either the settlement which was reached in 2008 granted these rights to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, or Namesake retained these rights and chose to license them to a different studio. Whatever the case, Vanished seems to have been the brainchild of Randy LaHaye, grandson of Tim LaHaye. Randy had grown up hearing his grandfather bitching about how much he hated the Cloud Ten movies (for the record, this is not a joke), and promised him that, someday, he’d make an adaptation that could make him proud. Around 2013, Randy was watching Twilight and realized that a YA film could be a great way to introduce a new generation to Left Behind. As he saw it, kids were fascinated with dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, etc), so they could slide very easily into the dystopian world of Left Behind.

Vanished would be very loosely based on the first Left Behind: The Kids book, The Vanishings – basically just adapting the premise of the Rapture and it being told from a YA perspective. Leaning into contemporary YA tropes, a love triangle was also made into a central aspect of the narrative in order to appeal more to a wide audience. Directing duties would go to Larry A. McLean, a veteran, workman TV director.

For the cast, the lead role of Gabby would go to Amber Frank, who was probably best known for The Haunted Hathaways at the time. Her hunky best friend (or maybe something more?) Josh would be played by Mason Dye, probably the most recognizable member of the cast, because he put in a fantastic performance as Jason Carver (the psycho jock) in the fourth season of Stranger Things. The other male lead, the brooding and mysterious Flynn, would be played by Dylan Sprayberry, who you might recognize from Teen Wolf or for playing young Clark Kent in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. Rounding out the main cast was Keely Wilson as Gabby’s younger sister, Claire. The film would also feature Tom Everett Scott as the megalomaniacal Damon, and Randy LaHaye himself as… Nicolae Carpathia!?! Yeah, you read that right, in one of the most insane (and possibly appropriate?) casting decisions ever, Tim LaHaye’s own grandson portrays super-Hitler. Maybe it’s for the best though – he was originally going to play a race-swapped version of Bruce Barnes, which would have been weird at best… not that Bruce’s race has been written to actually matter in the slightest in these stories, so it’s not like he needs to be African-American in that regard. However, he’s also one of the few prominent black characters in the franchise, so removing that aspect of the character would not be a good look at all. Anyway, Randy LaHaye said that he wanted to give Nicolae a bit more nuance, to make him less of a cartoonish villain, someone that people could actually look at and see why people would become deceived by him. So, in the spirit of this idea, he based his character’s big speech to deceive the world on… Obama’s speech to the UN… Oh shit, nevermind, we’re back to the really unfortunate racial optics.

GOD dammit Randy!!!

As for production of the film, there are actually some pretty interesting stories to be told here. First of all, the movie has an executive producer credit for goddamn Rick Santorum. Secondly, the production companies for this movie are kind of fascinating. On the one hand, we have Triple Horse Studios, whose website boasts that they are “a Content Creation Company with extensive technical capabilities”. Wow, such an artful description of your work, I’m inspired to the core. Kidding aside, they are responsible for The Case For Christ, which is, by most estimates, one of the best “capital-C Christian” films ever made. On the other hand, we have Salt Entertainment Group, which seems to have immediately gone defunct as soon as this film was made. And then, most intriguingly, there’s Faith Capital Group. “Oh cool,” you say to yourself, “is this just a conglomerate of evangelicals pooling money together to fund Christian projects they like?” That’s what I assumed, but… okay, I can’t find a definitive confirmation, but I think they’re actually an Arab company based out of Kuwait, throwing money around at various projects. Definitely take that with a lot of salt, because I wasn’t able to get a direct confirmation that this is the same Faith Capital, but it’s such a fascinating possibility that I had to mention it.

Filming would take place in Savannah, Georgia on a budget reported to be around $2 million… by far the lowest of any film in the franchise. Tim LaHaye would manage to see a rough cut of the film and gave it his enthusiastic endorsement before his death in the summer of 2016. Randy LaHaye had hopes to adapt seven films total, with hopes of having the first sequel underway in 2017, depending on the reception of Vanished. The film would get a limited, one-day theatrical release on September 28, 2016, but it failed to make an impact and the proposed sequels fizzled away into nothingness…

Plot Synopsis

Gabby Harlow is living with her mother and younger sister, Claire, when suddenly a billion people vanish in the blink of an eye and the world is plunged into chaos. When Gabby’s mother disappears, she, along with her neighbour and best friend, Josh, try to find Claire. They find her at a local restaurant, but she is being chased for unknown reasons. The pair catch up to her and find that she’s being protected by a local homeless teen, Flynn. They take shelter from the looting going on outside at a local church, where pastor Bruce Barnes gives them USB sticks explaining what is behind the vanishings. Before they can hear more, the church literally explodes and they flee. Gabby decides that they need to find her father, who lives outside the city. She calls him and he answers, but gets into a car crash and the line goes dead. Gabby, Claire, Josh, and Flynn all decide to head out to try to find him.

They eventually make their way to Gabby’s father’s home, but find that he is not there. Instead, the house is being occupied by a trio of bandits, who attack the teens. They flee, but Claire is wounded in the process. They find a farm compound nearby called “Sanctuary” which is owned by a man named Damon and his sister, Sarah. Sarah has studied medicine, and is able to stitch up Claire’s wounds, while Damon takes the boys on a tour of his facility. He has been preparing for societal collapse his whole life and so many of the people in the surrounding area have been coming to Sanctuary for aid. However, he advises that such help does not come for free, so they will have to work to pay for his help.

With Sam’s help, Claire’s injuries are healed. Josh watches the USB video Pastor Barnes had provided, which explains that the vanishings are due to the Rapture, and Josh shares this theory with the others. While working the next morning, Gabby and Flynn sneak into the woods to try to figure out their next steps and end up making out with each other. They then accidentally stumble on a secret compound where Gabby finds that her father has been taken prisoner as retaliation for trying to escape. Damon’s armed thugs realize that she has witnessed this, and Damon confronts Gabby, Flynn, Josh, and Claire to threaten them. However, Sam intervenes and promises to punish them herself… and then immediately sets them free. Predictably, Gabby and the others then go to free her father. Damon realizes what has happened almost immediately and sends his thugs out to kill them to prevent anyone from discovering that he is basically turning Sanctuary into an organization engaged in debt slavery. In the pursuit, Gabby’s father is shot and killed.

In honour of her father’s dying wish, Gabby, Flynn, and Josh decide to try to free the people trapped in Sanctuary. They succeed in the attempt, driving Damon into a rage as he pursues them and tries to shoot them. The group flee into an abandoned factory, where Damon corners them, but then falls through an unstable floorboard and dies. The group, having come to realize that Pastor Barnes was right, then return back to the city to try to spread this message to their friends. As they arrive, they see that the chaos has subsided and people have gathered to watch a video proclamation from Nicolae Carpathia, promising a new era of peace arising from the ashes of his chaos. They watch in fear, realizing that he is not the hope that he portrays himself to be…

Review

So, how is Vanished? Well, let me put it this way: as I was watching it, I was finding myself coming up with nice things to say about Tribulation Force. Like, as bad as that movie is, at least the cast is pretty good and there’s some actual ambition on display, even if they lack the budget, script, or talent to execute it well. I’ve said it plenty of times, but if I find myself coming up with excuses about why a movie I hate isn’t as bad as the movie I’m watching, that’s when I know that I’m watching something truly awful. Vanished is easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, approaching The Room or Atlas Shrugged: Part III in terms of how poorly made it is. Maybe it’s “shame on me” for expecting this to at least be on-par with the other Left Behind movies in terms of quality, but I was honestly not expecting something this bad.

First of all, the YA elements are implemented in such a transparently cynical manner. Even at the start of the 2010s YA boom, the love triangle trope was already seen as a nothing more than a cynical marketing move to appeal to the Twilight crowd, so having a movie that’s blatantly ripping off the cynical copies makes Vanished feel even more painfully forced. First off, we have Josh, Gabby’s goody-good best friend/neighbour who clearly has been developing some simmering tension with her. They’re kind of cute, playful dorks together, setting him as the “good” option. Then we have Flynn, who is clearly the “dark”, “mysterious”, and “edgy” option. He’s literally homeless, having been abandoned by his addict parents. Despite barely knowing him, Gabby inexplicably has the most sexual tension with him, with the pair engaging in a rather passionate (for an evangelical movie) make-out session. Unfortunately, the love triangle isn’t really developed at all, it just kind of happens when it wants to and we’re left to assume that Gabby’s conflicted, when she clearly doesn’t even care outside of scenes where she’s supposed to. Like, we get a scene where Josh and Gabby have a cute dance together since the Rapture caused them to miss homecoming, and then the next day Gabby’s off in the woods making out with Flynn after zero build-up. We don’t really get any conflict or indecision from Gabby over her feelings for these boys. It’s just assumed that this is a YA movie, so she has to pick between them and boy would it be dramatic if she flip-flops in every scene! Actually, it’s even funnier than that, because the climactic scene of the movie involves the bad guy literally saying he’s going to shoot one of the boys and Gabby has to pick which one lives. Hilariously, to this she yells “I CAN’T DECIDE!”

The love triangle isn’t the only cynical trope lifted from the YA scene wholesale though, because Vanished makes the baffling decision of being a dystopian apocalypse movie. This may have been riffing on The Hunger Games, Divergent, or The Maze Runner, but it ends up making Vanished feel more like The Walking Dead than any of its YA contemporaries. I’m not even exaggerating here – in this movie, as soon as the Rapture happens, apparently society completely collapses. We’ve got people attacking cops, roving bandits, food and medical scarcity, and wannabe-kings rising out of the ashes. It’s an incredibly weird choice for the adaptation for multiple reasons. For one thing, it’s completely different than all other Left Behind media, where the Rapture causes life to get disrupted for a few days, but more-or-less keeps going as normally. Based on this expectation, it took a while to “get” that they were going for something completely different here (and even then, I really “got” it when I realized “oh, they’re just ripping off all the dystopian YA movies). Secondly, it doesn’t really make sense that society would completely fall apart in a single day due to the Rapture. Maybe this is just because we have since lived through COVID-19, but I’d expect major supply chain issues and months of collective trauma rather than the complete breakdown of society. Government and law enforcement are still going to be intact. Communication infrastructure is still functioning. There’s no reason to believe that people would start eating each other in an instant. Again, it’s clear that this was done to shove in another YA trope in hopes of appealing to “the youths“.

That said, at least Vanished took a look at the hundreds of millions Raptured estimates from the previous films and said “Those are rookie numbers”. Apparently the number of people Raptured this time is around one billion… Forgive me for going on a tangent here, but these numbers still feel insanely low. First off, there are approximately two billion Christians world-wide. Of course, we know that the authours of Left Behind definitely do not believe that this number is representative of the number of “true” Christians, which would go some way to explainly why their numbers are far lower. However, what it does not account for is the children – in Left Behind, there is explicitly an “age of accountability” where God does not consider you morally culpable to your actions, and therefore “Christian” by default as far as the Rapture is concerned. Vanished makes the incredibly bold decision of setting this cut-off at eleven (if I’m remembering correctly, I believe that this cut-off is around thirteen in the books). In 2016, approximately 25% of the world’s population were under the age of fifteen, out of a total global population of 7.5 billion… so, if we assume that the age of accountability cut-off is ten and only account for two thirds of that percentage, then we’re still looking at approximately 1.2 billion children alone, without even factoring in a single Christian. I shouldn’t be surprised that evangelicals are bad at math, but here we are.

I present this screen cap without context. Have fun speculating over what you’re looking at.

Tying into the limp and cynical usage of YA tropes, the writing in Vanished is just plain bad. I think that the cast here probably have talent, but you’d never know it with this script. Gabby is a complete personality-void, stumbling from scene to scene as the script requires her. Meanwhile, my descriptions of Josh and Flynn as the “good boy” and the “bad boy” describe their YA tropes, but are also pretty much the extent of their characterization. And Claire’s here as little more than a burden that they have to babysit. There’s no character development at all, other than the obligatory “come to Jesus” moments that every Christian movie has to have… which, honestly, is a trope unto itself, so if not for the writers being slaves to every trope possible, I doubt there’d even be that much development. Meanwhile, the villain is a complete psycho for no good reason, although at least Tom Everett Scott gets to ham it up towards the end (although he is absolutely no Gordon Currie).

Then we’ve got overly-convenient writing which is so transparent as to be absurd. For example, all the kids are assembled at Bruce Barnes’ church. How can we get them out of here quickly so they don’t know anything about the Rapture yet? Oh, I dunno, how about a gas leak that gets introduced and then happens in the span of like five seconds? It’s kind of hilarious, because if you sneezed at the wrong moment, you could literally miss the entire “gas leak and then church explosion” – it’s introduced and over that quickly. Oh, and then there’s the part where Damon’s so mad about Gabby and Flynn snooping around at his penal facility that he’s threatening to shoot them. His sister, Sarah, says she’ll deal with the kids… despite explicitly saying that she doesn’t know anything about Damon’s nefarious activities, so why would he even trust her with punishing them…? In any case, Sarah immediately lets the kids leave, causing them to immediately cause even more trouble for Damon. The movie proclaimed him as a full-on “genius” in his introduction and he doesn’t even think to follow-up with her to confirm what she did? It just makes him look like a complete idiot. It’s also pretty baffling that a movie about the Rapture spends about 80% of its runtime dealing with a completely unrelated, relatively low-stakes problem where some random asshole has taken Gabby’s father captive for… “reasons”.

Beyond all that though, Vanished‘s writing just makes absolutely no sense. For a very basic example, the Rapture happens and then a few hours later Gabby calls her dad. We find out later that this conversation happened as he was escaping from Sanctuary… so you’re telling me that, in a matter of hours, society instantly collapsed when the Rapture happened, he went to Sanctuary for help, tried to rebel against them, and escaped…? For that matter, who exactly is Damon worried will find out about Sanctuary? He seems to believe that the government has collapsed and that communication systems were wiped out world-wide by an EMP, who exactly does he think is going to stop him…? Like, literally no one would even care what he’s doing if he wasn’t beating up and trying to kill people for leaving, it’s such a brain-dead “plan”.

Going hand-in-hand with the abysmal writing, the filmmaking on display here is incredibly shoddy, on the level of a bad student film. I’ll give it this at least – the filmmakers at least have heard of lighting, so in that regard it gets a leg-up compared to the first two Left Behinds. However, in pretty much every other regard, this movie looks positively amateurish. Probably the most notable element that this movie is lacking is music. At one point, I was watching the film and was wondering why so many scenes that should be important, exciting, and intense ended up feeling “dead”, until it hit me that there is no soundtrack whatsoever. Check out this clip from the film, which is a perfect encapsulation of just how badly made this film is, and how much it suffers for having no music:

Ahh, the heroic sacrifice and emotional death scene, a classic story moment that has been captured on film tens of thousands of times over the years. However, between the awful direction, editing, and lack of music, Vanished can’t even pull this off well. The whole scene falls flat and was honestly the most I laughed in the whole movie. Vanished is amateurish to the point where we get a shot of military drones flying over a bus near the end of the film and I’m convinced that they forgot to put in any sound effects for them. For any other film, maybe I could be convinced that they just couldn’t be heard because the bus was drowning out the noise, but I give Vanished absolutely zero charity, because it does not deserve it.

All this said, I’ve got yet another hot take for this Retrospective series: Vanished has possibly the most fascinating turn of any Left Behind movie. As soon as the cast arrive at Sanctuary, the movie pivots hard from a weird, crappy, Christian version of The Walking Dead with only one zombie, to a movie about conservatives fighting each other. This isn’t a joke – Vanished‘s second and third acts become a story about conservative evangelicals pouring shit on conservative libertarians; it’s like stumbling across two baboons having a knife fight. Remember, this movie came out the same year that evangelical movies were fellating audiences by demonizing liberals and atheists, so seeing a movie where they turned inwards and had a purity war is fascinating to witness.

Damon is immediately introduced as a bit of an asshole who has been building up a life that is off-grid, self-sustaining, and away from government surveillance and who disdains certifications from formal education institutions. He also is up-front that he doesn’t “give any handouts”, so any help he offers is going to need to be paid back. He’s clearly meant to be an embodiment of libertarian ideals, but there’s a clear distaste for him in his introduction. We soon find that all of his neighbours have been coming to him for help. Since society has collapsed and he was the only one around who was prepared for this, he’s been using them to work the land to pay their debts. However, we soon discover that Damon is a hypocrite – he preaches libertarian ideals, but only because he can use them to put everyone around him into debt slavery for his own enrichment and empowerment. Everyone who pushes back and tries to leave sanctuary is beaten into submission or imprisoned, and when Gabby and her father try to escape in response to these punishments, Damon orders them all to be executed. There’s a clear undercurrent here that Damon is an evil asshole – people are coming to him for help, and he’s disproportionately exploiting that desperation instead of being a good, Christian neighbour. The climax of the film revolves around Gabby, Josh, and Flynn returning to Sanctuary to liberate the debt slaves, so it’s clearly being emphasized that this guy’s a complete piece of shit, while our Christian heroes are morally righteous. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s a shockingly based message for a Left Behind movie of all things, and the funny part is that it basically comes down to a spat between different varieties of conservatives. Unfortunately, despite having the best politics of any Left Behind movie, it’s also by far the worst one – just chalk that up as another example that my political biases don’t disproportionately affect my evaluations of these movies. Sometimes they just suck on their own merits.

Vanished is a brutally amateurish film, one that manages to make Cloud Ten Pictures look like master filmmakers… and, guys, how bad do you have to be to make me come to Peter and Paul Lalonde’s defense like this? Seriously? It doesn’t even have the courtesy of being entertainingly bad either, it’s mostly just terrible filmmaking combined with lazy, uninspired, uncreative rehashing of tropes ripped off of far superior films… and that “superior films” distinction includes every Twilight movie (yes, even New Moon and Breaking Dawn). Goddammit, you’re making me do it again, Vanished, why do you have to be so much worse than all these movies? And Rise of the Antichrist is next up for me! If you make me look at a Kevin Sorbo movie with more-lenient eyes, I’ll never forgive you…

2/10

Be sure to tune in again soon when we look at the most recent entry in this series, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist!

Retrospective: Left Behind (2014)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! In this entry we’ll be going over the fourth film in the franchise, the Left Behind reboot. This was the last of the Left Behind films that I had seen prior to starting this retrospective series, and I remembered it having a very different feel compared to the original series. Could a bigger budget and more famous cast allow Left Behind to succeed on its second attempt? Read on to find out…

That’s about as boring a poster as you could expect from a 2014 Left Behind movie… Also, if you’ve actually seen the movie and, like me, have no idea who Jordin Sparks (the person on the left) is, then her inclusion on this poster is insane. I had to look her up after seeing this to realize that she was stunt casting.

Production

Remember that lawsuit Tim LaHaye had been harrassing Cloud Ten over since before the very first Left Behind movie even released? Well, around the time that World at War released, LaHaye managed to appeal the suit dismissal, and once again the movie series was on hold as the parties fought back-and-forth over the rights to the franchise. Well, in 2008, Namesake Entertainment, Cloud Ten Pictures, and Tim LaHaye finally reached a settlement, with LaHaye dropping all his claims in exchange for a two-year window to create his own adaptation of the books. Wow, after all that, Tim LaHaye finally got what he wanted – an opportunity to see his work brought to life the way he always wanted! What an incredible victory for him!

