End Times At The Movies

2 Corinthians 11:1
Oh, that you would bear with me in a little folly—and indeed you do bear with me.

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I can remember when I first saw the Christian film “A Thief In The Night”.
It was in a church basement. They played it on a reel to reel projector and had to stop the whole film when one reel would end and they could put on the new one.
“A Thief In The Night” was a very popular film in its day and still is. Three sequels came out of it.

With the convenience now days of DVD’s it has actually been a bit lucrative, (But not by much.), to make and distribute more of these “End Times” films in a genre all their own.

No one has really taken more advantage of this market that brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde at Cloud Ten Pictures.
Cloud Ten Pictures and others like Matthew Crouch at TBN have produced a massive amount of titles with “post- rapture” drama and tribulation heat and action as the back drop.

The Titles
Left Behind: The Movie
Left Behind: Tribulation Force
Left Behind: World At War
Apocalypse
Apocalypse II: Revelation
Apocalypse III: Tribulation
Apocalypse IV: Judgment
Apocalypse V: Redemption
The Omega Code
Megiddo: The Omega Code 2
Years of the Beast
SIX: The Mark Unleashed
The Moment After
The Moment After 2: The Awakening
Early Warning
Gone

It’s quite allot. And that’s not all of them.
Perhaps you might feel intimidated looking at a long list of titles like that.
Perhaps you’re saying to yourself, “I like a good end times tribulation movie as much as the next guy but I just don’t have the time to watch all that and keep a job and family life.”

I’ve got good news for you.
I’m a bit of a connoisseur as it were of end times movies. A fellow who smells the cork and cleans the pallet before tasting again of the next tribulation nightmare film.
I have not only seen all these movies, I personally own around eighty percent of the titles you see listed there and I can help you out.

You see, the producers of all these movies have not felt burdened to stray far from a tried and true “formula” when it comes to the story lines of all these films.
I shall break it down for you. If you read this through I can assure you that you will come away with a good working knowledge of all the movies listed above.

I have listed the titles. The “formula” will always call for key words to be incorporated. “Tribulation”, “Apocalypse”, “Revelation”, “Count Down”, “Beast”, etc .
Just to name a few.

The formula then requires certain core characters …

The Hero:
The hero is always a former:
-Counter-terrorism expert (Apocalypse V: Revelation)
- FBI agent (The Moment After)
- Airline pilot (Left Behind: The Movie)
- Lawyer for a large company (Gone)
- College professor (Years of the Beast)
- Award winning journalist (Left Behind: The Movie, Apocalypse, Early Warning)
- Police detective (Apocalypse IV: Tribulation, SIX: The Mark Unleashed)
- The President Of The United States (Left Behind: World At War)
- The Vice President Of The United States (Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 )

Before the Rapture The Hero was married or had close Christian relatives. They are all gone now and he has deep emotional tension. If he is a person in authority like law enforcement or the executive branch of the government, he will come to a point where he will have to choose a side in the persecution of Christians.
You know he will but it will take the vast majority of the movie before he accepts Christ and becomes a Christian himself.

He’s not alone. The Hero has with him a cadre of elite people who make up an invaluable team.

The Computer Hacker: A living legend to the computer hacking community and bane to the corporate world before the Rapture he/she is now saved and more clever than any PhD computer whiz Satan has. Usually he gets the funny lines. He lives.
The Female Hero: Her little boy Toby or Tyler or Timmy or little girl Brittany or Chelsea or Tiffany was Raptured along with her husband or mother who lived with her and read her son/daughter Bible stories. She carries a teddy bear or a doll or at least a picture.
Her and The Hero never come close to inappropriate intimacy but they do hug when crying and will hold hands while running from explosions. She probably lives. If she dies the scene will show her laying amidst the rubble of the collapsed building and close up of her face, (Eye make-up looking good. Bruise on her cheek and/or forehead.), as her eyes widen and she addresses Toby or Tyler or Timmy or Brittany or Chelsea or Tiffany who she apparently sees off camera. Some new actress will be cast in the sequel with the exact same background story.
The Big Tough Guy: Before the Rapture he was a former bouncer or mercenary or professional boxer or gang member or decorated soldier but now he fights the antichrist with a machine gun and grenades and yet, strangely enough, kills no one. His mother told him the gospel all his life but he wouldn’t listen and since she is now gone in the Rapture he , “Figured it was time to stop runnin’.” He is uncomfortable putting it into words.
He is also a helicopter pilot and an explosives expert with a fifth degree black belt in… Fill in the blank.
He also drives the van.
He might live or give his life by shielding The Female Hero. Before he dies he'll get a good spiritually edifying paragraph of lines.
Former Preacher: He was watered down before the Rapture but not no more. He guides our team of elite with Biblical information pertinent to where we are in the bowls and trumpets time line. He lives.
Wise Old Person: Usually a strong willed African American woman in their seventies who got left behind after the Rapture for reasons that are not explained because she seems very spiritually mature in this movie. She gets to defiantly chew out the one world police or the demon possessed agent or the antichrist himself to his face. She dies.
The Sell Out: Somebody in the team betrays them. If a character is introduced early on that doesn’t seem to have one of the above profiles to fill, put your money on them to be the traitor. They will probably turn out to be the Judas.
BUT… There have been instances where the traitor turned out to be The Computer Hacker, (Apocalypse II: Revelation). He dies.

