Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist: pp. 1-4

As Book 3 of this series begins, we pick up where we left off at the end of the second book. The action begins here just moments after that book stopped, with our heroes stuck in traffic in a rental car near Chicago, struggling to come to grips with the outbreak of war and the death of Bruce Barnes.

“Action” is not a word that’s often called for in discussing these books. Tribulation Force was a sluggish slog in which surprisingly little actually happened. That was a function, in part, of Tim LaHaye’s “Bible prophecy” outline.

Like all premillennial dispensationalists, LaHaye believes that the End Times begin with the Rapture, in which all Christians (but only the real, true Christians) will be plucked up to Heaven in the twinkling of an eye. That’s followed by the Great Tribulation — the final seven years in the history of the universe, during which God’s wrath is poured out on creation in an escalating series of plagues, seals, trumpets and bowls of divine destruction.

This seems like it ought to provide an eventful context for some thrilling storytelling, except that LaHaye’s meticulously calibrated itinerary for those seven years of Tribulation involves a lot of down time.

See, there’s quite a bit of competition in the “Bible prophecy” business. Scores of authors and prophecy “scholars” are vying for the same table space from which to sell their books and DVDs in the lobbies of churches hosting prophecy conferences. And all of these experts cranking out all of these products are working from the same basic outline, each claiming to be providing nothing more than a plain, common-sense summary of a “literal” reading of the Bible. (The expertise of such experts involves the ability to summarize a literal reading of the 20 pages of Revelation in a 200-page book.)

To compete for market share, then, these experts must carve out their own niche, each injecting their own quirks and idiosyncrasies into the basic scheme of PMD prophecy. This allows them to denounce one another as false prophets who lead good people astray — meaning, in other words, “Buy my books, not theirs.” Arcane controversies thus become the key to marking one’s “Bible prophecy” product.

Fierce battles erupt between those like LaHaye who say the Antichrist’s peace treaty with Israel occurs at the outset of the Tribulation and those who insist that, no, it clearly occurs at the midpoint, three and a half years in. This dispute benefits both sides by reinforcing the idea that these two options are the only two options, thus distracting the audience/market from noticing that the Bible doesn’t “literally” say anything about a Great Tribulation or a peace treaty between the Antichrist and Israel.

The problem here, for us as readers of this series, is that LaHaye’s particular Tribulation schedule includes long stretches of nothing-much in between the Rapture and all the cool Michael Bay portions of the apocalypse. Overcoming this problem was a difficult task for Jerry Jenkins, whose job it was to bring LaHaye’s outline to life on the page.

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 9

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 10

The fire-breathing prophets and flaming stuntmen marked the dramatic highpoint of our film. The big conflict is now behind us and Cam-Cam’s scheme is in place.

Or is it? Director Bill Corcoran only has one source of tension left to milk for suspense here at the end of his movie –we don’t yet know for sure whether the two magicians were able to fix the brainwashed rabbi.

So as everyone prepares to watch Tsion Ben-Judah’s Big Messiah Announcement on TV, no one — the heroes, the villain or the viewers — can be sure what he will say. Will he, as the Antichrist hopes, declare Nicolae Carpathia to be the Jewish Messiah? Or will he, as the Trib Forcers hope, instead shock the world by revealing to them the great secret that there are these people called “Christ-ians” who believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah?

Nearly everyone watching this movie will have already read the book, so they know what Ben-Judah says in that story. But the movie has diverged from that story enough that something else might happen here. Plus, this is supposed to be the “Great Tribulation” — a period in which, according to the “Bible prophecies” of Tim LaHaye, the Antichrist rules the world with absolute power. Nicolae is supposed to be in the middle of an unbroken seven-year winning streak, so shouldn’t we expect him to triumph here?

But then again, watching the Antichrist triumph isn’t really what the target audience wants from this movie. And its star, former teen idol Kirk Cameron, seems too concerned that his character be shown to be a role model for him to tolerate anything other than his character’s success. So there’s not a whole lot of suspense to be had here. For all that Corcoran wants us on the edges of our seats, wondering what Ben-Judah is going to say, we already know how this will turn out. The Christians will be declared right and righteous and Cam-Cam will boldly triumph over the Antichrist and the forces that are “detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”

In the sanctuary of New Hope Village Church, still in hospital mode, Chloe and Ivy weep and hug after witnessing the just-in-time deathbed salvation of Burn-Victim Guy. We can already see that Ivy is beginning to have the feelings in her heart that will make her want to believe in choosing faith (or whatever it was that Chloe said about how salvation works in the universe of this movie).

The next day, Nicolae Carpathia is holding a press conference in front of a painting of Jerusalem. The presser is crowded, with a huge throng of journalists from all over the world clamoring to record every word he says.