…in 2010, no adaptation had been made and the rights reverted back to Cloud Ten Pictures.

What. The. Fuck.

Yeah, that’s really how this legal drama we’ve been covering for four movies now ended. Tim LaHaye was either the biggest troll alive, or he was completely unable to find anyone who wanted to produce this movie to his standards. What an absolute waste of the time and money of everyone involved, holy shit.

In any case, by this time it was now five years since the last Left Behind movie had released and Peter and Paul Lalonde, presumably, felt that continuing the existing franchise was no longer viable and that it would be a good opportunity to reboot the property instead. Furthermore, Paul Lalonde would reveal years later that, despite owning the series’ film rights, they actually only had the rights to make movies based on the first two books… which is right where World at War ended, so the only way to milk the franchise further at this point without making further agreements with LaHaye would be to reboot. To further cement the fresh start, Paul Lalonde founded a new production company, Stoney Lake Entertainment, and aimed to make this reboot with a wider audience in mind, closer to LaHaye’s original vision of a blockbuster adaptation.

In line with this ambition, the Left Behind reboot landed Nicolas Cage as its Rayford Steele in late 2012. Nicolas Cage’s brother, Marc Coppola, who is a pastor, actor and DJ, was a fan of the novel and was the one who pushed him to accept the role in the film. While definitely a big “get”, it’s worth explaining some context here for those of us living in 2024 when Nicolas Cage is cool again – in 2014, Nic Cage was at the peak of his “weird guy slumming it in every role he gets offered because he can’t stop buying t-rex skeletons” phase. Sure, he’d show up in a Kick-Ass every once in a while and absolutely kill it, but these bright spots were vastly outweighed by unhinged performances in The Wicker Man, Season of the Witch, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, etc, so there was a worry (or, for some film connoisseurs, hope) that he’d be running around on a plane screaming “WHY DID THEY DISAPPEAR!?!”

After Cage, the rest of the cast fell into place. Chad Michael Murray (best known for One Tree Hill and a fuckload of Hallmark Christmas movies) would be cast as Buck Williams. Ashley Tisdale (of Disney channel fame, including The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and multiple High School Musicals) was originally cast as Chloe Steele, but would drop out due to scheduling conflicts. The producers kept the role open for her to return as long as they could, but at the last minute they had no choice but to recast her with Cassi Thomson (best known for TV series Big Love and Switched at Birth). Jordin Sparks, winner of the sixth season of American Idol, would be cast as well in a fairly minor role, but due to her fame, she ended up getting one of the top-billing roles anyway. Nicky Whelan (probably best-known for the Australian soap opera, Neighbours) was cast as Hattie Durham. Rounding out the main cast, Lea Thompson (of Back to the Future fame) was cast as Irene Steele. Also in a small role, goddamn Martin Klebba is in this movie… he doesn’t get any billing, but I guarantee you’ve seen him before – he’s the little person in all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and he also punches that piece of shit Costa in the dick in Project X. Honestly, he’s more famous than anyone else in this cast, aside from Nic Cage and Lea Thomson, why the hell is he not getting top billing, cowards?

This time, directing duties would go to Hollywood legend Vic Armstrong. Mostly known for his work as a stuntman, Vic doubled for Roger Moore in Live and Let Die, freaking Christopher Reeve in Superman, and (most famously) had doubled for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, Blade Runner, Return of the Jedi, and Patriot Games. This is an incredible record, but in terms of directing, he had mostly done some episodes of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and a Dolph Lundgren B-movie up until this point.

The budget for this reboot was set around $16 million (somehow even lower than the budget of the original movie, assuming that that film’s numbers weren’t inflated… which, having seen this movie, I’m even more convinced that the reported $17.4 million budget for Left Behind: The Movie was complete bullshit). The script would be written by Paul Lalonde and John Patus, who had written the scripts for the previous Left Behind movies as well. Also, as a series first, filming did not take place in and around Toronto! Instead, the film was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in August of 2013. A private screening would be held for Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye and, this time, they were extremely pleased with the results (although it has been implied by family that Tim LaHaye’s endorsement was mostly done to drum up good publicity for the film).

Critics, however, would be extremely harsh. The movie has a freaking 0% Rotten Tomatoes score. And it wasn’t just the secular critics who hated it – Christian reviewers decried its production values, while… well, I’m gonna post Wikipedia’s excerpt from Christianity Today‘s review, because it is scathing:

Left Behind is not a Christian movie, whatever ‘Christian Movie’ could even possibly mean. In fact, most Christians within the world of the movie—whether the street-preacher lady at the airport or Rayford Steele’s wife—are portrayed as insistent, crazy, delusional, or at the very least just really annoying. They want churches to book whole theaters and take their congregations, want it to be a Youth Group event, want magazines like this one to publish Discussion Questions at the end of their reviews—want the system to churn away, all the while netting them cash, without ever having to have cared a shred about actual Christian belief. They want to trick you into caring about the movie. Don’t.” They also stated that they “tried to give the film zero stars, but our tech system won’t allow it.”

My God, I’ve never seen such a damning indictment of the Christian media marketing cycle, but there’s Christianity Today laying it bare and shooting it in the back of the head. Just brutal… Perhaps because of this vitriolic response, Left Behind would bomb at the box office, making just over $20 million (which, after marketing, would not have broken even). This was, by the way, occurring during a banner year for faith-based films, with such successes as Son of God, Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings (to be fair, this one was a bit of a bomb, but it was undeniably a very prominent, expensive, religious blockbuster), Heaven is For Real, and, oh I dunno, God is Not Dead.

Oh, and for the record: Stoney Lake Entertainment haven’t released another movie since Left Behind.

Plot Synopsis

Chloe Steele returns home from college to surprise her father, Rayford, for his birthday, but discovers that he won’t be home – he has unexpectedly taken a shift flying a passenger plane to London. While waiting to see him at the airport, Chloe meets television journalist Buck Williams and the pair hit it off, venting to each other their issues with hypocritical Christians after an unpleasant encounter with a woman in the airport. Chloe soon finds Rayford and realizes that he has taken this flight because he is engaging in an affair with flight attendant Hattie Durham, having grown frustrated with his wife, Irene, after she converted to Christianity. Disappointed, she returns home alone, while Buck boards Rayford’s flight to London and they depart.

Irene tries to plead to Chloe to understand her desire to see her come to Jesus, but Chloe rebuffs her and leaves to spend time with Raymie. However, while they are at the mall together, the Rapture occurs and suddenly hundreds of millions of people across the world disappear. The event causes mass panic, as in addition to several adults, every child disappears as well, including Raymie. Planes and cars crash as their drivers disappear and chaos erupts as people begin looting to take advantage of the situation. Chloe is caught up in the middle of all of this and tries desperately to find her family as the world goes to hell around her.

Meanwhile, up in the air, Rayford, Buck, and Hattie try to maintain order as several passengers are Raptured. After a near mid-air collision with a plane whose pilots were Raptured, Rayford’s plane is left crippled and leaking fuel. He turns back to New York to land and slowly comes to the realization that the Raptured passengers were Christians – his wife was right all along. Chloe comes to realize this as well as she finds that her mother has also disappeared.

As Rayford approaches New York, he is informed that there is no landing strip open for him, there are crashed planes at airports all over, so he needs to go further inland. With their fuel situation, this is impossible and Rayford tries to find an alternate solution. Buck manages to contact Chloe and he, Rayford, and Chloe concoct a plan to land the plane on an open stretch of highway under construction. Chloe manages to guide them in and Rayford barely manages to land the plane safely. As everyone looked out on the chaos which has enveloped the world, they muse that this isn’t the end of the world – it’s just the beginning of the end…

Review

Okay, so I’ve got another hot take: the Left Behind reboot isn’t that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not good either, but it’s better and more entertaining than you’d expect considering the universal critical drubbing it got. Like, as of the time of writing this, Madame Web has a 12% Tomatometer and 57% audience score, whereas Left Behind has a 0% Tomatometer and 21% audience score. That just doesn’t feel fair to me considering the movie we actually got here. Maybe I’m being generous because I just watched two significantly worse Left Behind movies, but it’s arguably the most watchable entry in the franchise that we’ve covered so far (other than maybe the original movie). A lot of this comes down to the intent to refocus the franchise from a straight adaptation of the books and into more of a conventional disaster movie. This has its pros and cons, but it’s hard to be too harsh during the moments when you’ve got people dodging careening cars and airplanes, Nic Cage having to limp his crippled plane in for an emergency landing, or just soaking up the general chaos as the world goes to shit in an instant. Sure, these parts could be executed better, but they’re entertaining enough on a base level that you should find something to keep you interested.

That said, I had mentioned in my review of Left Behind: The Movie that that film managed to stay interesting because of its conspiracy theory plotline in the second half. This causes the Rapture to not outstay its welcome and keeps the pace snappy. However, this reboot excises the conspiracy aspects of the book entirely, meaning that the film needs to find a way to mine a lot of content out of the Rapture premise instead. Oh, and have I mentioned that this film is nearly two hours long? That’s a full ten minutes longer than the original despite featuring half as much narrative! As you might imagine, Left Behind is pretty slow and really stretches to fill that runtime. To give you an idea of how slow paced this movie is, it takes twenty minutes for the plane to even take off and the Rapture doesn’t happen until nearly forty-five minutes in. For comparison, Left Behind: The Movie gets Ray on the plane in about twenty minutes (despite also dedicating most of that opening runtime to the conspiracy plot we don’t have here), and then the Rapture happens five minutes later.

Now, to be fair, they do use this additional runtime to flesh out some aspects which are not very well established in the source material. In particular: we get a lot more insight into Chloe’s character, we get to see how Irene’s conversion has put strain on her marriage and her children, and we get insight into why exactly Chloe, Buck, and Rayford are so hostile to religion. However, this gets weighed down by several scenes with passengers who are little more than caricatures: we’ve got the quirky Alzheimer’s couple, greedy businessman, conspiracy theorist, Muslim dude (not to be crass, but that’s about the extent of his characterization), drug addict heiress, cute kid, angry little person, paranoid woman on the run from her husband, etc. Establishing the passengers is actually a pretty great idea. If we’re worried about these people being in peril, it should give the disaster sequences higher stakes. The problem is that they barely register as characters and you could easily cut out every scene they’re in and all it would do is make the pacing better.

Of course, once the Rapture does happen, a lot of that runtime is then taken up by utter chaos. I had completely forgotten that this movie makes the Rapture occur in broad daylight. I definitely prefer how, in the original movie, the Rapture happens subtly, resulting in this slow, creeping realization that something horrible and unexplainable has occurred, which soon develops into full-blown panic. That said, this change was clearly done to maximize the drama and chaos, because the second it happens, this film just explodes in a mass of screaming and running that would put a Black Friday news report to shame. It quickly gets to a point that is silly. This is best typified by Chloe’s storyline for most of this film, which can only be described as “Chloe and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”. Not only did her plan to surprise her dad on his birthday get ruined by him, but then she finds out he’s cheating on her mom, she gets in a fight over religion with her mom, then her brother gets Raptured while she’s hugging him… and then she dodges a driverless car which careens through the mall doors, and then a fixed-wing airplane falls out of the sky and plows into her car, and then some hoodlums steal her brother’s backpack, and then a bus somehow nearly falls on top of her like thirty minutes after the Rapture happened, AND THEN she almost becomes collateral damage when a looter gets shot and gets a shotgun pointed in her own face, AND THEN her dad nearly lands a plane on top of her. It very quickly crosses the line from believable into ridiculous, and that’s just the shit that happens to Chloe.

Ray also has a bunch of insane things to deal with: not only does he have a bunch of passengers disappearing on his hands, but then the plane immediately hits violent turbulence (I guess they’re hitting all the souls on their way up?), his co-pilot gets Raptured while at the controls (hey, shout-out to Chris, Paul Lalonde wants to see you go to heaven more than Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins ever did!), they get into a near mid-air collision with a plane whose pilots were Raptured and damage the electronics and fuel lines in the process, the wing catches fire, they run out of fuel, and they can’t land anywhere. It gets exhausting how relentlessly they wring out every single potential bit of drama they can, but then they just keep going further and further, to the point where it’s practically comedic. I almost wonder how much of this comedy was intentional, because at the very end of Nic Cage’s makeshift runway, there’s a fuel truck that they come within inches of hitting, and it’s honestly a pretty great visual joke to punctuate how much shit they’ve been through during the film.

You may have noticed that I keep saying “dramatically”, and that’s possibly my biggest issue with this film – it is melodramatic as all hell. Your mileage will vary on how much you can stand this, but I found this incredibly grating and every time some “dramatic” moment happened I just got more and more annoyed. Like, a good chunk of those opening twenty minutes before the flight are just Chloe coming across more and more obvious evidence that her dad is cheating – seeing him flirting with Hattie, hearing his unconvincing denials, finding his wedding ring in the car, and being asked to pass him tickets for a U2 concert he’s going to see in London with Hattie (oh man, that show’s gonna have to be canceled since Bono got Raptured, right?). Oh, and we can’t just have the Rapture happen, that’s not dramatic enough – we have to make sure it happens at the very second that Chloe’s hugging her younger brother and telling him that she loves him. Or later, when she heads to the hospital, she wanders into the maternity ward for no real reason, other than to give us more melodrama when they reveal that every baby has been killed by God… er, I mean, Raptured away. Or how about how every single phone and radio call cuts out dramatically at the worst possible moment. I’m not kidding either, this happens at least five times that I counted.

However, it wouldn’t be a melodrama without a couple dramatic suicide attempts! In the one scene where she actually does anything, Jordin Sparks’ character steals a gun from a Raptured air marshal and goes into a paranoid delusion where she believes that everyone on the plane is involved in an elaborate plot to kidnap her daughter and demands that they give her back. This is ridiculous enough, but then Buck tells her to point the gun at him because he’s such a big hero, while Jordin is basically screaming “I’M NOT CRAZY, YOU’RE CRAZY!!!” And then, all that talking her down does is cause her to turn the gun on herself. They do manage to talk her out of it, but my God, this scene is kind of illustrative of why always putting the foot on the gas with the drama gets ridiculous at a certain point and robs scenes that deserve emphasis of their power. Case in point: Chloe also contemplates suicide by climbing to the top of a bridge to scream at God. It definitely seems to be implied that she’s going to end it, until Buck and dad call her at the last moment. Melodrama! Oh, also, it’s not the movie’s fault for this, but I need to mention that this scene has “Dancing in the Sky” playing in the background, so TikTok memes have turned this scene into an inadvertent joke in 2024.

You might have also noticed that I’m talking about Chloe a lot during this review and that’s because, honestly, she’s got most of the interesting material in this film. Nic Cage has top billing, but his performance is disappointingly subdued, to the point where he’s basically sleepwalking through the film. For those of us who were hoping he’d bring some entertainingly mad energy to the film, it makes his segments rather bland. And, unfortunately, Chad Michael Murray’s Buck Williams has basically nothing to do, other than help Ray and Hattie keep order on the plane and suddenly (and unconvincingly) fall in love with Chloe after only meeting once for a couple hours at the airport. He’s alright in the role, but has so little to work with that I can’t even really judge the performance. So everything kind of has to fall on Cassi Thomson’s shoulders, and thankfully she is probably the brightest spot in the film. It’s worth noting that Chloe feels like an actual important character in this iteration, not just a burden or a love interest like she is in the books or the previous movies. Hell, they even managed to give her a key role to play in saving the day, so clearly there’s been some conscious effort put in to elevate her to equal importance in the main cast.

We’ve waded through a lot of negativity through this review so far, but I want to address perhaps the most interesting aspect of Left Behind, and that’s how it portrays Christians. Upfront, this film is hostile to Christians, and I don’t mean that the characters are disparaging to them – I mean that Christians themselves are straight-up portrayed negatively. When we get introduced to Buck, he’s getting pestered by an evangelical who is trying to preach to him. Chloe intervenes to dunk on her with facts and logic, and the woman is unable to respond. This woman is clearly being portrayed as the asshole in this situation, and the crazy part is that they are right to do so. She is being an asshole, and this is probably how this situation would play out in real life. It’s a level of introspection and self-flagellation which is kind of insane, especially considering that God is Not Dead came out this same year, and… well, that film did not have anywhere near the same level of self-awareness. After this encounter with the evangelical woman, Chloe tells Buck about how her mother says that major disasters are a good thing, because they’re a sign from God, which is a nakedly ghoulish way to look at the world. Later, Chloe gets into an argument with her mother about God and how disappointed she is that her father isn’t home. Instead of trying to empathize with Chloe, Irene says that God brought her home for a purpose, to which Chloe snaps back: “God did not bring me home. […] God is the reason dad is not here right now.” This stings because it is absolutely true. Ray confides to Chloe that people change as they get older and this can cause them to grow apart, and it’s clear that Irene is the one who has put a major strain on her relationship with her family. She wants to share her new faith with her family, but however she is doing it, it is not succeeding and that is entirely on her. Looking at all this, I can see why Christianity Today had such scathing things to say about Left Behind – on its surface, this movie is absolutely shitting on Christians at every turn.

Here’s the thing though – I believe that this is entirely a ploy by Paul Lalonde and John Patus in order to draw in a secular audience. Shit on the Christians in the first act, tell the audience “Look, we agree that we suck too!”, and they’re more likely to stick around until you can get to the point where you can pull the rug out from under them. The film completely pivots once we get to the obligatory “She was right” moment of realization for Rayford and Chloe. After shitting on Christians throughout the first act, and then spending a good chunk of the second act on disaster melodrama, it suddenly drops the sermon on you without warning and starts getting far more blunt with its intent. Early in the film, Buck and Chloe are speaking about a story he had covered, where a woman had her entire family die in a tsunami, except for one child. She thanked God for saving her and her baby, but then refused to evacuate and they both died in a mudslide. It’s pretty clear from this story that that person’s outlook was, at best, incredibly strange, if not foolish – it seems perfectly justified for her to be mad at God in this situation. However, when the Rapture occurs and suddenly our characters are in their own disaster, it became pretty obvious what this film’s theme is: “People come together during a disaster and learn to trust in God”. All the stuff the film was shitting on earlier becomes vindicated, and this isn’t just subtext either: Rayford says how it was his fault that he didn’t listen to Irene. However, I disagree entirely – she is the one who changed and created the divide. Rayford didn’t have to change with her and clearly was not convinced to do so. People change and sometimes that creates an irreconcilable difference. It sucks, but it happens. Oh, also, I find it really funny how Ray starts talking about how God caused the people to disappear, which causes Hattie to say “What has happened to you? Why are you talking like this? You’ve never spoken about God before. Where’s this coming from?” I dunno bitch, maybe a little thing called THE RAPTURE happened and changed my viewpoint. Fucking hell, even the unbeliever dialogue starts getting dumb at this point…

Ultimately, I find this interesting, because we’ve seen a bunch of different approaches through these movies to try to reach people. If the intent of Left Behind is to get the message out that the Rapture is coming and non-Christians need to be warned about it, then a film that’s stripped back and focused on this event is probably the right call, as is “watering down” the preaching in favour of spectacle for a more mainstream appeal. However, it also demonstrates that you can downplay all you want, but this is still unquestionably a “Christian movie”. Poo-poo Christians all you want at the start, but when the message is delivered bluntly like this, you’re going to alienate the mainstream audience you want to court. If anything, watering down the message only serves to piss off the core Christian audience who usually can be counted on to see these kinds of films. This is kind of counter-intuitive, but also probably explains why this film bombed so hard in a year when faith-based films that feverishly jacked off the Christian audience were doing major numbers.