So now we have our team of “Christian Commando’s” ready to take on the forces of darkness.
Usually, the bad guys are formed up into an orderly, para-military, unit.
When they have a name is it almost never anything we would recognize as an official organization today.
A new name is usually created.
Typically these are words to the effect…

- O.N.E. (One Nation Earth)
- U.N.I.T.E
- Community Police Force (CPF)

You can see that the formula is quite given to acronyms.
They are equipped with tanks and armored vehicles that have their name stenciled on the side. (All that has to be washed off when they finish principle shooting.)

And in all the movies there is the epitome of evil villains, the antichrist himself.
Here is a man that is said to be ruling the entire planet but most of his attention is fixated on seven characters breaking into the basement at night in an un-named city in the United States.
He is only very rarely outright called “the antichrist” in the film.
The formula requires a name. These include…

- Nicolae Carpathia
- Brother Christopher
- Franco Macalousso
- Stone Alexander
- Damien Thorn
-“Our Beloved Leader”

To name a few.
All the ingredients are now collected, sliced and ready for the pot.
“The broth” itself is the plot and “The Plot” is the part driven most by the formula.
It rarely deviates far…

The Plot
Boss Hogg has a way to get rich but it’s illegal so he figures a way to frame it on the Duke Boys so they get thrown in jail but cousin Daisy distracts Deputy Cletus and Uncle Jesse goes around and busts them out and then there’s a huge car chase through the back woods that ends with Sherriff Rosco P. Coltrane losing his squad car in the creek or a bale of hay or a chicken coop and the Duke boys make it to the bank or the county assessor’s office or the visiting governor just ahead of Boss Hogg and a dripping wet, or feathered, Sherriff Rosco to show the paper that has the proof…

Wait.
No, that’s every plot of every episode of “The Dukes Of Hazard”.

Hang on… Gimme just a second…
In the end times movies the plot is usually…

The Plot
The antichrist is about to give a world wide speech on TV or has a device that will make everybody watching get a subliminal message to worship him.
Our Hero and the team hear about this and ponder the evil implications of what the result will be. (Perhaps also Wise Old Person and Former Preacher are held in a jail cell too.)
But our Computer Hacker hero knows of a way to hack into the program, no details ever given, you just assume he’s working some kinda computer magic and re-directing the flow of “trons” and over riding the… flux capacitor with… uh… photons on the inter-web there.
Look, the hacker’s got it all figured out.
He’s got a virus or an over ride but he can only up load it by a floppy disk or thumb drive directly into the system in the antichrist’s quadrupled, mega-impenetrable, high security head quarters building with is located, oddly enough, not in Rome or Jerusalem, but in the same city our hero’s live in.
This is where the van comes in.
They all go to the back loading dock and break open the cipher key pad and cross some wires and get in through the basement.

After this it’s free hand. Some of the group get captured, maybe killed, if the hacker turns out to double cross them there might be a second hacker in the cast, the “Wise Old Person” gets a speech, an alarm get tripped, there’s some shooting.
“The Big Tough Guy” is covering them. Anybody that was in a jail cell before is busted out.

Somewhere in here a “miracle” happens.

- Special effects fly around the bad guys, (SWAT team guys from U.N.I.T.E or O.N.E.), who have guns pointed at our heroes. The bad guys drop dead or scream and blow away or explode.)
- Wise Old Person along with a group of Christians gets thrown into a huge furnace that happens to be in the building. They don’t burn up. The bad guys on the outside do.
-All the bad guys get blinded.