This seems unnecessary. Nicolae is the head of the one-world government and of the one-world media. These reporters all work for him now and his global media monopoly ought to bring some economies of scale. The OWM doesn’t need to send everybody to a press conference. And Nicolae doesn’t need to hold press conferences. He could just send a memo to his media minions, ordering them to “Print the following.”

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 8

Donald W. Thompson gave me nightmares.

I grew up in the American evangelical Christian subculture in the 1970s and 1980s, so it’s impossible for me to watch a movie like Left Behind II: Tribulation Force without thinking of Thompson’s earlier End Times movies. Those movies scared the Hell out of me, which is exactly the effect Thompson wanted.

If you’ve ever seen A Thief in the Night or its sequels, then you know they weren’t good movies. The dialogue was unnatural and the cast of nonprofessional actors had little idea of what they were doing. But Thompson made the most of his very limited resources and managed to create some haunting images that stick with you after better movies are forgotten.

The story was based on Hal Lindsey’s phenomenally popular books of “Bible prophecy,” so it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But the movies were compelling because Thompson had a central theme, a driving concern that shaped every scene in his movies: Get saved now, before it’s too late, or this will happen to you.

That’s a crudely and cruelly manipulative message. It’s wrong-headed, theologically misguided and ethically dubious to think that people can or should be scared into Heaven. But my point here is that Thompson desperately wanted people to go to Heaven and not to Hell. As awful as his pursuit of that agenda was, it was still, at a basic level, an expression of his concern for others. He believed they needed saving and he urgently wanted them to get saved.

One of the most striking things to me about the first two books of the Left Behind series was the lack of such urgent concern from Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. This is a huge departure from Lindsey and Thompson and all the earlier popularizers of premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy.” The driving theme of Left Behind and Tribulation Force is not ” Get saved now, before it’s too late, or this will happen to you,” but rather, “We’re saved, and those people didn’t listen to us, so they deserve this to happen to them.”

The section of Left Behind II: Tribulation Force that we’re looking at this week includes some painfully awkward, clumsily didactic scenes presenting the filmmakers approximation of the Plan of Salvation and demonstrating what they believe to be the necessary response to that message. This is all pretty excruciating to watch, but it’s also another illustration of my main evaluation of this movie: It’s awful, but it’s much better than the book. The explicit evangelism of the movie may be bumbling, but its infinitely preferable to the triumphalism of the books’ abominable fancy.

Buck Williams is back in his hotel room, getting ready for his big meeting with the Two Witnesses. He looks at the photo-booth pictures he took with Chloe. The photo in the shirt pocket is standard movie-shorthand for reminding viewers that the hero is thinking of loved ones back home. But just in case viewers don’t understand that shorthand, director Bill Corcoran underlines the point in the next scene by having Buck talk to Chloe on the phone, retelling us what we’d just been shown. But at least it’s a photo in Buck’s shirt pocket and not a cookie.

Buck’s plan involves getting Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah to the magicians at the Western Wall, which is cordoned off by armed soldiers.

“I still don’t know how we’re going to get to the Wailing Wall,” he says to Rayford.

“God got us this far, he’ll take us the rest of the way,” Rayford says.

That’s the plan: Jesus Magic. Sometimes you just have to step out on faith and depend on God to provide a miraculous solution, like, say, throwing yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple, for it is written, “He will command his angels … they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”

Our heroes are about to spring into action, carrying out their still-fuzzy-on-the-details plan. So first it’s time to pray.

“Let’s pray,” Cam-Cam says abruptly, and the scene that follows is awkward and unnatural. Cam-Cam is earnest and uncomfortably intimate. Brad Johnson seems unnerved and uncertain what to do with his hands. The scene is, in other words, a remarkably realistic portrayal that perfectly captures what this common expression of evangelical piety is like in real life.

“Amen,” Cam-Cam says at the end.

“Amen,” Johnson echoes, looking enormously relieved.

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 7

We’ve arrived at the fork in the road.

Up until now we’ve been watching an adaptation of Tribulation Force, the novel. The characters on the screen are taken from that book, and what we’ve seen thus far has mostly been a re-enactment of scenes originally written there by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. As in any adaptation, those scenes have been tweaked and streamlined, with a few minor departures — Chris Smith is alive, Ivy substitutes for Spiky Alice, etc. — but the story the filmmakers have been telling up to this point has been mostly the same as the one in the book.

That changes here. The rest of this movie tells a different story. It’s still not a good story, but it’s a better story than what we found in the book.

This was a bold move for the filmmakers, one that risks alienating the fan-base. That risk is always present whenever a popular book is adapted for the screen, but it was especially true in the case of this project. This is a direct-to-DVD version of a book that sold tens of millions of copies. More people read that book that are likely to ever see this movie, and the target audience for this movie consists almost entirely of people who already read the book. So changing the story was a big risk.