All-in-all, Left Behind isn’t a particularly great movie. It’s cheap, but compared to the previous Left Behind films, it’s practically a blockbuster in terms of presentation. However, once the Rapture happens it at least manages to be somewhat entertaining on a pure, dumb disaster movie level. It sorely could have done with some better pacing and maybe easing back on the melodrama, but I’ve seen much worse out of this series. Congrats, Left Behind franchise, you’ve graduated from church basement movie, to made for TV movie, to B-movie!

3.5/10

Be sure to tune in again soon when we look at the next entry in this series, Vanished: Left Behind – Next Generation!

Retrospective: Left Behind III – World at War (2005)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! In this entry we’ll be going over the third film in the franchise, Left Behind III: World at War. I had previously seen the first two Left Behind movies as a kid, but had never had a chance to see this third movie… and, honestly, I was always kinda disappointed about that. Like I said in the first entry, edgy, 11-year-old me got into this series to read about mass death in a way that would be acceptable to my evangelical parents. A Christian movie about World War III always piqued my curiosity and had a good chance of leaving me satisfied one way or another – either it’s somehow actually kinda cool and has an exciting world war, or it’s bad and I get to make fun of it. Which way would it shake out for World at War? Read on to find out…

Certainly not a good poster, but it’s miles more professional than the previous two films’ attempts.

Production

By the time that Left Behind II: Tribulation Force was released on home video, Cloud Ten were already promising that a third film was on the way and would feature that novel’s excised climax – World War III. I’ve already complained enough about the effect that this had on that previous movie, but the idea of this war getting a full movie to flesh it out was exciting enough. I have previously mentioned that Left Behind books tend to revolve around some massive disaster, but what I didn’t mention is that Jerry B. Jenkins kind of sucks at actually portraying these disasters. For example, there is a massive, global earthquake in the book Nicolae, which kills a full quarter of the world’s population in a matter of minutes. As I recall, this event gets a couple pages of reference, and it’s not even from the ground – it’s Ray flying in his plane above, watching all devastation occur. This is contrasted against the Left Behind: The Kids series, where the same event takes up about half a novella and features the point of view shots of several characters on ground-level. Anyway, point being that the Left Behind movies, once again, had a potential to greatly improve upon their source material.

With the Tim LaHaye lawsuit dismissed, Cloud Ten were able to put a lot more focus into this third Left Behind film. Cloud Ten were, obviously, keenly aware of the budgetary issues that a World War III movie presented and, perhaps because of this, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment were brought on to help produce and distribute this film. It seems that Paul & Peter Lalonde were keenly aware that their evangelizing focus in Tribulation Force (predictably) alienated the people they were trying to preach to, and so hoped that partnering with Sony could help them to reach a wider audience.

Once again, most of the original cast reprised their roles: notably, Kirk Cameron, Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie, Janaya Stephens, and Chelsea Noble. David Macniven also (briefly) returns as Chris after his big salvation scene in the prior movie. However, notably, Clarence Gilyard Jr. was unable to return as Bruce Barnes due to scheduling conflicts (reportedly, Gilyard Jr. is a Catholic and his priest was happy about this because Left Behind‘s theology is basically heresy to them). The role was replaced by Arnold Pinnock, an English actor who has been in tons of TV and small roles over the years. The biggest new cast member for World at War though was undoubtedly Louis Gossett Jr., who had won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for An Officer and a Gentleman. Gossett would be playing President Fitzhugh. According to Gossett, “All the predictions in the Bible seem to be coming true. I wanted to be connected to a film that was making that statement.”

Directing duties would once again be handled by a different workman director; this time Craig R. Baxley would be in the chair. Baxley was more known for his stunt work and second unit directing, having worked on The A-Team, 21 Jump Street (the TV show), and The Dukes of Hazzard. His biggest credit though would be stunts and second unit directing on goddamn Predator, so there was hope at least that his pedigree could result in a movie with some serious action chops.

As with previous Left Behind films, filming would occur in and around Toronto. After some delays, production began February 21, 2005 and would wrap nearly a month later. Budget totals are unclear, but I’ve seen estimates ranging from approximately $4.5 million to $17.5 million. Also like before, World at War skipped a full theatrical release, instead going straight-to-DVD and screening the film at over 3000 churches. Prior to the release, Peter Lalonde confidently stated: “Wait until they see it. Then people will be saying, ‘I hope there’s a Left Behind 4.'”

Spoiler alert: There would be no Left Behind 4

Plot Synopsis

World at War opens with Fitzhugh in the bombed-out remains of the White House, filming a confession as someone appears to confront him…

It then flashes back one week earlier, where the Tribulation Force are conducting a raid on a Global Community facility where confiscated Bibles are being stored. Guards interrupt the raid and Chris is killed in the escape. We then cut to President Fitzhugh and his vice president, John Mallory, who are discussing intelligence that someone is planning on using biological weapons on American soil – the three biggest factions being the Christians, the militias, or Nicolae’s Global Community. Their motorcade is then ambushed, but third-party militia interrupt the attack and save the president, although Mallory is killed in the process.

We then cut to the Tribulation Force, where a dual wedding ceremony is underway. Buck and Chloe are married, and then Ray marries Amanda, a woman we’ve never met before until this scene. Fitzhugh meets with Nicolae about the attack on his motorcade and recognizes Nicolae’s personal assistant, Carolyn Miller, as one of the militia members who rescued him in the attack. He then captures and interrogates Buck, who Fitzhugh knows is connected with the Christians and that they’ve been stockpiling vaccines. Buck tells him that they’ve been doing this because of prophesized plagues and that he believes that Nicolae will be the one behind the biological weapons.

Fitzhugh arranges a meeting with Miller and the pair infiltrate a Global Community facility. Here they discover that Buck is right and that Nicolae is poisoning Bibles with chemical agents. The manage to escape the facility and meet up with the militia, creating a coalition between America, Great Britain, and Egypt which will launch a pre-emptive attack on the Global Community. However, Fitzhugh realizes that they need to kill Nicolae in order to win, and goes to assassinate him himself. However, Nicolae is aware of Fitzhugh’s intentions and, despite landing several shots on Nicolae, he is completely unphased by the attack. Nicolae reveals that he has already commenced bombing operations and that World War III is underway, before using his powers to Force push Fitzhugh out a window. However, Fitzhugh survives the fall through divine intervention and slinks back to the militia. Unfortunately, they believe the war is going disastrously and they believe that Fitzhugh sold them out.

Meanwhile, the Tribulation Force are in disarray. Bruce and Chloe have been exposed to the biological agents and are dying after caring for the sick at the church. Rayford and Amanda rush to be with them, while Buck feels that God is calling him to be in Washington. After some soul-searching, he confronts Fitzhugh in the White House and convinces him to come to Jesus. While this is happening, Chloe realizes that communion wine can be used to neutralize the biological agent, although this is discovered too late for Bruce, who succumbs.

Fitzhugh once again confronts Nicolae at Global Community HQ, who gloats over his victory. However, Fitzhugh has activated a satellite missile, which homes in on their location and obliterates it, killing Fitzhugh in the process. Nicolae is seemingly killed as well, but emerges from the flaming wreckage completely unscathed.

Review

Right from the opening scenes, it’s apparent that World at War has a very different “feel” than its predecessors. I believe that this is down to two factors. First of all, World at War was the first proper post-9/11 Left Behind movie (Tribulation Force did come out in late 2002, but it would have been in production in the days and months following the event). The filmmakers would have been able to draw inspiration from the fallout of the disaster, the Anthrax attacks, the beginnings of the Iraq War, and the cultural paradigm shift occurring around them. Tonally, World at War feels like it has more in common with a mid-2000s, post-9/11 political thriller than it does with its two predecessors. I think the most notable factor though was Sony’s involvement. It seems that they brought guidance and a more professional atmosphere to the project, and you can clearly see this when comparing the production values of World at War to either of the previous Left Behind movies. I’ve been harping on this throughout this retrospective, but my God, it is refreshing to see a movie that’s competently lit; it makes such a massive difference at making this look like a real, professionally-made movie.

God said “Let there be light”, to which Peter and Paul Lalonde replied “Nah man, that shit’s too expensive”.

I will give some credit though to the filmmakers (and probably Craig R. Baxley in particular), because there are a couple pretty exciting moments peppered throughout the runtime. The opening sequence where the Tribulation Force break into a Global Community compound and steal confiscated Bibles is approaching legitimate action movie territory and is miles more exciting than any sequence in the prior two films. This quickly gets upstaged though by the ambush on the presidential motorcade, which opens with an incredible car explosion stunt. Seriously, this ambush sequence came out of nowhere and my jaw dropped at how spectacular the opening stunt was. It makes for an action sequence which is legitimately pulse-pounding, reminiscent of the ambush scene from Clear and Present Danger (albeit, far cheaper). Unfortunately, both of these sequences are pretty early in the movie, so it peaks very early and leaves you with some false hope that the war sequences might actually deliver.

We’ll keep the positivity going by moving onto the performances. Louis Gossett Jr. is absolutely acting his ass off in this movie, putting in by far the best performance in the entire franchise up to this point, and elevating the shlocky material he’s given far higher than it has any right to be. Arnold Pinnock also really leaves an impression as the new Bruce Barnes. Clarence Gilyard Jr. wasn’t exactly bad as Bruce, but (other than one scene in the first movie) he was given absolutely nothing to work with outside of being an exposition dump machine and his character was unable to leave any kind of impression. Here, he actually comes across as the leader of the Tribulation Force, and when he becomes sick with Nicolae’s biological agent, his acting is good enough that it could bring tears to your eyes.

I have to give one last special shout-out to Gordon Currie though, who cranks his hammy take on Nicolae Carpathia up yet another notch. He’s deliciously evil and smarmy, and has some incredible moments of villainy: disrespecting Fitzhugh by sitting in his presidential chair, tanking three shots at point blank range, using his powers to force Fitzhugh to stick a gun to his own head, and then deciding it would be funnier to make him choke himself instead, he Force pushes Fitzhugh out a window and then lampshades it when he miraculously survives the fall, and then walks off a goddamn missile strike like it was nothing. Absolute king shit. I said it before and I’ll say it again, Gordon Currie’s Nicolae is a low-key, all-timer villain, and his performance in this movie just cements that further for me.

Unfortunately, for all these good performances, there’s also some notably weak ones. Kirk Cameron has been tolerable through this series, but his constant boy scout charm isn’t really selling it for me when Buck’s going through some really emotional moments that should be leaving him far more shaken. His wife, Chelsea Noble, is also notably weaker here than in previous films, coming across like a personal screed against catty bitches moreso than an actual character performance. In some ways, this actually makes Hattie legitimately dangerous to Rayford, but it’s kind of wild how spitefully performed and written she is. Notably, Cameron and Noble were always the weakest of the original cast, but this is the first time that I feel like their performances dipped enough to actually merit some criticism… and, honestly, as far as movies like this go, it’s still not that bad overall.

As for Cloud Ten’s attempts to court a wider, more secular audience, the whole enterprise seems to be a fool’s errand. Explicitly Christian movies are kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If your entire purpose is to push a message, like Tribulation Force does, then you completely alienate the people you’re trying to preach to. If you scale it back, like World at War attempts to do, you still end up with a level of palpable preachiness which is going to alienate a wider audience and is also going to cause your core audience to believe that they’re “watering down the message to be like Hollywood”. World at War is definitely trying to entertain and is less-overtly pushing a message than the previous two films, but it’s still unmistakably preachy. For one thing, the Christian persecution complex is starting to actually show here, with Christianity outlawed, Christians getting shot, several characters likening them to terrorists, and government agents literally poisoning Bibles to kill off believers. Hell, Buck has a gun to his head and is told to renounce Jesus and refuses, a fantasy scenario which every evangelical has jerked themselves off to at least once in their life. There’s also plenty of scenes where the characters have to trust God in order to solve their problems, way to progress the plot which is basically meaningless unless you’re already convinced that Jesus is your saviour. Hell, the very idea that they could neutralize the effects of the chemical weapons attack with communion wine is absolutely insane and only makes sense if you think that communion holds some sort of special, elevated significance already.

Now, while the production value of World at War may be above its predecessors, that’s still not saying all that much. If the first movie was a glorified church basement movie, and the second was absolutely a church basement movie, this third movie has finally reached the lofty heights of a late-night, made-for-TV movie. Progress! Again, the lighting and direction really make the movie feel far better, even though World at War feels even cheaper than the previous two movies in some aspects. For one thing, there’s a lot more use of visual effects, with lots of sequences of people firing rockets, setting off massive explosions, throwing people through windows, etc. This definitely cost more than the miniscule visual effects in the previous two films, but the CGI used is so bad and so prominent that it ends up making World at War feel tackier. There’s also a lot of usage of green screen for scenes of driving, flying, window vistas, etc, and it’s usually really obvious when it’s been used, because the the matting is terrible. I’m talking visible “fuzz” around the actors where the background hasn’t been quite eliminated, the background not matching the camera movement properly, or even green light reflecting onto the actors (humourously, during one of these scenes, Nicolae asks Fitzhugh what colour the sky is, and then says that he could see it as green for all we know, while green light is literally showing on his skin). World at War is also taking place in a lot more sets than its predecessors (who at least spent a good chunk of their runtimes seemingly filming at some guy’s house as a stand-in for Rayford’s or at a literal church). In World at War, the church has been driven underground, so all the church scenes are literally in a church basement (which is like 60% of the Tribulation Force’s entire screentime), while the rest of the movie alternates between the White House, Buck’s apartment, a military bunker, a warehouse, and Nicolae’s office… and I’m pretty certain that most of these are just being borrowed from other productions (the White House set at least was apparently reused from Murder at 1600). This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does lend the film a very tacky, low-budget, TV-movie quality.

However, easily the biggest fumble for World at War and the cheapest, most made-for-TV movie aspect of it all is that World War III occurs entirely off-screen. I’m not exaggerating either – we see some brief news snippets, see some background explosions, hear the sounds of distant fighting, and the camera shakes every once in a while to simulate a nearby explosion. We don’t even get a shot like what the film’s DVD cover promises with planes doing a bombing run! A decade ago I wrote about how low budget movies will often promise some really cool, ambitious idea in order to draw you in, and then not deliver, and World at War absolutely lives up to that shameful standard. They could maybe make an excuse like “Oh, we wanted to focus on the message, not on gratuitous violence!” and to that I say bullshit. This is goddamn Left Behind, the gratuitous violence and spectacular disasters is absolutely the draw. If you make a movie about World War III and then not show that war at all, then you have absolutely failed as a filmmaker.

This brings me to the second crippling flaw of World at War, and that is the awful script. This movie is basically a messy jumble of scenes stitched together that barely make sense you actually scrutinize what is happening. When I take edibles, I hyper-fixate on the structure of a story and the filmmaking decisions involved and become really easily confused if any of this is “off”. I’m thankful that I watched this movie sober, because if I watched it high, I probably would have had a mental breakdown, it’s that all over the place from scene to scene. I’ve got countless examples of this that I need to go through:

  • Fitzhugh was just told by his vice president that Nicolae’s planning on using biological weapons to attack America. It’s pretty heavily implied that Nicolae knew that he knew this, and had the vice president assassinated to shut him up. Nicolae then meets Fitzhugh to offer his condolences for his friend’s death, and proceeds to show him biological weapons he’s developing. This is an absolutely insane scene and it makes no sense when Fitzhugh later re-confirms this information and is shocked at the revelation.
  • Fitzhugh captures and interrogates Buck Williams, but the whole scene makes no actual sense under scrutiny. First of all, Buck is Nicolae’s personal media mouthpiece. Fitzhugh seems to know that Buck is secretly a Christian, so maybe he assumes that his snooping around won’t make its way back to Nicolae, but that still means he’s basically talking to a terrorist as far as the state’s concerned. Fitzhugh asks Buck if he knows about the chemical weapons, because Christians have been stockpiling vaccines (boy, that’s rich in 2024), to which Buck says that he doesn’t know, but that he imagines that Nicolae’s the one who will unleash them. Fitzhugh then lets Buck go. I’m going to say this over and over again here, but this is the actual, goddamn President doing this interrogation, and not some lackey, so there’s no plausible deniability, no layers of insulation, nothing. Buck Williams, a globally-respected reporter now knows direct, national security information because the President directly gave it to him for no real reason and then let him walk out of there alive.
  • Fitzhugh then meets Nicolae’s personal assistant (who, like his pilot and media representative, is yet another mole in his organization) and the pair decide to infiltrate a Global Community facility. Again, not secret service, not trusted soldiers, the goddamn President grabs a gun and goes Solid Snake on this facility. He even shoots a guard and then snaps another one’s neck! I get that they’re just trying to maximize the amount of Louis Gossett Jr. that they can get in this film, but my God, the idea of the goddamn President being put in harm’s way so directly and unnecessarily is completely insane.
  • Then, as soon as he gets confirmation that Nicolae has chemical weapons and the militias are planning on launching a surprise attack on him, Fitzhugh has the bright idea to call Buck Williams on a cell phone so he can tell him that he was right about Nicolae!!!! Again, HOLY SHIT, the unprompted and unnecessary intel leak for something of this magnitude to Nicolae’s personal reporter is unbelievably stupid.
  • Then, when they decide they need to assassinate Nicolae in order to win the war, they send Fitzhugh to do it. They know that there are moles in his organization, it’s not like Fitzhugh is the only one who can get close to him.
  • Then we get to the war itself and there’s so much dumb shit here. There’s bombs going off a few blocks from the Global Community HQ and Nicolae is just sitting up in his office building watching it all… rather than, y’know, heading back to New Babylon where it’s safe (this is entirely on the movie, by the way, in the book I believe he is orchestrating the attacks from his plane the entire time). Meanwhile, characters are walking all over the country like there isn’t a war going on outside – we’ve got Fitzhugh walking from Global Community HQ, to the militia’s bunker, the White House, back to GC HQ, like it’s nothing. And at the same time, we’ve got Buck walking to the White House to meet him. There is absolutely no danger presented by these considerably-long treks, no sign of exertion or anything. It’s just more proof that the whole World War is basically an after-thought.

It’s also worth noting that the Tribulation Force, the characters we’ve been following since the first movie, are relegated to the B-plot of this movie and have shockingly little to do here that matters. Basically, Buck warns Fitzhugh about the Nicolae, converts him to Christianity, and the other characters are at ground zero for the biological weapon attacks. They are sidelined so heavily that it makes most of their screen time feel unnecessary, and if they weren’t legacy characters, then they probably would have been cut out during script rewrites.