“The Hero” and “The Female Hero” and “The Hacker” make it to…

- The main frame computer or
- The broadcast tower, or
- Power junction, or
- The bridge, or
- The control room

… and then they…

- Upload the virus
- Kill the power
- Take over the satellite
- Out boost the broadcast power of the antichrist
- Stop the launch (Right when the clock says, “007”. No… That’s James Bond.)

The result? The result will always be that on big screen TV’s on the roof tops instead of seeing the antichrist giving his speech everyone on the planet will see…

- Jack Van Impe
- T.D. Jakes
- John Hagee
- Anybody that gave at least $500,000 for the production of the film.

… preaching a summary of the gospel in 180 seconds.

Our hero’s get out of there amid the explosions and the flames and back to a quick get away in the van.
Cut away to the actor playing the antichrist, shot from over head, howling to the ceiling and shaking his fist, “I’ll get you Tribulation Commando Force Team 6!”

There it is.
Now you have seen every end times tribulation movie ever made.

Save yourself the time and effort.

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Look, folks… I’m all for things that excite people into studying Biblical prophecy.
The Left Behind books have gotten thousands asking the right questions and I praise God for that.

Thousands I said. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. If you’re one of them, good on ya.
But I’m skeptical the millions that have seen these movies have the right heart.

The Left Behind books are novels but the Bible is God’s Word. The goal of any type of fiction based on Biblical passages would, I hope, be to get people to go to the source. (I’m not against Christian fiction.)

But there are people… Sorry… But huge cross sections of people are dull, un-discerning, lazy in study and gullible.
I don’t see that it helps to make two dozen movies using the same plot line that may, or may not be, the reality of the scriptural “Great Tribulation”.

(Why do I have so many then? Cause they were in a bin for $5. I collect movies based on the Bible. I had no idea they would turn out to be the same movie all over again! It’s given me sage advice to give.)

These movies make it sound like the Bible backs up the idea of a “Christian Commando” team that “stick it to the antichrist” like a “holy A-Team” and get back to the hide out just in time for prayers and slaps on the back.
“It doesn’t look so bad.”

The Bible teaches that the Tribulation will see half the people in the world dead, (Rev 6:8; 9:18).
All the fish in the sea will die, (Rev 16:3). A quarter of the earth burned (Rev 8:7).
Satan will be allowed to prevail over the saints, (Rev 13:7).
Most of the believers in Christ during the Tribulation will die.

There comes a time when it has stopped being about displaying God’s sovereignty in knowing the beginning from the end and just making money off a genre.

I have personally seen the types this prolific industry has produced.
People who think it might be kinda cool being in the Tribulation and shooting a gun and “sticking it to the antichrist”.
I have literally read in forums people writing that they want to be here to fight the antichrist and die a martyr.
I have personally met a guy who wanted to stay behind so he could be a pastor to saints in the Tribulation.

At their best these films can make the Tribulation look no worse than the Great Depression.
At worst they can make it look like a bad Sylvester Stallone movie.

If the Great Tribulation is not taken dead seriously it can make for a lackadaisical attitude toward urgency in evangelism.

Prophecy of the last days is a pearl.
It displays God as sovereign and in control of all human history, (Isaiah 46:9-10).
He has it all worked out, have faith in Him. He will win.
Displaying it over and over like an “Oceans 3:16” movie is borderline casting this pearl before swine.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good Christian movie. I just think some people are bankrupt on imagination and can’t come up with any new ideas. They are a “One Trick Pony”.

On the other hand there are quality Christian movies out there.
“Time Changer” Starring Gavin MacLeod and directed by Rich Christiano.
(Pretty much anything directed by Rich Christiano.)
“The Imposter” Starring Kevin Max and Kerry Livgren. About a Christian rock singer whose life falls apart.
The TBS made movies about the Bible can be quite good. Some times. They all tend to stray from the Bible. (“The book was better.”)
But by and large most stay true to the doctrine.
The “Joseph” one was the best. The “Moses” one was the worst.
“Peter and Paul” Very good made for TV movie from back in the 70’s with Anthony Hopkins as Paul.
“Jesus Of Nazareth” made by NBC in the 70’s starring Robert Powell as Jesus.
I have all these on DVD. “The Passion Of The Christ”, “The Ten Commandments”, “The Bible: In The Beginning”, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, “King Of Kings” (I even have the old silent Cecil B. Demille version.).
I have “The Story Of Ruth” and “One Night With The King” (It’s about Esther.)

I’m not against Christian movies. I’m just kinda queasy from the same story coming round and round again.
I like the story. I just liked it best the first time. When it was called “A Thief In The Night”.
It should’ve been left alone.