But that big change in the story was necessary. The book’s fans may have wanted a strictly faithful adaptation of Tribulation Force, but that wasn’t an option. The story of the novel isn’t filmable because the novel doesn’t really tell a story.

The characters in the novel don’t do anything. Some things happen to them, or near them, or around them, but the events that unfold in the book do not occur because of decisions or actions made by the main characters. The heroes of the Trib Force are passive bystanders. Even the villain, Nicolae Carpathia, spends the first 400 pages of the book as an inert presence whose evil is constantly asserted, but not demonstrated.

When Jenkins abruptly skips forward in time — “Eighteen months later” — one suspects it’s partly due to his recognition of readers’ increasing boredom, and partly due to his being bored himself with the book’s belabored uneventfulness.

Again, though, this can’t be blamed entirely on Jenkins. His task was to follow the precise timetable of LaHaye’s prophetic scheme, and the truth is that in LaHaye’s version of the “Great Tribulation,” the first year or so of that seven-year period isn’t that bad. LaHaye’s imagined Antichrist starts out as more of a benign bureaucrat than a tyrannical monster. And the nasty displays of divine wrath don’t get started until much later, so a novel portraying the early portion of the Tribulation was bound to be kind of dull.

Plus, more skeptically, I think the authors were milking the runaway success of the first book. Their initial idea of a trilogy was getting padded out into a 12-book series (ultimately even longer) and Tribulation Force was stuffed with that padding. The time-skip, also, allowed the authors to gloss over the parts of LaHaye’s prophecy that they weren’t able to explain or describe as something that might happen in reality. One-world currency, one-world religion, one-world language? How? Why? By skipping ahead to where such things could be portrayed as a fait accompli, the authors never have to answer those questions.

All of which makes for a book that defies adaptation into a movie. You can’t make a 90-minute movie in which the hero and the villains tread water for the first 80 minutes before you skip ahead a year and a half to when, in the final 10 minutes, the villain destroys London and Washington while the heroes get stuck in traffic. No one wants to see that movie.

So what if, instead, the villain actually does something villainous? And what if, instead, the heroes tried to stop him? That would give you an actual story for your movie — a better story but also, necessarily, a very different story.

And so here we arrive at the point where our heroes discover that movie-Nicolae, unlike book-Nicolae, is planning something. And here, unlike in the book, those heroes decide to try to foil his plan.

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 6

Morning dawns at New Hope Village Church and the establishing shot reminds us of the wanton chaos of a world unleavened by the civilizing presence of real, true Christians.

Trash, furniture and yet more bicycles are strewn across the lawn of the church. (What is it with abandoned bicycles lying all over everywhere in this movie? I’m the sort of liberal Christian that this story insists will be among those left behind, but I’ve never been secretly inclined to toss bicycles about the sidewalk or onto the the lawns of fundamentalist churches. I don’t know for sure how I’d respond if I awoke tomorrow to learn that every RTC had been whisked away by the Rapture, but I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be thinking, “At last, those annoying Christians are finally gone! Now I can finally start scattering bicycles everywhere, bwa-ha-ha-ha!“)

A toppled newspaper box bears a headline from the day of the Event, suggesting that this disarray has been there, untouched, for more than a week. Why hasn’t Bruce arranged to have this cleaned up by now? I appreciate that the Tribulation Force regards itself as having a vitally important mission — “nothing less than to stand and fight the enemies of God during the seven most chaotic years the planet will ever see,” as the back cover of the book says. But that’s no excuse for allowing such a mess to fester on the lawn of their headquarters. Seriously, the four of them could have this cleaned up in less than an hour. The earthquakes, rivers of blood, fiery hail and demon locusts will be enough of a challenge on their own without compounding the problem by letting trash pile up on the church lawn.

Inside the church, the Trib Force’s executive committee of the whole is having yet another discussion about Buck’s plan to interview the Two Witnesses in Jerusalem. Whenever we see the four of them gathered together like this we realize yet again that we’re seeing three actors and a celebrity. Kirk Cameron has a different agenda here than the others have and it takes us out of the story. Brad Johnson, Clarence Gilyard and Janaya Stephens are trying to show us a story. Cameron is trying to preach us a sermon. He seems perpetually on the verge of turning to the camera to say, “I’m Kirk Cameron, and I approve this message.”

One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare in Love repeats an old theater joke. The actor cast to play the nurse in what will become Romeo and Juliet is asked what the play is about. “It’s about this nurse …” he says. That sums up the difference between what Cameron and Johnson are doing in this movie. If you asked Johnson what the movie was about, he’d have told you that it was about a pilot humbled by the sudden loss of his wife and son. If you asked Kirk Cameron what the movie was about, he’d tell you what he thinks the Bible says about the End Times and the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. He would never say, “It’s about this reporter …,” and so when we see him there on the screen we never see that reporter.