World at War annoyed me. For the first twenty or thirty minutes, it displayed some legitimate potential and I was thinking that this could end up being my favourite Left Behind movie. Unfortunately, it falls apart quickly, absolutely fails to deliver its promise of an apocalyptic World War III, and completely collapses as soon as you start thinking about what actually happened during the course of the movie. In spite of all that, I’m kind of sad that this is where the original series ended – as poor as these films are, it would have been nice to see them get through apocalypse and show us some of the more outlandish disasters. Say what you will, but Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are spectacularly uncreative – if the Bible says something about demon locusts with horse-like bodies, a scorpion’s tail, men’s faces, and women’s hair, then you’d best believe they are making a literal army of locusts attack humanity. If the Bible says that there’s two hundred million horsemen riding on horses with lion’s heads that can shoot fire, have snake-head tails, and will kill 1/3 of the human population, then you’d better believe that they’re literally gonna have a bunch of demonic horsemen show up. For the record, this isn’t just them “taking the Bible literally as intended”, as it all stands in contrast to the equally-specific descriptions of the various Beasts who are popularly identified as the Antichrist and False Prophet. However, since these figures are associated with human individuals, suddenly it’s fine for them to be metaphorical descriptions. It’s shit like this that made me, as a child, realize that the apocalypse portrayed in these books is pure fiction. That said, setting aside that millions of people believe this will actually happen, this kind of Christian apocalypse is metal as fuck. That is why I wish we got a continuation of this series with this cast – Cloud Ten would no doubt manage to screw it up in execution, but I would have had a lot of respect for them if they had managed to bring this vision to life.

3/10

Be sure to tune in again soon when we look at the next entry in this series, Left Behind (2014)!

Retrospective: Left Behind II – Tribulation Force (2002)

Welcome back to the Left Behind retrospective! In this entry we’ll be going over the second film in the franchise, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force. To everyone’s shock and surprise, I didn’t think that the original Left Behind was all that bad – sure, it was extremely cheap, and the source material is garbage, but the movie itself managed to mine the drama and excitement of its apocalyptic premise well enough. Could they keep this (relative) quality up going into the sequel? Read on to find out…

Okay, I had some nice things to say about the original movie’s poster, but this one’s just bad. Random, distant shot of Kirk Cameron looking moody? Really indistinct picture of Nicolae framed against flames? This poster communicates basically nothing about the movie and looks like a high school media arts project at best.

Production

In spite of the poor theatrical run of Left Behind: The Movie, DVD sales were healthy, with over three million copies sold. This reception was strong enough for Cloud Ten to greenlight a sequel, in spite of potential issues which could arise due to their ongoing legal battle with Tim LaHaye. Cloud Ten insisted that the sequel would continue regardless, to which LaHaye stated: “Whether the second movie will happen or not will be settled by the court.”

Well, turns out that Cloud Ten and Namesake pictures got the last laugh, because the courts dismissed LaHaye’s case. He would go on to appeal, but we’ll cover the results of that in later entries… For now, Tribulation Force was a go.

The second Left Behind film would be based on the second book, Tribulation Force, which continues to follow the characters from the previous book in the aftermath of the Rapture, leading into the beginning of the Tribulation. Perhaps due to budget, the movie would not include the most exciting (and expensive) part of the book – World War III, where Nicolae goes to war with all the nations that haven’t submitted entirely to him. Instead, Tribulation Force would cover the time period leading up to those events and the next movie would be dedicated entirely to WWIII.

This brings us to a character who, despite playing a very small part in the making of the film, influenced it in a way that can be felt strongly: pastor and evangelist Ray Comfort, a man so easy to make fun of that even Wikipedia pulled off a Fatality on him. You know those fake $100 bills you come across which end up having a Bible tract on the back? This guy is the sonofabitch responsible for those things. He also really hates evolution, having written a book called You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think and an abridged (and suspiciously-edited) version of “On the Origin of Species”. During my research into this movie I found that he had written a book about the making of the film, which I attempted to track down. If you followed my Twitter account in the last few weeks, you would know that this did not go well. I did eventually get the book though and read through it…

According to Miracle in the Making, Kirk Cameron had met Ray Comfort in the 90s, and instantly found his teachings to be captivating. The pair would become close friends and collaborators, and would eventually go into ministry together. During the production of Tribulation Force, Kirk confided to Ray that he and Chelsea were considering dropping out of the movie. Two weeks out from the start of shooting, the script had not been finalized, contracts had not been signed, and they didn’t even know who else was going to be in the movie at that point. However, Ray convinced him to stay on in order to champion the film’s message. Together, he and Kirk rewrote the script to include a stronger evangelistic message and, after pitching the changes to Cloud Ten, the producers agreed to incorporate them.

…that’s about all we learn from Ray Comfort about the making of the movie. Forgive me for going on a tangent away from Tribulation Force, but I need to indulge for a bit: Miracle in the Making is 100 pages long, about maybe 15 pages of which have anything to do with Tribulation Force. The rest is a meandering gaggle of Ray preaching about his doctrine (basically, keeping the Ten Commandments is the most important element of salvation), telling parables about two guys wearing parachutes on an airplane, telling stories about getting told to fuck off by Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron, debating atheists, hanging out with celebrities, and harassing restaurant-goers (and others besides) with Bible tracts. It’s also got some jaw-dropping moments, like Ray Comfort and Tim LaHaye joking about their chances of being accused of sexual harassment. He also tells a story about how he was on notice for jury duty on a case where a truck driver had been carrying unsecured boxes, which came off the truck and caused an accident with back and neck injuries. Ray bragged that he got off jury duty because he declared that he found the idea of making someone pay for an accident abhorrent and that he “wouldn’t give the guy a bean”… DUDE, assuming that the injury is indeed legitimate (which is the job of the trial to determine in any case), that guy is gonna be dealing with medical bills for life, which he’s not going to be able to afford with America’s shitty healthcare system, and this “accident” is directly due to the driver’s negligence. This is a textbook case of why suing people is so common in the States and why the system even exists in the first place.

Maybe the biggest shock though was how Ray Comfort describes how Kirk Cameron first became enamored with his preaching. Cameron describes how “I believe I was robbed of the deep pain of seeing the depth of my sinfulness, of experiencing the exceeding joy and gratitude that comes from the cross, because I was convinced of God’s love before I was convinced of my sin. […] I had never opened up the Ten Commandments and looked deep into the well of my sinful heart. I never imagined that God was actually angry with me at a certain point because of my sin.” THAT is emblematic of Comfort’s doctrine – Jesus may love you, but God hates your sin more and if you don’t do something about that then you were never “really” a Christian to begin with. Take his argument against the idea that the church is full of self-righteous hypocrites: “There are no hypocrites in the Church. Hypocrites are pretenders, masquerading as genuine Christians. God sees the pretenders and He sees the genuine, and warns that they will be sorted out on Judgement Day”. Keep all this in mind as we go into the film whose script he helped influence…

Is… is Ray Comfort responsible for making Kirk Cameron into Kirk Cameron, the guy we all know and hate now…?

Anyway, back to Tribulation Force… As I stated earlier, Kirk Cameron and Chelsea Noble both returned to reprise their roles, as did many of the cast from the original film – not just the main cast either, like Brad Johnson, Clarence Gilyard Jr, Janaya Stephens and Gordon Currie, but also smaller roles like David Macniven (who played Rayford’s co-pilot, Chris), Krista Bridges (who played Buck’s assistant, Ivy Gold), and Christie MacFadyen (who played Rayford’s Raptured wife). It’s honestly extremely impressive that they were able to get everyone together, especially considering that most of the cast wasn’t secured until the last minute.

Directing duties would go to Bill Corcoran, a long-time, workman Canadian filmmaker. Like the original, filming occurred in and around Toronto, including the scenes in Israel (I didn’t see any camels this time though, sadly). Normally I wouldn’t mention anything about the editing, but I got extremely excited when I saw that Michael Doherty edited this movie. The Michael Doherty of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Trick ‘r Treat and Krampus fame!? I was excited about this for days, but literally as I am writing this I realized that Michael Doherty is (sadly) not Michael Dougherty. Dude still edited the latter-date Romero zombie movies and several episodes of Hannibal, so that’s cool, but significantly less exciting than I had thought…

The budget of this film is estimated to have been around $3.8 million, significantly less than the original’s reported $17.4 million, although if the estimated budget for Left Behind of $4 million was accurate, then this actually wasn’t that much of a drop. Unlike the first film, Tribulation Force skipped a theatrical release entirely, only going straight-to-DVD, with some churches choosing to screen it privately.

Plot Synopsis

Tribulation Force opens with Nicolae working on establishing the UN as a one-world government, as he consolidates the major currencies into a single global currency and begins taking steps towards founding a one-world religion. He is impressed by Buck’s reporting and requests a meeting with the reporter, who is uneasy about doing so after having just witnessed him murder Stonagal and Todd-Cothran in the previous film. Buck, Rayford, Chloe, and Bruce debate about what they should do now that they know that Nicolae is the Antichrist. They hear rumours about three men burning to death at the Wailing Wall in Israel and Bruce believes that this is the doing of the “two witnesses” who are prophesied to lead thousands to Christ during the end times. However, the area has been placed off-limits and their message is being suppressed. After much deliberation, Rayford and Buck decide to get closer to Nicolae to leverage their positions to fight back against him – Buck will attempt to get the message of the witnesses out, while Rayford will become Nicolae’s pilot in order to spy on him.

During their meeting, Nicolae agrees to give Buck full UN security clearance in exchange for becoming his personal voice in the media. Meanwhile, Rayford leverages his connections with Hattie in order to get the job as Nicolae’s personal pilot. While all this is happening, Chloe grows increasingly concerned about the safety of her father and Buck, while also getting jealous and throwing a fit for a while because she mistakenly believes that Buck is cheating on her. This is because his assistant, Ivy Gold, is staying at his apartment, since she has nowhere else to stay due to the post-Rapture chaos (women, amiright?). The couple manage to make amends before Buck and Rayford travel to Israel for a press conference, where a leading religious scholar, Tsion Ben-Judah, is due to make an announcement about the identity of the Jewish Messiah.

During the flight over, Rayford discovers that Ben-Judah’s announcement will be that Nicolae is the Messiah. They decide to intercept him and try to get him to speak with the witnesses, who will be able to convince him through God’s word that Jesus is the real Messiah. Buck manages to convince Ben-Judah to confront the witnesses with the ruse of performing an interview to discredit them. Ben-Judah accepts and the pair confront the witnesses on the temple mount. The witnesses say some Bible verses, and then they shoot flames out of their mouths to burn a couple soldiers to death. Buck is distressed to discover that the UN cut off his broadcast before the witnesses could say anything, but he hopes that Ben-Judah heard enough to change his coming speech.

The next day, Ben-Judah makes his proclamation on international broadcast that the Messiah could only have been Jesus. Nicolae is enraged and tries to stop the broadcast, but Rayford sabotages his ability to do so, and the proclamation goes off unhindered. The film ends with the Tribulation Force gathering to celebrate this victory against the Antichrist as Nicolae swears vengeance against God…

Review

When I originally saw Left Behind: The Movie as a kid, I recall that I thought it wasn’t bad. I was surprised to find that I agreed with this watching it again 20+ years later. As a kid, I thought that Left Behind II: Tribulation Force SUCKED, and I am completely unsurprised to find that this has also held true. This isn’t a shock at all – the book, Tribulation Force, also sucked. Even as a kid, I found it incredibly dull, to the point where I got fed up, and skipped over like fifty pages of it just to get to the World War III section… which isn’t even in this movie, so that should give you an idea of how much this film is scraping the barrel for anything of interest. While I understand that cutting out a massive war was probably done for budget reasons, it’s kind of insane – each Left Behind book almost entirely revolves around some massive disaster or dramatic event that defines that entry: Nicolae is the earthquake book, Apollyon is the demon locust book, Assassins is the insane Nicolae murder conspiracy book, etc. The decision to excise the novel’s climax has massive repercussions on the movie, because everything that remains is so FUCKING DULL.

I’ll get the nice stuff out of the way first. The cast were easily one of the best parts of the first movie and it’s nice to see them get to reprise their roles. They still do a decent job, especially Brad Johnson (who portrays Ray as putting up a manly-man façade, but is clearly still traumatized over losing his wife and son) and Gordon Currie (who’s hamming it up more than ever), although they are really let down by the much weaker script. That said, putting aside the issues caused by removing the big climax from the book, Tribulation Force actually improves on its source material in some areas. In the book, Tsion Ben-Judah comes to the conclusion that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah on his own and, for some reason, the world is interested enough that this announcement becomes international, live broadcast news. However, the movie changes this so that the whole announcement and broadcast is orchestrated propaganda – it’s heavily implied that Ben-Judah has been intercepted by Nicolae and brainwashed into believing that he is the Messiah, all as part of Nicolae’s plan to establish his one-world religion. Thus, it becomes up to our heroes to save the day and spread the truth. This ends up being orders of magnitude more tense and interesting than what was put to page.

I also appreciate that this film seems to have more compassion for its characters than the source material. In the first book, Chris (Rayford’s co-pilot) commits suicide off-screen immediately after discovering that his entire family were Raptured. In Tribulation Force, there is an extended sequence dedicated to saving Chris – not just from suicide, but converting him so he can be with his family again someday. On the one hand, his fate in the books really underscores the devastating magnitude of the Rapture and the effects it can (and would) have on those left behind. However, step back a bit, and this is basically Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye conceptualizing a character and then condemning him to an eternity of torment while his family who love him are separated from him forever… and all this is justified because, according to their doctrine, he deserves it. Just thinking about it reminds me why, if God is truly all-loving, then universal reconciliation surely must be true doctrine, because the alternative reflects very poorly on Him and makes salvation an existential horror. Meanwhile, giving Chris the opportunity to be saved is far more in keeping with the sort of fate a Christian should want for a character and I’m kind of glad that he gets his little redemption arc in this adaptation.

Wait a minute… there’s no shadows being cast by the witnesses from the flamethrower attack.

And… uh… that’s about all the good I have to say about this movie. Everything that was a problem in the previous movie is still here: poor lighting, cheap sets, unconvincing special effects, etc. However, everything feels so much worse. If Left Behind: The Movie was, as Tim LaHaye put it, a glorified church basement movie, Tribulation Force is very much a church basement movie. The first movie at least had a pretty ambitious opening scene with lots of practical explosions and a real car bombing later, this movie has… a very brief fire stunt and that’s it. You’ve got alleyway sets where they’ve thrown trash all over the place to represent the post-Rapture lawlessness. We’ve got UN soldiers and Israeli army in what are clearly WWII-era army surplus uniforms. The Israel restaurant set looks like it was a reused Arabic bazaar. Nicolae’s plane changes models three different times depending on what location or stock footage the scene is using. Tribulation Force is operating on a much smaller scale than the previous film and when it tries to widen that scope beyond “American house/church” you can reeeeally feel how small this film’s budget was.

The direction of the film is also notably worse. This is perhaps best demonstrated recalling the scene of Nicolae murdering Stonagal and Todd-Cothran in the first movie, and then comparing it to the scene of Buck meeting Nicolae in Tribulation Force. The first movie nailed the execution of that scene, creating a very tense sequence which effectively demonstrates the character and otherworldly menace of Nicolae, visually demonstrates that Buck is immune to his charms, and communicates that he’s terrified that Nicolae might realize this. Conceptually, the rooftop meeting could manage to be comparable: Buck is voluntarily putting himself within reach of his sworn enemy, who may or may not know his secret. Plus, visually, the scene is evocative of the temptation of Christ, which seems relevant since Buck is literally making a deal with the Devil. However, in execution, this scene really fails. There’s nothing sinister about the meeting, no tension at all in the way that it’s filmed. Any tension to be had is wrought out of the dialogue, but it is utterly neutered by unimaginative direction. The fact that the meeting is occurring on a rooftop even seems to be completely irrelevant – they might as well be meeting in the street, or a café for all it’s worth. Not even a camera movement to suggest “Oh my God, is he going to throw me off the roof?” Hell, you could have an awesome character moment for Buck if he just thinks “I could push the Antichrist off this roof right now”… and all it would take is someone deciding to shoot anything other than two angles of medium close ups.

However, all of this pales in comparison to the actual problem with this movie, and that is unquestionably the script. As I’ve already said several times, cutting out the novel’s climax has huge repercussions on the movie. The entire climax has been excised and they have to compensate by spinning a lot of wheels in order to get Tribulation Force barely over a 90 minute runtime. This results in some excruciating scenes as the film grinds its pacing to a halt and wastes as much time as humanly possible. Nearly the first ten minutes of the film are just people watching TV: Nicolae watching Buck reporting the news. Bruce watching Nicolae at the UN. Buck watching the same broadcast, but from an entirely different location. Barely any of this serves anything but to dump some exposition about the state of the world and to establish why Nicolae wants to turn Buck into an ally (although given their relationship in the previous film, this probably wouldn’t even be necessary). It’s also really awkward to have the scenes constantly get inter-cut with footage of Bruce, who doesn’t react or say a damn thing the entire time, and won’t even get a line for about another five minutes. It’s like they need to remind us that he exists because he barely got to do anything in the last movie.

The absolute worst part though is the awful, awful, AWFUL attempt at romantic drama which dominates a putrid, nearly fifteen minute chunk of this film. Chloe and Buck have become an item between the end of the last film and the start of this one and Chloe wants to make things more serious with him. However, through a set of extremely contrived circumstances, she goes to his apartment and finds Ivy Gold staying there, who flashes her engagement ring and tells her to piss off. Chloe then gets pissed off at Buck, refuses to talk to him, and acts like a child, all while Ray tells her that she’s acting like an idiot. When it’s finally revealed that she’s misunderstood the whole situation, it comes across like the film’s just dropped a bucket of shit on her, because she obviously should have trusted Buck all along. How awful it is that she would not assume he was innocent! This whole storyline adds nothing to the overarching plot, is nothing but absolute bottom-barrel romantic comedy tropes, and serves nothing but to pad out the runtime.

Really, the film is just constantly shitting on Chloe during the first half – when Rayford takes down photos of his wife and son, Chloe comes across like she’s whining when she makes some very reasonable points. When Rayford and Buck decide to put themselves in harm’s way for the cause, she whines and sulks about it. She’s just such a wet blanket that it nearly gave me whiplash when, in the second half, they turn around and let her be competent at serving in the church’s makeshift hospital and she even becomes friends with Ivy Gold. Adding it all up, it just clearly shows where Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ opinions on women in the church lie: while the men are off doing big, “important things” throughout the movie, Chloe (when she’s not being an emotional burden on them) is stuck comforting the dying and getting over jealousy. She’s clearly side-lined and “lesser”, and it’s an issue which sticks with her through the entire book series (well, until her untimely demise, anyway).

On top of all this, the writing also just happens to be really stupid at times. Like, the film opens with Nicolae seeing Buck on TV and going “Wow, he’s so cool, I want him on my team!” Buck has literally just been providing a basic overview of what has happened in society since the Rapture happened. There’s nothing notable or exceptional about it or Buck’s reporting, but it gets treated like he’s an eloquent, hard-truth-speaking genius. Or how about how Rayford refuses to become Nicolae’s private pilot because it would be dangerous and then Bruce berates him for being selfish, but literally one scene later Buck says he’s going to get access to the two witnesses to spread their gospel and Bruce says “I dunno Buck, that’s dangerous, you sure?” You could miss the inconsistency entirely if they weren’t literally back-to-back scenes, but as is, it makes it seem like Bruce just really hates Ray and wants him to go get himself killed. Or how about when Nicolae is told to arrest the witnesses, he says “I do not want to put them in jail, this is not a dictatorship.” DUDE! They lit three people on fire, arrest them all you want, no one is going to complain! Or how about how Tsion Ben-Judah becomes convinced that Jesus is the real Messiah because the two witnesses literally just quote some Bible verses to him. I need to explain why this is so insane: Tsion Ben-Judah is apparently the world’s greatest religious scholar. Are you telling me he hasn’t even read the Bible or spoken with Christians before in his studies? He doesn’t even argue with the witnesses, the thing he is supposed to be meeting with them to do in the first place! Man, I sure am glad that they axed the WWIII climax in favour of this one!

In regards to the writing, one way that Tribulation Force really differentiates itself from its predecessor is by being an exponentially-preachier film. If you weren’t a Christian already, you could probably get through Left Behind: The Movie without feeling like you were being outright preached to the whole time – it feels like a narrative moreso than a sermon. In comparison, Tribulation Force spends far more time unabashedly focused on preaching to its audience. Your taste for this change will vary significantly – I’ve always been of the opinion that these movies are almost entirely made by evangelicals, for evangelicals, and so any preaching is literally being done to the choir. It’s less about changing hearts and minds, and more about pandering and reinforcing the audience’s existing beliefs. I would not say that this is necessarily a bad thing in itself; rather, that the execution is poor…

What is this, some kind of Tribulation Force?

…which, finally, brings us to good ol’ Ray Comfort’s contributions to the film. He and Kirk Cameron wanted to make this film more “evangelistic”, and boy did they take a sledge-hammer to the script (despite Ray Comfort literally saying in his book that movies that preach to the audience suck). The most blatant example of this is when Rayford is trying to convince Chris to submit to Jesus. The arguments that Rayford uses to convince Chris that Jesus is real are straight out of Ray Comfort’s mouth… and they kinda suck. Rayford has two big points he pushes to try to convince Chris not to kill himself:

  1. You’re not a good person, because if you ever committed a single sin in your life, then you’re tainted in God’s eyes. Also, the parameters of potential slip-ups are way broader than you would think, so God’s extra unfair to you (eg, if you covet then you’re a thief in God’s eyes, if you get angry then you’re a murderer, if you look lustfully then you’re having pre-marital sex, etc). Therefore you need to submit to God, or you’re gonna roast in Hell.
  2. Gun to head, all else has failed, what can Ray possibly say to convince Chris not to do it? “Hey, maybe there’s a God, or maybe there isn’t! If there isn’t, then we both end up the same. If there is, then you go to heaven if you listen to me, or hell if you don’t! Which would you prefer?” I need to iterate that THIS IS THE ARGUMENT THAT CONVINCES HIM TO BECOME A CHRISTIAN!!!

Having spent a couple years in university associated with Campus4Christ, I can attest that these sorts of crap evangelism tactics don’t really hold up to any sort of scrutiny. Like, “if you get angry, you’re a murderer in God’s eyes”. Umm, no, that’s kind of an insane difference, God. Where is the justice in the idea that God is just waiting for us to slip up even a tiny bit, just so He can punish us to the full extent? All that Ray has really done is use the movie to push his own, very narrow view of faith, and weigh down the script with poorly considered arguments that aren’t convincing to anyone outside of the target audience. Honestly, a bit of reframing could do wonders – “Umm, ackshully, the rules say that you’re a thief, murderer, and an adulterer!” is extremely unconvincing, but change that to “You may not be as bad as a full-on murderer, but in comparison to the perfection of God, you are just as much of a sinner”. There’s an actual argument here, one that actually meets them where they are and doesn’t hinge on them accepting that God views them as the most extreme kinds of sinner.

Overall, there really isn’t a whole lot to say about Tribulation Force (I say, approximately 4000+ words deep in this retrospective). It’s a movie whose greatest struggle is simply in finding ways to waste time until anything of importance has to happen. The result, predictably, is a dull and slow slog with no satisfying payoff. There is precious little plot here and it is surrounded by long stretches of wheel spinning. The movie is barely 90 minutes long and you can feel how they padded the runtime significantly to get it to “proper” movie length. Considering that approximately ten of those minutes are directly dedicated to the infuriating “romantic misunderstanding” storyline, I can pretty much guarantee that an arbitrary runtime was the entire reason the pacing is so bad in this movie. With some more judicious editing, this could easily have been a far better film at 70 minutes (or even 60)… but then they’d have to find some other way to end this story. A shame, if only there was some other ending that they could have used instead…

2.5/10

Be sure to tune in again soon when we look at the next entry in this series, Left Behind III: World at War!

Retrospective: Left Behind – The Movie (2000)

It’s been quite a while since my last retrospectives series (more than 3 years now), but that’s largely because of the sheer amount of work that goes into these things. Not only do I have to make time between work, family, and other hobbies to be able to watch 3+ movies, I also have to do research into the the production history of the franchise, and actually write out the reviews for each movie… I’m not complaining, I really enjoy doing this stuff, but I also get paid jack shit for it so it takes a lot for me to get the motivation to put one of these out (it’s also why I’ve largely pivoted to the less labour intensive Love/Hate format for most media franchise overviews these days).

Anyway, all that said, I want to make it clear that I’m fucking excited for this look at the Left Behind franchise. Growing up evangelical, I was really into the book series… because fuckloads of people die in it. I’m not even kidding, that was the entire appeal for little edgelord me at 10 years old (the massive disasters and demons running rampant were also super cool). It simultaneously managed to get me into end-times theology, and also eventually made me realize that the whole industry that built up around it was a grift. Despite having a massive grudge against this franchise and the poison it has been for Christianity as a whole, I’m going to give each film a fair shake and recount the batshit insanity that went on behind the scenes with each new film. So let’s start at the beginning, with Left Behind: The Movie, which I actually thought was pretty decent when I was a kid. Does it hold up still, now that I’m a jaded, crusty old bastard? Read on to find out…

Boy… that sure is a late 90s-era evangelical movie poster. Definitely not good, but could be worse. I also kinda like that whoever designed it at least understood colour theory and made sure to make this poster orange and blue, it gives it some visual unity and appeal, even though the poster is entirely made up of random images. Oh, and it probably doesn’t bear mentioning, but they REALLY upped the brightness on ol’ Kirk here and it doesn’t look very good.

Production

If there is one man most responsible for Left Behind, it is Tim LaHaye (take of that statement what you will). LaHaye was a pastor in the mid-1950s before becoming an instrumental force in the conservative evangelical movement in America in the 70s and 80s. He, along with Jerry Falwell, were instrumental in establishing and directing the Moral Majority, the movement which caused Ronald Reagan to be elected to office and, among other things, created the cultural environment that would allow the Satanic Panic to occur.

Basically, this motherfucker is the reason why America is so fucked up today.

Anyway, LaHaye was on a flight in 1994 and witnessed the pilot (who, apparently, was married) flirting with a flight attendant, which caused him to begin imagining how he would react if The Rapture occurred at that very moment. He quickly teamed up with Christian writer, Jerry B. Jenkins, and the pair conceptualized Left Behind, which would follow a large cast of characters trying to survive and save as many people as possible during the final seven years of Earth in the evangelical Christian apocalypse. The pair drew heavy inspiration from A Thief in the Night, a series of apocalyptic thriller films released in the 70s and 80s, which also portray a post-Rapture world. By all accounts, LaHaye provided his ideas and theology for the structure of the story, while Jenkins did all the actual writing. Notably, LaHaye’s influence can also be felt in some of the more… interesting decisions in the book. Notably, a lot of the first book’s plot is driven by shadowy “international bankers” influencing the UN, which has way more power than it does in real life… then you realize that Tim LaHaye is obsessed with the Illuminati, and this just reflects what he thinks is actually going on in the world. Similarly, LaHaye believes that Catholics are a bunch of heretics, so most Catholics are not Raptured. Oh, and as an extra “fuck you” to Catholics, the Pope gets Raptured… because he dropped his Catholic beliefs and adopted evangelical doctrine. And then, later in the series, the new pope abolishes Catholicism for a new one-world religion and, when he dies, his memorial is cancelled because no one gives a fuck about him, ouch.

Left Behind was released in 1995, and would be a run-away success, with selling millions of copies, and reigniting an evangelical obsession with eschatology as the new millennium drew nearer. A new book would follow every year (some years, 2 new books!), for a grand total of 16 main series entries by 2007, plus countless spin-offs and merchandise, not to mention a cottage industry of prophecy-based media which polluted Christian bookstores for decades.

As early as 1997, Jenkins and LaHaye began shopping the series around to movie studios interested in adapting the books to the screen. Namesake Entertainment optioned the rights from LaHaye and Jenkins, promising that they would be able to make it into a big-budget blockbuster series. Namesake seemed like a good fit for LaHaye and Jenkins, because they specialized in adapting Christian thrillers for screen. With Ralph Winter on-board to produce (known for X-Men, Fantastic Four, and… that Planet of the Apes movie), things were looking promising for Left Behind (even if its script was being written by Alan B. McElroy, the guy who wrote Halloween 4, Spawn, and the goddamn Tekken movie). Unfortunately for all involved, Namesake were unable to find a studio interested in financing the movie, so they licensed the rights to Peter & Paul Lalonde at Cloud Ten Pictures, a Canadian production studio making end-times films for the evangelical market. At this time, they had already made a micro-budget trilogy called Apocalypse (whose entries feature goddamn Mr. T, Gary Busey, Jeff Fahey, Margot Kidder, and Howie Mandell, what the actual fuck!?), so apparently they were the best people for the job. Despite being prominently credited on the film (and its sequel), Ralph Winter and McElroy didn’t have any actual role in the production, and it’s believed that their names were included because it granted the film more legitimacy.

Y’know who didn’t want their names on the film? Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. They had sold the movie rights on the promise of getting a $40 million Hollywood blockbuster that could compete with the secular market. Instead, they got a film directly marketed to the Christian community with a reported budget of $17.4 million (which, according to the producers, made the film the most ambitious Christian movie of all time), although LaHaye stated on-record that “representations about the size of the budget were not true”. It seems that this was especially contentious for LaHaye and Jenkins because they had, for whatever reason, sold the exclusive film rights to their entire franchise to Namesake in their original deal – not just the books which had been written at that point, but also future novels, and the Left Behind: The Kids young adult series, which they seemed particularly keen to reclaim the rights to. LaHaye and Jenkins had planned on making their own adaptation of Left Behind: The Kids, which was unable to proceed due to the rights agreement.

In July of 1999, before the movie even came out, LaHaye sued Cloud Ten for breach of contract, claiming $10 million in damages. He offered to drop the suit if Cloud Ten and Namesake relinquished their rights to Left Behind: The Kids and gave up their rights to any further Left Behind books. This was not going to happen though because Namesake were developing their own television series based on Left Behind: The Kids (which never came to fruition, probably due to this lawsuit) and, despite offering revenue sharing to the authours, LaHaye would not budge. This lawsuit would drag on for several more years (and movies), which we’ll cover further in their own entries…

Meanwhile, development of Left Behind: The Movie proceeded in spite of all the drama surrounding it. Vic Sarin, a Canadian, long-time, workman director and cinematographer was brought on to direct the film. Of the principle cast, the highest-profile cast member was Kirk Cameron, who was known for being on Growing Pains and then converting to evangelical Christianity and going off the deep end. He, along with wife Chelsea Noble, were very much true-believers, and actively sought to become involved in the films after reading the books. Cameron was cast as co-lead Buck Williams, a high-profile journalist, while Noble was cast as The Whore of Babylon. The other co-lead role went to manly-man Brad Johnson, who played Rayford Steele. The role of Nicolae Carpathia went to Gordon Currie, who had a small role in Jason Takes Manhattan (he’s the poor son of a bitch who gets chucked off the mast and gets impaled on the radio antenna). Rounding out the main cast were Janaya Stephens as Rayford’s daughter, Chloe Steele, and Clarence Gilyard Jr as Bruce Barnes. Fun fact, the role of Chloe Steele was originally going to go to Hallmark movie queen, Lacey Chabert, in what would have been one of her first film roles, but she ended up dropping out due to scheduling conflicts.

Filming took place in and around Toronto in May of 2000 and lasted for 31 days. For the opening sequence of the film, which takes place in Israel, the production used a quarry and made some camels walk around in the background to make it look like the Middle East. I mainly mention this because literally my first note when I was watching the movie was that the camels were extremely conspicuous and that “Israel” looked like a quarry, so it was hilarious when I found out that these observations were indeed correct.

Left Behind: The Movie would take an unconventional release strategy. It originally was released straight to DVD in 2000, with a theatrical release following in February of 2001. Its theatrical run was not particularly great, grossing only $4,224,065.

Plot Synopsis

The film opens in Israel, where GNN television reporter Buck Williams is interviewing scientist Chaim Rosenzweig, who has developed “Eden”, a formula which can allow food to grow in desert environments. This formula has poised Israel to become a global leader as they hold the key to solving a growing food scarcity crisis. However, the interview is cut short as Arab and Russian jets launch a surprise attack on Israel. The pair flee into a bunker and watch the unfolding attack. However, the attacking forces begin spontaneously exploding before Israel can scramble a response, which causes Buck to run outside to document and report on the miraculous happenings. Within moments, the entire raid is thwarted and Israel is saved by mysterious forces.

We then follow airline pilot Rayford Steele, who bails on his son’s birthday party in order to take over a flight from New York City to London, much to the distaste of his daughter, Chloe. Aboard this flight is Buck, who is looking into the attack on Israel after being tipped off by a contact of his, and Hattie Durham, a flight attendant who Rayford is having an affair with. However, she reveals to Ray that this is her last flight, she will be taking a job with the UN, in part because she feels like he has just been leading her on.

While over the Atlantic, passengers begin to realize that several people aboard have disappeared, including all of the children. Bruce, Hattie, and Buck struggle to maintain order aboard, while Rayford diverts the flight back to New York. They soon discover that these disappearances are a global phenomenon and that hundreds of millions of people have vanished without warning, causing several deaths due to vehicles having their operators disappear, amongst other things. The flight ends up diverting to Chicago. Rayford is thankful for Buck’s help during the flight and Buck convinces Rayford to link him up with a private pilot who can get him to New York City. He stays at Rayford’s home for the night.

Rayford returns home to discover that his wife and son are gone. He realizes that his wife, who he had resented for converting to Christianity, was right all along. Meanwhile, Chloe returns home, having had her vehicle stolen while trying to head to college for her exams, before being unable to continue due to all the wrecked vehicles littering the roads. Chloe takes Buck to the airport, where he links up with Ray’s contact, pilot Ken Ritz, who agrees to take him to New York. When he arrives there, he finds that his contact, Dirk Burton, has been killed for knowing too much. Buck gets his confidential files and then flees when a sniper tries to kill him as well. He discovers a plan orchestrated by international bankers, Jonathan Stonagal and Joshua Todd-Cothran, who intend to use their protégé, UN Secretary General Nicolae Carpathia, to entice Chaim Rosenzweig to hand over the Eden formula to the UN in exchange for plans to reconstruct the Jewish temple. They will then bankrupt the UN and control the world’s food supply, netting themselves untold billions in the process.

Rayford travels to new Hope Village Church and discovers that its pastor, Bruce Barnes, has been left behind. He had preached for years, but never really believed until now. The pair set about preparing for the coming tribulations.

Meanwhile, Buck returns to Chicago and meets with CIA agent Alan Thompkins to try to get information about Stonagal and Todd-Cothran’s plans. However, Thompkins is killed in a car bombing and Buck flees to Rayford’s home once again. They take Buck to New Hope Village Church in order to utilize the medical services running out of the building. Rayford and Bruce show Buck a tape that the former lead pastor had made, which predicted the disappearances, the rebuilding of the temple and the rise of the Antichrist. Buck doesn’t believe them, and leaves to go to the UN to warn Chaim about Stonagal and Todd-Cothran’s plans.

When he arrives, he soon finds that every prediction that he had been told by Rayford and Bruce were true and converts to Christianity in order to protect himself against the Antichrist’s machinations. Nicolae calls a private meeting, where he reveals his plans to consolidate power and then executes Stonagal and Todd-Cothran, before using mind-control to cause everyone (except Buck) to believe that they committed murder-suicide. Buck returns back to his new friends and they all agree to band together to fight the coming evils…

Review

So, this might be a hot take, but here goes: Left Behind: The Movie isn’t all that bad. No, I’m not kidding. I remembered thinking the movie was decent when I saw it more than 20 years ago, but my opinions on eschatology and movies have changed since then, so I was expecting to like it a whole lot less. While I definitely have my issues with it, my estimation of it hasn’t dropped that far compared to where it was. It also probably helps that I’ve made a hobby out of seeking out and writing my thoughts on shit movies, so in comparison Left Behind: The Movie doesn’t even come close.

Now, a caveat to this – if you have no interest in religion, then Left Behind will probably not do anything for you. Similarly, if you can’t set aside a distaste for the creators’ theology, then it’ll also sour your experience. If you can lay that aside though and just go with it, Left Behind: The Movie is an alright thriller, buoyed significantly by its strong premise.

I’ll keep the positives going with probably the strongest aspect of Left Behind: The Movie – its cast. Christian movies, especially in this era, were known for having amateur-level acting, but Left Behind‘s cast are fairly solid across the board (even Kirk Cameron, although he and Chelsea Noble put in the weakest performances of the main cast, in my opinion). Easily the two standouts are Brad Johnson as Rayford Steele and Gordon Currie as Nicolae Carpathia. Johnson is a consummate professional, effortlessly taking Rayford from seething and resentful of his wife, to controlling and in-charge as a pilot, to desperate and downtrodden when he discovers his family has disappeared, to truly convicted in his beliefs when he converts. The only problem is that his arc ends too early and he spends the last forty minutes of the film with nothing to do but preach at the audience (I found a contemporary review by a Christian who saw the movie who agreed that Rayford was the best character, but opined “he comes off as a Bible-thumping turnoff after he’s saved, and delivers the usual ‘there’s something bigger than all of this’ kind of talk”).

Meanwhile, Gordon Currie gets to chew the scenery as Nicolae Carpathia, going from seemingly-good natured, to slimy and sinister on a dime. The reveal that he’s the Antichrist is extremely obvious from the moment he appears in the film, but when they do reveal it, it’s really effective scene where Currie absolutely commands the room. Hearing him say “Don’t worry, this will be completely painless. After all, I’m not a monster” and then chuckling to himself is downright chilling. This might be another hot-take, but I feel like Currie’s Nicolae is, low-key, an all-timer villain. That might sound crazy considering that I’m talking about a series of micro-budget Christian films, but these novels and movies have a hold in the imaginations of the evangelical market. There are millions of people whose conception of an Antichrist figure is exactly what Currie portrays: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a leader who preaches peace, but who has sinister intentions. This portrayal is so ingrained in their thoughts that, when a figure who arguably fits the theology of who an anti-Christ figure is better, they enthusiastically vote for that guy three times.

The other main strength of Left Behind: The Movie is its overall premise and plot. It also has to be said that the movie is a whole lot better than the novel it’s based on. Where the novel can be meandering and poorly written, the movie tightens everything up into a (mostly) well-paced thriller. While the Rapture itself is a compelling enough event to mine a lot of drama, it’s over fairly quickly and the film needs more events to keep you watching. Think about it a bit: if this movie was just about The Rapture, then the natural progression for acts 2 and 3 would be a massive amount of preaching to the audience. The main reason the film is able to sustain interest after the Rapture is its B-plot, which features Buck Williams uncovering the conspiracy to take control of the world’s food supply, which eventually results in the rise of the Antichrist. While nothing particularly special or unique goes on in this B-plot that you haven’t seen in any other conspiracy narrative, this storyline stays interesting with a cavalcade of assassinations, clues, and near-misses, keeping it constantly moving forward and engaging (dare I even say “exciting”?). It all culminates in probably the best scene of the movie, where Nicolae is revealed to be The Antichrist and Buck realizes he’s trapped in the same room as him. It’s a really tense scene, with Nicolae dispatching Stonagal and Todd-Cothran in cold blood and then using his mind control super powers to tell everyone assembled what he’d like them to believe (except, Buck, who is protected by the power of God). It effectively hypes up the real danger Nicolae presents going forward and gets you properly interested to see how the characters will deal with him in future… until you read the books and find out he’s constantly getting clowned on, because they can’t just let their symbol of ultimate evil ever win.