“The Antichrist has powers we may not even be able to comprehend,” Bruce warns.

It’s an apt warning, because the Antichrist of this movie is, indeed, very hard to comprehend. Nicolae Carpathia just doesn’t make much sense as a character.

We’re told who Nicolae is, or at least what he is, but we can’t reconcile that with what we see him doing. What he does conflicts with what he wants. It conflicts with what he’s supposed to want given that he’s the Antichrist. But then that would probably be true no matter what he did, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone wanting what he wants. Why would the Antichrist want to be the Antichrist? Why would he agree to that? And specifically, why would this Antichrist agree to be the Antichrist?

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye never address that in the books except by authorial fiat. They just assert that Nicolae wants bad things because he’s a bad person and that he wants arbitrarily strange things because that’s what the prophecies say he will want. That’s the Jenkins Method: Tell, don’t show. But that’s not an option on the screen. In a movie everything has to be shown, and that presents a big problem for director Bill Corcoran, screenwriters John Patus and Paul Lalonde, and most of all for actor Gordon Currie. Each struggles with the impossibility of conveying who Nicolae is as a person, what he wants, how what he does relates to what he wants, and why it is that anyone might possibly want or do any of what he wants and does.

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 5

Earlier, in a faithful adaptation of a scene from the book, the filmmakers were no more successful than Jerry Jenkins had been in portraying a phone call to an unlisted number as a sign of the Antichrist’s terrifying power. In this next scene, director Bill Corcoran strays from the book significantly in an attempt to increase the creepy-Antichrist factor.

In the movie, it seems, Nicolae Carpathia can control elevators.

Cam-Cam presses the button for the ground floor and instead the elevator heads up — ignoring whatever buttons he presses to take him to the roof. There the door opens and two large men greet Buck by name, escorting him to where Nicolae is waiting.

That’s a far better entrance than any Nicolae makes in the book, and the rest of this scene is also an immense improvement over the material its adapted from. (Yes, that’s a low threshold, but still.) Corcoran condenses the action, which allows it to seem like action, rather than like the several chapters of treading water he squeezes down into this one scene. In the novel there were several more phone calls, leading up to Nicolae’s arranging for Buck to fly to New York for a meeting. Jenkins recounted every detail of that flight in excruciating detail before belatedly trying to inject some suspense into the story by having Buck fear that the limo driver was a hired assassin. That all took several dreadful chapters to unfold, none of which contributed to the readers’ sense of Nicolae’s menace.

Here, too, we can gratefully appreciate Corcoran’s wise decision to do away with the agonizingly drawn-out business in which Buck and Rayford wasted a hundred pages insisting that they would never, ever take a job working for Nicolae. In the film, both characters quickly decided not just to accept such jobs, but to pursue them. That saves us lots of time and makes the heroes appear more decisive. Oddly, though, in this scene it means that Buck and Nicolae both want the same thing.

Corcoran’s biggest advantage in this scene is that he has Gordon Currie playing Nicolae. Currie doesn’t seem interested in portraying the “young Robert Redford” described in the novel. He seems to be shooting more for a young Christopher Lee or a young Bela Lugosi. He attacks the part with an enthusiastic B-movie turn that sometimes borders on camp (and sometimes sets up camp in camp).

In this scene, Currie is actually a bit more restrained, playing up the persuasive, idealistic side of the character rather than the mustache-twirling, cackling villain he unleashes elsewhere.

The conversation between Buck and Nicolae diverges quite a bit from the book. It’s a condensation of the longer, less-focused discussion there, incorporating much of what both characters should have said.

Nicolae greets Buck and seems to quiz him to see if he remembers witnessing the double-homicide in the last film. Cam-Cam is awkward and evasive and wholly unconvincing.

This is why that name “Cam-Cam” is invaluable here in discussing Kirk Cameron’s portrayal of Cameron “Buck” Williams. When you watch this scene you’re aware that you’re not just watching Cameron Williams acting awkward, but that you’re watching Kirk Cameron acting awkwardly and you’re not sure where one stops and the other begins. (Somebody there on the roof isn’t sure what to say, how to say it, or what to do with his hands.)

Inexplicably satisfied by Buck’s non-responses, Nicolae moves on to his big proposal. He wants to hire Buck to work for him after the takeover of all major media by the U.N.’s new one-world government.

This proposal is indefensible, but — unlike in the book — both characters seem to realize that. “A free press is the cornerstone of a free world,” Cam-Cam says, nobly. And then he even explains why, saying that government control of the press means “leadership without accountability.”

His full line, unfortunately, is “Leadership without accountability does not sound very compelling” — the latter half of which, frankly, does not sound very compelling, and sounds even less compelling as delivered by Cam-Cam. (I’m picturing Cam-Cam in colonial Lexington: “Taxation without representation … does not sound very compelling.”)

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