That said, there’s one glaring issue with this film’s narrative structure and pacing, and that’s how Rayford’s arc is handled. If Buck’s journey is the B-plot, Rayford’s storyline is very much the A-plot for most of the film as he deals with the fallout of the Rapture and then tries to cope with the disappearance of his wife and son. However, after about an hour he realizes they were right, converts to Christianity, and then becomes a die-hard believer from that point onward… with about 40 minutes left to go in the movie. Like, the movie cuts back to him every once in a while, but there isn’t much for him to do, other than preach at Buck, Chloe, and the audience. I can’t help but feel that the movie would have been stronger overall if Rayford spent more time struggling, or maybe went through a period of anger at God for taking his family away. Then, maybe he could have learned about the Antichrist from Bruce Barnes at the same time as Buck.

And with that, we can dovetail into the things that Left Behind does not do so well. It really pains me to say this, but Tim LaHaye was right about something – this movie is cheap as fuck. Like, I know that people will say all sorts of things in a legal battle to try to sway the narrative, but I actually believe Tim LaHaye when he says that the film’s widely-reported $17.4 million budget is an exaggeration (and, adjusting for inflation, that would apparently be closer to $30 million today, which makes this even more insane to me). I’ve seen estimates that put the budget around $4 million, and I find that far more realistic considering what we got on-screen. Tim LaHaye has also gone on record saying that Cloud Ten’s productions look like “glorified church basement movies” and, oh my God, it’s a pretty apt description. Most of the film takes place in very simple sets – Ray’s home, a warehouse, a plane set, some office buildings, a UN set. They’re functional, but considering that we only get a very small handful of outdoor sequences, and they’re pitched as the “big” money-shot sequences (eg, air terminal chaos, Chloe coming across the car wreck, the car bombing), it underscores this film’s low production values. It also doesn’t help that the lighting in the film is absolute ass for most of the runtime, which is probably the largest contributing factor to why this movie feels so amateurish.

The absolute worst offender though is the aforementioned opening scene in “Israel”. As I said in the Production section, the second I saw that camel in the background I thought “Oh man, they clearly are NOT filming this on location, it looks like a quarry”. Then there’s the CGI of the planes and tanks during this sequence, which was poor even by year 2000 standards. I’ll give them some credit – there are some pretty good practical explosions during this sequence, almost enough to make you not realize that Buck and Chaim go into some random goat herder’s house, and suddenly are in a state-of-the-art military bunker. It’s pretty clear that most of the budget and ambition went into this opening scene, because it is miles beyond anything else in the film… but would it have taken up a good chunk of $17.4 million in the year 2000? I strongly doubt it.

Then again, I wonder how much they had to pay to borrow camels from the Toronto zoo for a day.

Left Behind is better than the book it’s based on, but there are fundamental issues which can’t really be excised in adaptation. Even as a child reading these books, one of my greatest frustrations was a deep-rooted lack of imagination on the part of the authours and the people inhabiting their world. Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I’m referring to here: as the attack on Israel gets underway, the skies suddenly darken, going from the middle of the day to black as night. In any other movie this could be construed as “passage of time”, or (potentially intentional) “continuity error”, but here it’s clearly intended to convey the intervention of God. However… no one comments on it. It’s supposed to be the middle of the day, but for whatever reason in Israel it suddenly became night time, defying meteorological explanation. And then all the planes begin exploding and everyone is just dumbfounded… and I do mean “just”, because there’s no explanation or speculation presented. Buck’s driving force for a good chunk of the movie is “Wow, I sure do wonder what happened there in Israel?”, but he seems to be the only one who cares, and the the whole question gets quietly dropped pretty soon in the movie. It’s not even like the world didn’t see this happen, it was literally being televised, but there’s zero impact beyond this scene. Like… are you telling me that there wasn’t a sizeable contingent of people going “That sure looks like it was divine intervention”?

Of course, the response to the Rapture falls into the same issue. “Huh, every non-Catholic Christian and child under thirteen in the world disappeared in a manner like the mythical rapture some evangelicals believed in. Wonder what happened, radiation maybe?” That last part isn’t even a joke either, radiation becomes the “official” explanation for what caused the disappearances, even though any moron could look at the demographics of the people who disappeared and find correlation showing that it was not random. One character believes that aliens were behind the disappearances (which, honestly, would probably be the second most obvious answer), while laughing about the idea of it being the Rapture, but that just underscores the issue – if they have information about the Rapture, it kind of defies explanation that they wouldn’t see that this miraculous event was anything other than that and instead handwave vaguely to “radiation” without any evidence. To me, this reveals a few potential insights into the authours’ opinions on the average non-Christian:

  1. Charitably, they might believe that God is “hardening their hearts” like the Pharaoh in Exodus, so that they cannot accept the obvious truth. If so, it’s kind of fucked up that God would then put them into this “final chance for redemption” and then take away their chance to see truth.
  2. They believe that the signs of God really are as obvious as they are portrayed in this movie and non-believers are just oblivious idiots. Hate to break it to them, but if we lived in a world God blew up an entire army and then caused hundreds of millions of children and Christians to disappear, there’d be a lot more converts, because then there would be some actual, concrete evidence for the supernatural.
  3. They believe that non-believers are actively looking for any excuse to defy God. Considering that “there are no real atheists” is a common belief amongst fundamentalists, this wouldn’t surprise me too much.

While I think that any (potentially even all) of these options are true, there’s also a much simpler explanation which could also be true: Jerry B. Jenkins is a hack writer who ignores any potential impact to the world because it interferes with the story he’s trying to tell… despite that story being one where the entire world’s population is undergoing countless disasters, the massive consequences of which should be being felt and responded to. There is so much impossible shit that happens in these books: in this first movie alone, completely ignoring full-on supernatural intervention, we have Israel magically developing technology to make the deserts fertile in order to become a global superpower. Kind of a weird plot point, until you realize they only did this because they believe it to have been prophesized. Our prophecies say that there will be a one-world currency? Guess we’re gonna make Korea join the EU now. Maybe this felt more realistic in the late 90s when the European Union was just taking form, but 20 years later in the wake of Brexit, this idea is laughably optimistic. And don’t even get me started on Israel rebuilding their temple, which even the movie acknowledges is impossible without the aforementioned magic and some handwaving to reveal that the temple can actually be built somewhere else… again, because their prophecy says that it has to happen, so by God they will force it to, then yada yada through the details and have everyone accept it. Oh, and this is also in a world where the UN basically rules the world already, which starts to make sense when you realize that Tim LaHaye believes in the Illuminati…

Underscoring all of this, I’ve always found it ironic that the existence of Left Behind makes the entire scenario even more impossible. Like, the premise of the books kind of works if the Rapture remains this weird thing that some evangelicals believe in, so you can see why some people wouldn’t immediately go “oh shit, the Rapture just happened!” if everyone suddenly disappeared. However, Left Behind was such a cultural juggernaut and has become so ingrained within the evangelical zeitgeist, that the idea of a Rapture occurring and not causing most people to immediately logically conclude that is laughable, let alone the idea that hundreds of millions of people would willingly go and tattoo themselves with 666 in light of all this.

Also, this scene is driving me nuts. 142,380,000 confirmed vanished? That’s got to be an interim and highly under-estimated total. There were 6 billion people in the year 2000 – we know that every child under the age of 13 was Raptured, in addition to a high number of Christians. Assuming even 10% of the world’s population was raptured (which seems like a very low estimate considering that world population demographics tends to skew young), that’s still over 600 million people.

Rounding things out here, it wouldn’t be an IC2S review if I didn’t at least mention the ladies… and they are really poorly served here. Hattie Durham is set up to be important, but she doesn’t really do anything – she ends her affair with Rayford and then goes off to the UN to work with Carpathia. Real riveting stuff… I have no idea why Chelsea Noble was so keen to play her. Then there’s Chloe Steele, whose entire character in this movie is “mad at dad” until the end when she decides that he’s right, they should convert to Christianity. As I recall from reading the books, Chloe does basically nothing important for the entire series and only really exists to be a love interest for Buck. I expect that this probably stems from LaHaye’s regressive views on women (his wife Beverly founded an anti-feminist womens’ organization, Concerned Women for America, which, among other things, advocates for the subservience of women…). As a result, Chloe isn’t allowed to do anything cool, so she just kind of exists on the sidelines.

When it comes down to it, the overarching message of Left Behind doesn’t come across as “You don’t want this to happen to you!” Rather, when Rayford came home and saw his wife’s clothes and her Bible beside the bed, the message became clear to me: “I told you so”. Perhaps it is a consequence of Cloud Ten making this film directly for the Christian market, but Left Behind feels like it’s jerking off its audience, reassuring them that their beliefs are true and, boy, those sinners sure are going to regret not listening to you when this happens to them! It’s not as nakedly spiteful as, say, the God is Not Dead movies, or is it as smugly hateful as Atlas Shrugged, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort made into changing hearts and minds as it is saying “Your beliefs will be vindicated, just wait”.

That is all pretty harsh, and like I said, this movie isn’t all that bad. That said, it’s also not exactly great – it is, after all, an adaptation of Left Behind, so it’s always going to be screwed to some degree. As you can see, other than the really poor production values, most of my issues with the film are related to the shitty books and theology it rests upon, which cannot be entirely ignored, but they also aren’t really issues with the film itself. However, it’s not so intrusive in this film that you can’t mostly ignore it, and I think that there is some enjoyment that can be had here with this premise if you’re able to put up with all the bullshit.

5/10 (A very generous rating, if I do say so.)

Be sure to tune in again soon when we look at the next entry in this series, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force!

Video Game Review: Raiders! Forsaken Earth

It’s been a really long time since I did a proper video game review (holy shit, 7 years!?), but I’ve been trying to get back into writing more regularly. A few years ago, I saw a post on Reddit about a developer’s upcoming strategy game which would let you play as a Mad Max/Fallout-style raider pillaging the wasteland. I was fascinated by this premise and instantly wishlisted the game, Raiders! Forsaken Earth, although it wasn’t until this year that I finally got the urge and free time to purchase and play the game.

In a broad sense, Raiders! is a strategy game with lite management and RPG elements, not too dissimilar to the XCOM franchise. You play as a player-created raider who has just taken the mantle of leadership and need to bring your band of scumbags from a ragtag group of thieves, to the uncontested rulers of the wasteland. This plays out in classic fashion – raiding caravans, dodging lawmen coming after you, and eventually building up your strength enough that you can extort entire towns to avoid your wrath. The management elements come into play as you have to build-up your base, manage your ever-expanding groups of raiders, and make sure there are enough resources available to survive and craft everything you need to survive. Meanwhile, the wasteland will react to your attacks with ever-increasing levels of offensive and defensive presence.

That’s a fairly rudimentary overview of the game, but it’s emblematic of Raiders! core gameplay – it’s a tried-and-tested formula and the game executes it well. There’s always some new little goal pushing you forwards, and I found myself on multiple occasions getting that “one more turn” compulsion, and then suddenly 30 more minutes would pass as I raided another settlement and made sure all my lowlifes were equipped with the best items. It’s not as deep as, say, a Paradox Interactive game, but I think it strikes a good balance between strategy and breezy fun.

That said, Raiders! is unmistakably an indie game and its flaws are readily apparent. The most obvious of these is that the game has basically no animation at all. World events are told via a static image and text box, the world map is navigated with a bunch of static PNGs being moved around the screen, and don’t even get me started on combat – you’re lucky if you get a 2 frame “animation” whenever someone does an action (honestly, the most “impressive” animation in the whole game is that you can see spent shell casings ejected out when you fire a gun, but that’s because they can just apply the same small JPG every time and rotate it a few times). While not exactly a major detriment to the core gameplay, it does leave Raiders! with a very unimpressive presentation. On the one hand, it captures the sort of vibes you’d get from the first two Fallout games, but it’s so dated that it’s likely enough to turn some people off the game entirely.

I mean… just look at it. If not for the resolution, you could mistake this for a 90s game.

Beyond the presentation issues, the game’s combat is fairly rudimentary. You get 2 rows per side, up to 4 ranged fighters, and up to 4 melee fighters per row, with melee having to fight adjacent enemies, and ranged being able to shoot anyone they want to. As fighters are defeated, units in reserve will move in to take their place, if any are available. Any fighter has about a dozen options available to them per turn, but most of these don’t matter – you can do heavy attacks (at the cost of accuracy), give an enemy a status condition, heal yourself, regain stamina, break armour, insult an enemy’s mother, etc. However, you rarely need to do anything other than just make a standard attack. The XCOM comparison earlier wasn’t just for show – accuracy is a major issue for your raiders, especially in the early game when they might have 20-30% hit rates, and +10 damage for -10% accuracy is not worth it unless you will literally die otherwise. Likewise, who needs status effects when you can just spec your raiders to be able to one-shot everyone you come across? This also makes a lot of the game’s optional level-up perks kinda useless, because about half of them are activated abilities, and then the good half are all passive bonuses. All of this is even more important because you can cheese this game’s AI pretty reliably – if you hit an enemy and get them around 50% HP, they will usually waste a turn healing. Meanwhile, if you kill an enemy, their replacement usually won’t be able to attack, so you can just cycle through enemies without getting a scratch if you have spec’d your band well enough. All this means that, once you get your band together, combat becomes fairly tedious and trivial outside of all but the most overwhelming battles, and it only gets easier when you get access to WMDs and artillery strikes. Thankfully, the game does have an auto-battle option, so you can speed through caravan raids into the late-game when you know that you will definitely win.

The management aspects of the game can get pretty annoying as well. Maybe it’s just because I spec’d by leader to give XP bonuses galore, but my raiders were constantly leveling up, necessitating a trip into the Roster menu after every fight to assign stat bonuses, buy perks, update weapon loadouts, etc, which only gets worse as you get more and more raiders in your party. Eventually I just gave up and started auto-leveling my raiders, but you’re probably going to want to manually level everyone until you have at least 6-8 max level scoundrels spec’d out with high accuracy, high damage, and high crit-chance as your core so they can annihilate anyone you come across. As you start conquering settlements, you also have to babysit them to make sure they’re all fortified and defended, because if not, then they’ll get destroyed by regulators and need to be recaptured and re-stocked. There’s no way to order units to travel between places, so you have to recruit dirtbags from a city into your party, then walk all the way over to the place you want them to be in.

All of this is small beans though compared to this game’s real glaring issue. The fact that they’ve programmed this game where you buy/sell items either 1 at a time, or all of them at once, is INSANE. My raider band carries up to a maximum of 300 units each of water, meat, and beer. I usually keep these around 150 each, because I will quickly top these all up through regular raiding, and then sell off the excess for easy cash. Now, think about what that means – I am regularly having to click the “sell” button 450 times for an incredibly basic action. I legitimately don’t know how this managed to make it through playtesting and how it has not been patched out, because it’s absolutely moronic that this in the game.

I also ran into a pretty major issue in the late game during my playthrough. If you’ve captured all the major settlements, the suddenly caravans stop running… This is a game about raiding caravans in order to get money and resources. When that gets taken away from you, you suddenly become extremely limited on options that you need to actually finish the game. Luckily, I had enough strength left in my band that I was able to capture the remaining slaver and arms dealer settlements so I could get a ton of cash, but even then I had to wait 2 in-game days to generate enough income to be able to get over the threshold to declare myself governor.

Like I said, Raiders! is a game where its flaws are glaringly obvious… but goddamn, I don’t really care, because this game lets you do some awesome shit. I pretty much always play a good guy in games, but it’s nice to give in to the fantasy of playing the irredeemable, chaotic evil villains for once, and Raiders! delivers how you’d expect it to. For one thing, you can go full-hog as a cannibal if you want to – you can kill and eat your own raiders (or just eat them when they are killed in battle), demand captives from a town and then eat them, capture enemies and then eat them, butcher someone and then sell that meat to merchants… It’s despicable and hilarious in equal measure. You don’t even have to eat people either if you don’t want to – hostages can be ransomed for money, killed to send a message, or you can put a bag on their head and use them as a human shield in combat (…guess which option I used half the time). You can perform human sacrifices to your savage wasteland god for combat bonuses. You can unleash napalm and mustard gas attacks on settlements. You can burn down the remaining pockets of civilization for the sheer fun of it. You can recruit feral dogs and boars to fight alongside you. You can engage in polygamy and build up a harem of up to 3 spouses (and if you want more, just kill and eat one of the existing ones). You can build up your base will all sorts of services, including (naturally) a brothel, which your evil-as-fuck ass can keep in business with literal sex slaves.

The game also has some fun random events hidden in the world map off the beaten path. One of my best raiders was welcomed into the group after being found in the desert. Another time, I found a thunderdome and fought a guy there. Then there was the time we came across an old nuclear submarine and found a goddamn tactical nuke inside, which I promptly took to blast the shit out of a pesky settlement. Then there was the time I found a group of cultists and sold them a bunch of slaves to sacrifice, which was handy because I really needed the money at the time. Clearly, the game allows you to be a real son of a bitch, although the dated, text-based presentation might actually help to not make it feel as “grimdark” as it could otherwise – yeah, you’re doing a lot of fucked-up shit, but most of it is left to roleplay and your imagination. You can also play with a conscience if you want to, but that doesn’t feel like the spirit of this game to me: you can be the good guy in every other game, after all.

While I have harped on the game’s presentation, I will give it some major props for the way that it portrays your raiders and their equipment. Every raider has a randomized appearance and name, and you’ll rarely see raiders with the same face (although I did see names repeating every once in a while). Probably around 95% of the weapons, armour, and items you can equip on your raiders will be reflected on their character model (and, conversely, you can prioritize attacking enemy fighters based on the equipment you see on them). The equipment is all classic raider items – hockey masks, riot helmets, nail baseball bats, rusty guns, shields made of manhole covers and stop signs, spiky armour, dusty jackets, etc. Considering the low production value, I was pretty surprised by this, as it no doubt took quite a bit of work to make this all happen, but I’m so glad they put in the effort.

As you play and level these guys (and gals) up, you grow attached to them as they bring you victories. Like I said, you can marry up to 3 of them. You can also promote up to 2 of them to higher positions of command in your band – this can potentially cause them to get too big for their britches and challenge your for control, although this never happened to me in my game; my officers were all ride-or-die. All of this helps to build affection for your regular group of raiders, which is important because, again, this game is like XCOM – no matter how good you are, eventually a lucky crit is going to happen, one of your favourites is going to die, and it is going to hurt. The game keeps track of your fallen brethren (and whether you ate them), and I had a few memorable losses in my playthrough. Poor Blackburn, he was my best marksman early on, and my first spouse and officer. He died at the end of our first big settlement raid, and it was a devastating loss. Then there was Shockmaster, a regulator who was hunting our band down, but when he was defeated in battle, he defected and became a scumbag himself. In one particularly devastating battle when I was outnumbered and outgunned by another band of regulators, I lost Shockmaster and Snaggle, 2 of my 3 best remaining marksmen at the time. If you’ve ever played XCOM, you know exactly what sort of feels this game gives you and just how ripe it is for roleplay.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t go through some of the hilarious names your raiders can have in this game. Like… there’s literally a dude named “Cock” in my band. I didn’t name him that, that’s just what the game called him. In addition to being appropriate for the “raider fantasy”, it also encourages more roleplay: like, I imagine that all these nicknames were made up by the other raiders during initiation and then stuck from there, so you start wondering how they got some of these names. Some highlights from my playthrough include: Hooligan, Shifty, White Legs, Sniffer, Wrists, Smutty, Rotten, Night Hate, Worms, Maggot, Dank, Pisser, Gonorrhea.

I put about a dozen hours into my playthrough of Raiders! Forsaken Earth. For me, that’s a solid amount of time to sink into a game. I don’t have time, or interest, in games that are dozens of hours long, so this was fantastic. However, I can see Raiders! being one of those games you could sink and much, or as little, time into as you want. The game has procedurally-generated maps and lots of customizable difficulty options, so you could easily have several more playthroughs to challenge yourself more, maybe try handling your band differently, or just replay on a different map – the choice is yours, really. Again, like XCOM in that regard, or like the 90s strategy/management games I used to play all the time, like Age of Empires II or Rollercoaster Tycoon, where it’s a different experience each time.

Raiders! Forsaken Earth has some really rough edges, but its core pillars are rock solid. Honestly, I’d love to see a sequel with more quality of life improvements (let me type how many items I want to sell, PLEASE), more weapons/armour/equipment, more random events, more rival raiders, larger maps, goddamn car chases… I think there’s still a lot of untapped potential here that could make for a real homerun if given the chance.

6/10

Female Space Marines and the Wokehammer Agenda

Hide your 3D printer and grab your Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer, the wokes are coming for Warhammer 40,000! Or so you’d believe if you’re unfortunate enough to be a 40k fan on social media these days. The discourse going on right now is absolutely exhausting and I’m at the point where I just want to get all my thoughts out in one place (and preferably in a place that doesn’t have a 280 character limit). So what is all this hubbub about? Simply put, people are arguing about whether female Space Marines should be a thing… but, of course, it’s really about a lot more than that. Let’s get into it, shall we?

As a note, you don’t necessarily need to know anything about 40k to get through this – I’ll try to keep it understandable, but I’m going to have to nerd out just due to the nature of this discourse, as some of the arguments are nonsense if you don’t know the finer details of the lore.

So What Is This Discourse All About?

In Warhammer 40,000, the main, iconic faction are the Space Marines: genetically altered and enhanced super-soldiers who are amongst the most elite warriors in the galaxy. In the lore of the universe, Space Marines are recruited exclusively from young males. It has been this way for about 30 years now and through several editions of the game.

In recent years, there is a growing (albeit, still minority) desire amongst some fans to relax this bit of the lore and allow Space Marines to also be women. There are several arguments in favour of this, which I’ll get to later, but recently this discourse has come to a boiling point again as it has become a rallying point for reactionaries to bring the culture war to 40k. This is also drawing in a lot of people who have never cared about 40k one way or another, but view it as a battleground to push back against “the regressive left”, or as fertile ground for them to grift people through rage and engagement.

That’s the basics. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that Games Workshop are, inevitably, going to need to formally address this at some point or another. So, as a result, we’re left with the question: “Should there be female Space Marines? Why, or why not?” With that question in mind, let’s look into what I consider the legitimate arguments against, and for, female Space Marines:

Arguments Against Female Space Marines

  • Monastic Elements – Traditionally, Space Marines have had a monastic theme to the faction’s identity. Most chapters straight-up are based out of strongholds called fortress-monasteries, and a lot of chapters have similar levels of religious reverence that you might expect out of monks. You could argue that allowing women in the Space Marines would dilute this aspect of the army… and, y’know what, that would be fair if that was the reasoning given. That said, these monastic elements are already very diluted compared to where they were in 2nd and 3rd edition, and different chapters have different traditions, so it doesn’t even apply neatly across the faction.
  • Fascism/Traditionalism – One could make the argument that the fascist society of the Imperium could be the reason why Space Marines are all male, even if there might be the ability to recruit women. Perhaps The Emperor decreed this, or when he recruited only men to be in the original legions, the chapters have kept this going out of tradition. This could also be a legitimate excuse to keep Space Marines male as far as I’m concerned – it honestly would help reinforce the themes of the setting in ways that are far more interesting and intentional than what we currently have by just handwaving “Marines have to be male, because reasons”. This is a bit shaky though, because, again, Space Marine chapters have incredibly diverse traditions, and the Imperium at large doesn’t seem to have this male/female division in the rest of its military forces (outside of the Sororitas, but that’s because having an all-female army was a loophole for the church to have its own standing army).
  • Artistic Intent – If Games Workshop came out and said “Nah, Space Marines are all male, because that’s what we want and we don’t intend to change it”… then, man, how do you even argue with that? I mean, there will no doubt continue to be arguments (and you can certainly argue about an artistic choice you disagree with), but that’d be pretty clear-cut.

Arguments For Female Space Marines

  • The Lore Changes All the Time – 40k’s lore isn’t the goddamn Bible. Games Workshop need to sell us new toys, and as a result it changes constantly. The past couple editions have seen some of the biggest lore changes in the history of the game. Just in the past few years, we’ve had the story move forward with the Fall of Cadia, the resurrection of primarchs Roboute Guilliman and Lion El’Jonson, and the introduction of Primaris Space Marines. These were monumental, narrative- and lore-changing events which have fundamentally altered the 40k universe and Space Marines as a faction. And then there’s the lore impacts every time a new faction gets added, or a faction gets fleshed out. Recently we got the League of Votann, a brand new faction which now, it turns out, have always been there actually. Before them, we got the T’au, and then we got the fleshing out of the Necrons, which fundamentally altered an existing faction’s lore (for the better, it must be said). In comparison to all of this, changing the lore to allow female Space Marines is miniscule. You could literally change a couple sentences in the lore section of the rulebook to make it work – either Cawl figured out a way to make female Space Marines work, or they’ve always been a thing, but we weren’t privy to it. If you wanted to make it something more elaborate (like one of the missing primarchs is involved somehow), then that could work too, but in my opinion this works best when it’s simple. People who go “But the lore!!!” as an excuse for why there shouldn’t be female Space Marines baffle me, because that is easily the weakest ground for them to stand on in this fight.
  • Gender Essentialism Excuse Makes No Sense – As it stands in the current lore, Space Marines are all male because “the gene-seed zygotes [which are used to turn someone into a Space Marine] are keyed to male hormones and genetic structure”. It’s basically just a hand-wave to explain why things are the way they are, and why they’ve been that way for 30 years. This is one of those anti-female Space Marine arguments that just gets more dated year after year, as discourse about gender and biology become more a part of the public conscious. Like I said in the lore section, it would be incredibly easy to just change this – it’s not like gene-seed is based in any real biology, so it’s not breaking the laws of reality or something for it to suddenly be able to be implanted in women too, whether that’s just retconning it, or having some new development make the process viable.
  • Space Marines Aren’t Inherently Male – This is my personal argument in this. Space Marines are all male, but there isn’t anything inherently male about them that would be lost by allowing there to be women in their ranks as well. About the only thing I can think of is that they all call each other “brother” a lot, but that’s more of a sign of respect and comradery. In terms of the faction’s identity, I’ve seen it argued that Space Marines are a male power fantasy, which holds some merit, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to extend to “therefore there should be no female Space Marines”. Space Marines are effectively sexless – they are pumped so full of modifications that they aren’t really human anymore, they’re sterilized and asexual, and most chapters have no personal connection to any normal humans. Given all this, what is lost by allowing Space Marines to recruit from women as well? They will end up the same weapons of war, not defined by their gender. It’s honestly so small a change that Games Workshop could get away with not even making new models to make this work (at most, they could sell a sprue of optional head swaps, so there’s even a financial incentive to consider).
  • They’re The Poster-Boy Faction – One common argument against female Space Marines is that people should just play one of the other factions which is mixed-gender instead. Maybe they should, because the other factions in 40k are all more interesting than the Space Marines (well, except for the Aeldari, because fuck elves), but Marines get the majority of the attention in the game and are likely going to be the first faction for most players. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to wish that the noob-friendly faction could have some more representation for women as it might subsequently draw more people in. From my understanding, this is pretty much the core argument for why people wanted female Space Marines in the first place.
  • Space Marines Are Meant to Be Personalized – Ever since the first Tactical Marine box was released, Space Marines have been meant to be highly customizable. The entire point of chapters and the various foundings is for you to be able to make up your own custom chapter and tell your own stories. The introduction of Primaris marines in 8th edition reinforced this, opening up the lore so that chapters that used to not have a “lore justification” for having additional foundings now could. Hell, the 40k universe has intentionally been designed as a playground you get to tell your own stories inside, rather than a grand narrative like something like Star Wars or Marvel. It’s an inherent aspect of the miniature hobby that you have full control over the painting, design, and customization of your minis, and that is represented fantastically through the Space Marines’ diverse array of traditions and options. In light of that, if people want female Space Marines in their chapter, it seems in-line with this philosophy to allow it as an option. Similarly, if people wanted their chapter to be all-male, then that would be fine too within that customization, but at least people would have the option this way.
  • There Used to be Female Space Marines – In 1987, Games Workshop sold two women in power armour with bolters and swords. Ever since, they’ve been a contentious aspect of the lore. Were they Space Marines (which were a thing at the time), or were they actually Sisters of Battle (which weren’t a concept yet)? Legend has it that they didn’t sell well, so Games Workshop phased women out of the Space Marines and made them all male to appeal more to the young boys who were their primary audience at the time. Supporting this theory, several armies also had female models get phased out of production, although the Space Marines were somewhat unique as this got extended to their lore as well, which would become more solidified and recognizable to the 41st millennium we know today by the time 2nd edition dropped in 1993. We could argue that female Space Marines are a call-back to the game’s history, although (to be fair) that was a time when 40k wasn’t even 40k.

Those are the legitimate arguments, for and against, as far as I can see them… and it should be pretty obvious which way I lean on this. There are other arguments though, and I’d be neglectful not to go over those as well:

Other Arguments Against Female Space Marines

  • The Sororitas Are the Faction For Girls/Are All-Female – I alluded to this one earlier. The Adepta Sororitas (aka Sisters of Battle) are held up as the female version of Space Marines, but they’re not quite the same thing. While there is some overlap, they ultimately aren’t the same since they are not super-soldiers, are physically much weaker, have a far different aesthetic, theme, and playstyle, and do not have anywhere near the same recognition and exposure as Space Marines do. They’re also 100x more interesting that Space Marines, but that’s a completely different argument altogether… Oh, and there’s also the argument that Sororitas are all-female, so Space Marines should stay all-male. Put simply, in the tabletop game this isn’t accurate: the Sororitas have multiple male units and characters in their army (specifically: Priests, Missionaries, Crusaders, Arco-flagellants, and Penitent Engines; they also used to have several more in previous editions, but these have been sectioned off into the Inquisition supplemental codex or discontinued). You can theoretically make a whole Sororitas army with nothing but male models if you wanted to. I recently got into it with a guy on Twitter who said that these “don’t count” and even argued that Penitent Engines and Arco-flagellants don’t count as male because they are just drugged-up killing machines… first of all, they make sure that these heretics are still somewhat lucid so they can torture them more for their sins, and secondly, at that point do they even consider Space Marines to be male? There are people who will argue that the Adeptus Custodes to be a mixed-gender army because it has six Sisters of Silence units (one of which is a named character, one of which is a generic leader, one of which is literally just a generic transport tank, and three of of which are literally just the same models with different weapons options), but will also argue that the Adepta Sororitas are all female because it suits their argument (and if the Sororitas are not all female, then there is no all female faction in 40k). Ultimately though, this argument is entirely a distraction from the actual discussion about female Space Marines and not worth getting into all the pedantry required to wade through it. Keep the argument on the question of female Space Marines where it should be.
The absolute insanity of calling Slaanesh daemons female is really sending me. Most of the army are full-on hermaphrodites, they’re as non-binary as you can get.
  • Goes Against the Lore – I’ve already addressed this previously, but there certainly is the argument that the existence of female Space Marines goes against the lore. If you view the lore as something that can’t/shouldn’t be changed, then I’m probably not going to convince you, but it’s the shakiest ground you could hinge this argument on. The options available to outright change the lore, or to introduce new elements to make it work, make this incredibly weak and the people making it must be constantly pissed off whenever a new 40k product comes out.
  • Why Are You Injecting Politics Into My Escapism? – Guys, if you are legitimately entertaining this idea, you need to take a long, hard step back and re-evaluate this. You’re saying you can’t enjoy a piece of media anymore because there’s a woman in it? You’re saying that, because they wanted to appeal to a wider audience, you can’t enjoy your hobby anymore without thinking about politics? Does progressive society make you so miserable that you have to retreat into your hobby and try to shut people out? That’s just silly. This is the sort of argument that you can hold and scream to the heavens about, but it’s not going to convince anyone one way or another.
  • It’s Misogynist/Sexist! – LOL. That’s all I really need to say about this take. Basically, some people try to claim that forcing women to go through the initiation process is torturous and would be misogynist/sexist. It’s a transparently bullshit argument and clearly just an attempt to use “woke” words to make their ideological enemies look like hypocrites. Don’t even entertain this kind of idiocy.
  • Why Are You Injecting Your Fetishes Into My Hobby? – LOL. Do I even need to entertain the argument that people want female Space Marines because they want dommy muscle mommies? No one is seriously motivated by this idea.
  • The Wokes Will Destroy 40k! – Finally we get to the core of the latest round of discourse about female Space Marines. In the wake of Gamergate, outrage merchants and political strategists have found that nerds will work themselves into a frothing mess when they think that their properties are being threatened with change. The culture war has made engaging with nerd properties fucking exhausting for the past decade. Star Wars is probably the clearest example of this – the sequel trilogy didn’t ruin Star Wars. Wokeness didn’t ruin Star Wars. The toxicity which has invaded the fandom in the wake of The Last Jedi‘s divisive reaction is what has made this franchise exhausting to interact with. It’s turned into a narrative that woke Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson are trying to destroy the brand, but Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are there defending it for the real fans… but they are also responsible for The Mandolorian season 3, The Book of Boba Fett, all the shit parts of Obi-Wan, and forcing Filoni’s OCs into canon at every opportunity. Meanwhile, we’ve got Rogue One, which people complained had another (!) female lead before release, and Andor, which is probably the wokest Star Wars has ever been, is nearly universally acknowledged as the best Star Wars project since the originals… So maybe “wokeness” isn’t the issue, but rather that Disney is sucking the life out of the brand and mismanaging it. That’s a long tangent to go on about why the woke 40k argument is fucking bullshit, but it illustrates the point – they’ll point to all these other properties that “wokeness” ruined, but when you look into it, it’s almost invariably bullshit. Female Space Marines are viewed as the first step to wokeness ruining 40k, but I just can’t see it. The entire appeal of 40k is that it’s a fascist hellscape, and I don’t see a single person interested in this setting wanting that to change, including the vast majority of people who want female Space Marines. If you believe the slippery slope argument and that’s what’s motivating you to push back against female Space Marines, you’re a fucking rube. I had an argument years ago with someone who similarly believed that having wheelchair-bound mini-figs was representing the woke-ification of Lego. It was an absolutely mad argument at the time, and the intervening 8 years have shown how fucking stupid this kind of logic is.
I already wrote a ton of words above about Star Wars, but Halo? That was clearly shit showrunning and disrespect for the source material rather than shoving wokeness at you. World of Warcraft? From what I can see, looks like they’re pissed because Blizzard added some gay couples in an expansion, lol.

Closing Thoughts

When it comes down to it, I have the same philosophy when there are calls to make a change in a media property: “is there a legitimate reason not to do this?” With female Space Marines, I see very few reasonable reasons not to introduce them into the game – the impact on the game and lore would be miniscule, while the upsides of making more people feel welcome and giving people more options for their armies is obviously a great thing. Games Workshop clearly agrees as well – just look at the Stormcast Eternals, the fantasy equivalent of Space Marines in Age of Sigmar, who are filled out with a cast of colourful men and women. It’s a different system of course, but it shows you that this is something they’re aware of and that they would do differently if they were to start fresh. If the idea of welcoming more people into the hobby is repulsive to you, then you are the problem.

Also, funnily enough, this whole discourse is reminding me of when I was a crusty gatekeeper in the 40k community. Around 12 years ago, bronies were infiltrating the 40k community. You couldn’t go on Dakka Dakka without seeing a brony avatar and there were several people converting up Space Marine pony armies. People fucking hated it, myself included. This was making a mockery of the game! Why can’t they just like 40k as it is? It completely goes against the tone of the setting!

…then, over time, we as a community got used to it. I stopped caring about all the bronies who were posting regularly, enjoying the hobby. I grew the fuck up. If people want to have fun their own way with their own army, why the fuck should we care? That’s one of the things that draws people to this universe, the ability to carve out your own little slice of it and go “pew, pew” as you fire a deathstrike missile at your opponent’s face. If some more representation would make it easier for others to share in that joy, then who are we to deny that?

Ranking the Albums I Listened to in 2023

Welcome back to my annual music countdown! Last year I went overboard with more than fifty album reviews, and the process made listening to new music into more of a chore than I’d like. Thankfully, I did indeed tone it down this year, keeping at a far more manageable 19 new albums this time. I didn’t listen to a whole lot of new bands this year, instead spending the first third of the year obsessively listening to Mechina, and then spent most of the rest of 2023 catching up on 90s and 2000s bands I missed out on at the time. I expect that 2024’s countdown will likely have more entries than this year. Still plenty to get through though, so let’s get to the rankings!

19) Lighting Up the Sky, Godsmack

When Legends Rise was one of the biggest surprises of 2018 for me, being the first Godsmack album to be anything more than a guilty pleasure. It had me excited to see where the band would go in future, but Sully Erna and company had another surprise in store for me when it was announced that Lighting Up the Sky would be their final album release. I had hoped they’d pull out all the stops for this big send-off, but Lighting Up the Sky is a painfully mediocre, wet fart of a finale. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the worst album they’ve ever put out – I used to give Faceless that dubious honour, but for all its dreariness, at least it has some good songs and sticks to the winning Godsmack formula. Lighting Up the Sky, in comparison, doesn’t have any tracks that resonated with me at all. In fact, as a non-American, I’m kind of annoyed by “Red White & Blue”, which takes an idiot centrist position on all issues and says “Yeah but all that matters is that I have freedom of speech and that I support America no matter what!” Wow, such a brave and intelligent stance, Sully… I swear I didn’t rank this album so lowly because of that song, but nearly every track doesn’t get any sort of reaction out of me. “Truth” is the one good song on here, but it’s not nearly enough to save the album as a whole, not to mention that even the worst Godsmack albums tend to have more than just one good song. Godsmack are still going to be touring for the indefinite future, but I just can’t see any of these tracks getting crowds excited (other than, y’know, “Red White & Blue” for a certain audience). It’s too bad, I was really hoping for a great send-off for a band which could never quite “get there”, but I’m still thankful for all the work they put in over the years.

18) 72 Seasons, Metallica

There’s a solid idea at the core of 72 Seasons, with each song telling the story of a boy’s journey from birth to adulthood (18 years being the titular 72 seasons). Conceptually, there’s a lot to be mined from this idea, but in execution this is an absolute slog of an album. Metallica always over-deliver when it comes to an album’s runtime, which is great when they put out good material, but when they don’t… well, we get 72 Seasons. This is such a baffling album, it’s like Metallica have completely forgotten how to make songs that sound distinct from each other or have any sort of interesting sound to them. I’m not even a latter-day Metallica-hater either, I enjoy Death Magnetic and I think Hardwired… To Self-Destruct is the best original studio album they’ve put out since The Black Album, but 72 Seasons is just plain dull.

17) World on Fire, Sovereign Council (Bandcamp)

It has been a long time since we saw Sovereign Council on IC2S, a local band whose guitarist was a neighbour of mine and whose vocalist, Alex, went to school with me. However, in the intervening eight years, they’ve gone through yet another major lineup change, losing Alex in the process. This was an intriguing change: on the one hand, one of Sovereign Council’s biggest assets was the contrast between Alex and Lisa’s vocals, but on the other hand, Lisa’s a great vocalist, so seeing how she can front the band solo is an interesting prospect. Right out the gate, you can really feel how all the changes have really shifted the feel and tone of Sovereign Council. Their first couple albums had an epic sound to them, and I’m realizing that was partly due to the layering of multiple guitarists, vocalists, etc. World on Fire‘s line-up has been stripped back to basics and this makes Sovereign Council’s sound feel smaller in comparison. One thing which hasn’t shrank though are Lisa’s vocals, which are better than ever here. “Of The Ashes” is probably the closest they come to recapturing that epic feel, and hopefully that’s the sort of feel that Sovereign Council can harness going forward.

16) Rated R, RED

Declaration was easily my favourite album of 2020 and I’d still expect it to end up in my eventual “Best Albums of the 2020s” list in 7 years or so. Knowing this, it should probably go without saying that I was excited to see what RED were going to cook up next. However, my excitement was somewhat tempered, because RED have a bad habit of swinging wildly in quality between albums – their first 2 albums were great, then their next 2 were very mediocre. Then of Beauty and Rage came out and ended up being their best album ever, only to be followed up by the very mediocre and forgettable Gone. Then Declaration came along and was another incredible album. And, as much as I hate to say it, Rated R keeps up the tradition, being another painfully mediocre follow-up to a masterpiece. There’s not a whole lot to say about the tracks here: musically, they harken back to their sound on Innocence & Instinct, but the songwriting feels uninspired and the tracks aren’t given enough time to breathe (the album itself is 10 tracks and barely gets over the 30 minute mark, so that should give you a good idea of just how brief these songs are). That said, the second half of the album is a bit better than the first, with tracks “The Suffering” and “Still Bleeding” injecting the album with a bit of soul and energy, although it isn’t quite enough to save the album as a whole. Well, if nothing else, I guess this means that the next time RED releases an album it’s going to be amazing… right?

15) Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge, Wolves in the Throne Room (Bandcamp)

Primordial Arcana was, for most of 2021, my favourite album of the year until Moonflowers and God is Partying snuck in and took the crown from it. Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge acts as a sort of stop-gap epilogue to that album, giving us a handful of tracks which mostly stick to the atmospheric black folk metal sound Wolves in the Throne Room had established on Primordial Arcana. It can go a bit beyond just sticking to the same sound though; “Twin Mouthed Spring” lift riffs directly from Primordial Arcana and they even have an instrumental reinterpretation of “Spirit of Lightning” (renamed “Initiates of the White Hart”), which strips out the black metal and instead becomes a clash between folk and industrial music. It’s interesting, but it’s also kind of indicative of Crypt as a whole – there’s certainly some ideas here, but I wouldn’t have been left wanting if they had just waited until they had a full album ready. As-is, Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge kind of feels like a Primordial Arcana b-sides EP and doesn’t do much to provoke interest on its own merits and lacks the meticulous craftsmanship that Wolves in the Throne Room usually bring.

14) Volume IV, September Mourning

Holy shit, now that the NFT fad has cratered, September Mourning finally decided to get around to releasing Volume IV two years late. I hope that the NFT bullshit was worth it for them*, because now that it’s here, Volume IV is a bit underwhelming for me. It’s basically more September Mourning: uncomplicated pop-metal with little in the way of evolution since they established their modern sound on Volume II back in 2016. Fans will enjoy it no doubt, but September Mourning’s sound is so simple that it might be downright unimpressive to those unfamiliar with them. For my part, the music here is fine, but it doesn’t have the same sort of impact that Volume II did for me back when I first heard it. I dunno if that’s due to disillusionment after all the NFT bullshit, but I do not think so. For what it’s worth, there are a couple songs which do stand out, “Empty” and “Kill This Love” easily my favourite tracks of the bunch; if you haven’t listened to September Mourning before, maybe check these out.

*Seems to have been, a few months after putting out Volume IV, they released a single to promote some other NFT project

13) Interludium, Powerwolf

God forbid Powerwolf go a year without finding a way to milk more money out of their rabid fanbase, this year’s annual release is a bit of a strange beast. Featuring six original tracks, three re-released B-sides, and a French version of “Beast of Gévaudan”, I’m tempted to call it an over-glorified EP masquerading as a full album. Powerwolf are really good at making music, so the new tracks achieve that baseline quality you’d expect from them. However, when you’ve already heard two tracks on this album years ago and they happen to be the highlights of the album, it’s fair to feel a bit underwhelmed.

It wouldn’t be a new Powerwolf album without meaty bonus discs, including an orchestral version of each track from the main album, and the real feast, Communio Lupatum II. I’m always super interested in these Powerwolf cover albums, because while most of the songs do not work when taken out of Powerwolf’s signature style, there always end up being a couple diamonds in the rough. Luckily, Communio Lupatum II happens to be the best Powerwolf bonus disc since Metallum Nostrum way back in 2015, with several solid covers, including “Reverent of Rats”, “Stossgebet” and “Night of the Werewolves”. Particular highlights are “Dancing With the Dead” and “Venom of Venus”, which both transform the original work in interesting ways and easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Powerwolf originals. All-in-all, Communio Lupatum II is a more interesting album than the actual album it’s a bonus to and it’s a nice change of pace that there are more hits here than misses for once.

12) Last Days EP, Impending Doom (Bandcamp; note that this EP is not on their Bandcamp page for some reason)

Last Days is an extremely slight release from Impending Doom, clocking in at barely over 10 minutes. Consequently, it probably doesn’t help that the three tracks here are just more of their signature deathcore sound with basically no innovation or particularly interesting hooks. That’s not to say that Last Days is bad, it’s perfectly enjoyable, it’s just uninteresting. Given that the band’s last release was also an EP, you could maybe mash this and Hellbent together for a longer listen. Oh and the band has still managed to not go on an anti-woke tirade in their lyrics, so I consider that a win as well.

11) Obliterate Me EP, Coping Method (Bandcamp; note that the EP is here, but as a series of separate singles rather than a single collection)

Coping Method came up in one of my random mixes on Spotify so I thought I’d check them out. They’re primarily a metalcore band, although there is some electronic/EDM fusion here, especially evident in “Hypomania” (which is probably the highlight track of the EP). For the most part though, their sound is solid but not enough to put them over the top for me into really enjoyable. Definitely worth a listen, especially “Hypomania”, but not one that will likely stick with me over a long period of time.

10) Die About It, Bad Wolves

I feel bad for Bad Wolves: they showed a ton of promise on their first two albums, being one of the most exciting bands in hard rock/metal at the time. But after their extremely bitter breakup with former frontman Tommy Vext, and their subsequent album, Dear Monsters, being rather mediocre, that excitement has been completely dampened. Understandably, I went into Die About It with a lot of caution. What I got wasn’t quite what I expected. Dear Monsters really played it safe, with lots of radio-friendly hard rock. Die About It doesn’t shy away from that kind of music, but it’s also extremely scatter-shot in terms of sound and musical variety, akin to the shotgun-blast approach that defined their debut album, Disobey. We’ve got full-on metal tracks like “Bad Friend”, rap-metal on the title track, heart-felt ballads like “It’s You (2 Months)”, a full-on moody sax solo in “NDA”… like I said, they’re all over the place on this album. I’m not even sure I particularly liked a lot of the tracks on the album, but they go in so many directions that it’s at least constantly interesting and a step up from Dear Monsters. I’m still nowhere near the enthusiasm I had for Bad Wolves before 2020, but Die About It at least charts a more intriguing future direction for the band going forward.

9) Cenotaph, Mechina (Bandcamp)

Venator was one of my favourite albums of 2022, and a big reason why I listened to way less albums this year is because I spent about half of the year listening to Mechina’s entire discography on repeat. They are powerhouses, putting out a new album nearly every year, all telling one epic sci-fi tale of war and revenge. Their music has also undergone some major changes over the years, starting as full-on death metal and slowly getting to the more melodic, industrial metal sound they demonstrated on Venator. Going into Cenotaph, our heroes have declared war on the tyrant Enyo and the first battle is to be waged… and, somewhat unfortunately, Cenotaph doesn’t really live up to how exciting that premise is. Cenotaph has far less energy to it than Venator did, and now that I’ve seen how heavy Mechina used to be, it makes Cenotaph stick out even more. That’s not to say that it’s a bad album by any means, in fact it’s far more musically-diverse than Venator, but its slower, softer tone is a bit disappointing. It helps that this album was released on the first day of the year, because it has given me some time to come to appreciate it more – if it had released much later in the year, I probably would have ranked it much lower.

That said, a special mention has to go to a massive single Mechina released halfway through the year, “Blessings Upon the Field Where Blades Will Flood”. It’s not really in contention for its own entry since it is just a single, despite being 18 minutes long (!!!), but this is exactly what I was hoping to get out of Cenotaph, musically. It’s far heavier and has a faster tempo, with some actual roared vocals to complement and contrast Melrose’s angelic voice. This track caps off that chapter of the story well and leads into the future, promising a massive showdown to come. I’m hoping it’s also a sign that Mechina are aware of some of their fans’ criticisms about their musical direction, so with any luck the next album will sound a bit more like this. I know I’m crossing my fingers excitedly.

8) Godmode, In This Moment

In This Moment have been one of my favourite bands for nearly a decade now and I would say that they haven’t had a bad album in all that time… Godmode really tested that devotion though. When I first listened to it, I really did not like it. As I was listening to it I kept feeling that it was uninspired (probably doesn’t help that some songs, like “Skyburner”, are straight-up rehashing lyrics and themes from prior albums wholesale). However, after a few listens, Godmode really grew on me. The main evolution here is that In This Moment are steadily working more electronic elements into their sound that we’ve been hearing since Mother and Blood 1983. On the plus side, they’ve at least restored some of the heaviness that was missing in those two albums, but it took me a few listens to really appreciate tracks like “Army of Me”, “The Purge”, and “Sacrifice”. All that said, I instantly loved “Damaged”, featuring Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas. Like all of In This Moments’ duet tracks, “Damaged” is awesome, bringing a sudden shot of adrenaline to the whole album. I’d still put this as my second least favourite In This Moment album overall, but I’m glad I gave Godmode a few chances, because I’m legitimately enjoying it now and I think it stands well amongst the rest of their discography, even if it isn’t the most distinct album they’ve put out by any means.

7) NA​̈​E’BLISS, Red Cain (Bandcamp)

I really enjoyed Red Cain’s Kindred duology, so I was excited when news of a full-length follow-up came out. NA​̈​E’BLISS iterates on Red Cain’s epic dark fantasy metal sound, but for the most part this is a somewhat heavier version of what they were doing in Kindred. That is far from a bad thing though, as every track on this album stands out and feels like a piece of a greater whole. They have said that this album is inspired by The Wheel of Time; I haven’t read the series myself, but this lack of context didn’t negatively impact my enjoyment of NA​̈​E’BLISS. Really, my biggest complaint is that the album art is either AI-generated, or it’s so surreal that it’s indistinguishable from AI… I haven’t been able to get a straight answer, but it’s a pretty bad look for up-and-coming creatives to be utilizing these sorts of tools (especially since Kindred‘s art was so good). There’s a basis here for some rather evocative imagery, but knowing that it’s probably AI-generated makes it orders of magnitude less interesting.

6) Delain, Dark Water (Bandcamp)

I got really excited as soon as I saw the cover for this album – I mean, just look at it! I need more good, non-Alestorm pirate metal in my life and Dark Waters delivers. Calling it “pirate metal” is kind of a misnomer though, this is firmly a symphonic metal album with pirate-themed lyrics, and it sounds just like what you’d expect from a symphonic metal band – operatic female vocals, not too heavy, etc. That said, there are some really good tracks on here, like “The Quest and the Curse”, “Invictus” and “Underland”. Dark Waters is not treading any new ground, but it’s well-made and happened to find me at a time when I was looking for something exactly like this, so it gets some extra points for that.

5) OMNI: Part 1, Project 86

I spent half of my review of Project 86’s prior album, Sheep Among Wolves, trying to make excuses for Andrew Schwab’s transphobia in album-closer “Metempsychosis”. Project 86 had been one of my favourite bands for a decade at that point, so it was hard for me to admit that they had done something shitty. Well, I came to terms with it very shortly after publishing that review and, honestly, the realization has completely soured my relationship with this band, to the point where even the announcement of their farewell album left my bitter heart with nothing more than hope that they wouldn’t tarnish their legacy even more. However, through the development of this final album, Andrew Schwab continued shitting the bed with an email implying that they wanted to get into NFTs and then platforming reactionaries with “just asking questions” bullshit on his podcast. All of this was said to tie into the final album’s themes, so you can expect that my anticipation for OMNI: Part 1 was at absolute rock-bottom through this entire year.

However, you can see that OMNI: Part 1 is not at, or near, the bottom of this list, which should be an indication that I give a fair shake, even to projects that I am strongly biased against going in. Honestly, Andrew Schwab’s problematic politics don’t really shine through in OMNI, which is more concerned with how social media is ushering us into a corporate autocracy (best exemplified with “Virtual Signal”… which, yes, is a bit too analogous to “virtue signal” for me to not side-eye it). Oh, and also some weird, apocalyptic Antichrist shit.

In spite of all the baggage, Andrew Schwab is still a fantastic lyricist and this is easily the heaviest Project 86 album of all time, pushing into full-on metalcore territory at times. This was a very pleasant surprise as my own tastes have gotten heavier over time, so it’s not even as jarring as it may otherwise have been (for that matter, an old friend of mine who really likes Project 86 did not get on with this album very well because it was harder than they would like). It’s not really an album where individual tracks stand out to you, it’s more about the overall listening experience, and in that regard OMNI: Part 1 delivers much better than I expected. However, it does suffer somewhat from the litany of extended interlude tracks, especially towards the second half of the album, where we get interludes longer than some of the actual songs. These do help set the dark tone, but the sheer number of them make the listening experience drag eventually. All that said, while my relationship with Project 86 is irrevocably soured at this point, but I’m glad to see the band go out with their dignity intact. Part 2 comes out next spring, so I’ll be sure to cover it as well in 2024.

4) The Forgotten EP, Orbit Culture (Bandcamp)

Orbit Culture have had quite a year. They already released a full-length album in 2023 and then, surprisingly, four months later put out an EP as well. Based on the title and release window, I assumed that The Forgotten was just a series of b-sides, carved off and sold to fans for an extra dollar. While $1 for some b-sides would actually be a decent (if unremarkable) deal, The Forgotten does not feel like an after-thought. Rather, it feels like a proper release in its own right and easily stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its full-length sibling.

First-off, The Forgotten is a meaty EP, clocking in over 18 minutes long across three tracks (which is no mean feat, considering that the album which came out four months earlier was nearly 50 minutes long in its own right, and Orbit Culture’s music is fast and aggressive, so filling out time is harder for them than some other bands). That wouldn’t mean much if the music wasn’t good, but there are some really solid tracks here. “While We Serve” is deliciously heavy and demonstrates how Orbit Culture love to build up tension across the track’s runtime before changing tempo and becoming even more heavy as they change up the track’s sound. I was headbanging the entire time, it was great.

Meanwhile, “The Upheaval” starts out strangely, spending the first minute or so with a heavy sound, but an intentionally-delayed tempo, before letting loose and going back to their usual fast and aggressive tempo. It’s relatively short at four and a half minutes, but each minute takes you on a journey to a new soundscape.

Unfortunately, the closer, “Sound of the Bell”, is pretty disappointing. As Orbit Culture’s longest song, I was hoping for something akin to “A Sailor’s Tale” off of their previous Shaman EP, but the track takes about six and a half minutes to really get going, and then when it finally does get going, it doesn’t escalate any further and instead just peters out. It’s not an awful track by any means, but it is a limp way to end an otherwise stellar EP. If “Sound of the Bell” was a bit better, this could have actually been my album of the year, but alas.

Overall, The Forgotten is a bite-sized distillation of Orbit Culture’s sound and the elements which make them such an enjoyable band. They’re not doing anything different or revolutionary with their sound here, but considering the turn-around time and the price you’d pay for this album, not to mention the actual quality of most of the music here, it’s another fantastic release in a banner year for Orbit Culture.

3) Convinced, Anberlin (Bandcamp)

After waiting eight years for new music from Anberlin, I wasn’t really expecting more new music from them quite so soon, but I am not going to complain either! For the most part, this is just more Anberlin. That would be fine on its own, but the whole package is elevated significantly by “Banshee”, a fantastic track which stands strong amongst the best songs Anberlin have ever put out. Once again, Convinced is another rather slight collection that leaves you wanting more, but Silverline is still recent enough that it makes for a good double-feature, almost like a full album released in two parts over a year.

2) Dethalbum IV, Dethklok

After 10 long years, Metalocalypse fans finally got the finale we’ve long been waiting for in 2023 and, frankly, never thought we’d receive. Even more surprising is that Army of the Doomstar is about as strong of a finale as fans could have reasonably hoped for, especially considering how inconsistent the series’ quality can be. As a cherry on top of all this, we’ve also gotten Dethalbum IV, which I’m also shocked and pleased to find is far better than I was expecting. So many albums from my favourite bands this year have been disappointing and it’s left me wondering if I’m just getting grumpy and old, but as soon as Dethalbum IV got underway I was flooded with excitement. This album is classic Dethklok through-and-through: energetic, epic, hilariously over-the-top death metal that you can’t help but crank the volume up on and headbang along to. Like any good Dethklok album, the music stands on its own and can be enjoyed even if you don’t watch or like Metalocalypse. Every song on here is solid, but I really loved “Gardener of Vengeance” and (unsurprisingly) “Murmaider III” is probably the most epic of them all.

1) Descent, Orbit Culture (Bandcamp)

Orbit Culture screamed their way into my heart with 2021’s Shaman, with their mixture of heavy, aggressive death metal instantly winning them a devoted fan. Descent has been probably my most anticipated album of the year and Orbit Culture did not disappoint. If you’ve listened to Orbit Culture before, then you’re not really going to be surprised (and if you haven’t listened to Orbit Culture, then do it, goddammit!). This is very much the same sound they have been refining for years now, but why reinvent the wheel when it’s still working? On Descent, Orbit Culture are still delivering great, catchy tracks like “From the Inside”, “Vultures of the North” and “Undercity” that make you want to scream and headbang along. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s quality, and sometimes that is more than enough.