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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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 4

Rayford Steele delivers his speech and Chris Smith delivers the gun.

Let’s set aside the content of Rayford’s speech — more or less, “magnets, how do they work? Therefore, God” — and just consider the fact of it and the result of it. This is a major difference between the movies and the books. In the books, Smith, Rayford’s co-pilot, kills himself. Book-Rayford barely notices, and then never gives his long-time colleague another thought. Here in the movies, though, Chris telephones Rayford for help and Rayford offers that help.

So here in the movies, unlike in the books, Chris is still alive.

That highlights the vast difference between book-Rayford, as written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and movie-Rayford, as portrayed by Brad Johnson. If book-Chris had thought of making a desperate final phone call, it wouldn’t have been to book-Rayford, because he would never have come to help. Movie-Chris made that phone call because he knew that movie-Rayford would come. That’s a big change, not just for Chris, but for the reader/viewer.

Back at the church, everybody’s gone. Bruce Barnes delivered his big altar call less than an hour ago, but all those people who came forward — brand-new believers full of questions and in need of guidance — were apparently quickly shooed away so that Bruce, Chloe and Buck could have an inner-circle Tribulation Force meeting.

Cam-Cam is worked up over the Two Witnesses story, announcing what he regards as an innovative and ingeniously sneaky plan. He’s a TV reporter — he could report on the witnesses on TV! Bruce agrees this is deviously brilliant.

Rayford arrives and we come to another welcome change in the story. Tribulation Force, the novel, bogged down for hundreds of pages in the middle with Rayford and Buck insisting for several chapters that they would never, ever, under any circumstances accept a job working for Nicolae Carpathia, each turning away from the jobs being thrust at them from every side. (“Bogged down” is a relative term. It’s not as though this detracted from the otherwise fast-paced action of the plot — which was meandering and uneventful before and after this interlude. But that part of the book seemed even slower and more pointless than the sluggish, meaningless padding that surrounded it.)

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 3

“When your fiancé comes, he can stay here too,” Cam-Cam tells flirty not-Alice as she settles in to his apartment, and hundreds of conservative youth pastors sigh in relief as the movie crosses back into mostly acceptable territory.

It’s clear now how the movie’s version of the book’s romantic-confusion subplot will unfold, with Chloe jumping to the wrong conclusion about Cam-Cam and not-Alice and bursting into silly girl-tears. It’s just so much more romantic when you make them cry.

The phone rings — this is a Left Behind movie, after all — and it’s Steve Plank, politely reminding Buck to schedule an appointment with Planetary Potentate Carpathia. The filmmakers try their hardest to make this seem spooky and menacing, since Buck never gave Steve his home number. In the first movie, we saw Nicolae divvy up the world among 10 princes, murder two people in cold blood, and then brainwash a room filled with witnesses, so I’m not sure that tracking down an unlisted phone number really adds much to our sense of him as a powerfully menacing evil presence.

(On the scale of Creepy Movie Phone Calls, I’d score calling an unlisted home number as about a 3, with “Because I want to know who I’m looking at” a 7, “It’s coming from inside the house!” an 8, and realizing the phone isn’t plugged in a 9. A 10, of course, would be any call from Sallie Mae.)

We cut back to Rayford standing in front of New Hope Village Church. It’s nighttime, but we don’t know if this is the same night or the next night. The church we see through the open door behind Rayford isn’t the same church we see once they get inside, which, in a way, is creepier than Steve’s phone call.

“Hey Chris,” Rayford says, greeting his co-pilot from the first movie. Movie-Rayford seems to have more friends than book-Rayford does.

Inside the church, the pews are neatly arranged and filled with curious visitors as Bruce Barnes stands up front ‘splaining to them all about Bible prophecy. Bruce says …

Wait a second. Rewind. Suddenly I’m remembering a scene from the segment we looked at last week. It was only about 30 seconds long and I failed to discuss it then. I think I had pushed it out of my brain because: A) it makes very little sense, and B) it seemed to be included only to reinforce to us that Chloe/women is/are utterly useless.

That scene seemed to take place in New Hope’s sanctuary, but the pews had been removed, replaced with cots and floor-lamps scattered about the room. Wounded people of indeterminate origin and identity lay in the cots, with Bruce and some other people puttering about reading Bibles and/or administering first aid.

It was the sort of scene one would expect to see in the chaotic immediate aftermath of a major earthquake or similar disaster, but what that disaster was here in this movie was never explained. We know it wasn’t the Rapture and the crashes and calamities that came with that, because that was more than a week ago in our story and we’ve seen dozens of scenes showing us that life is back to normal from that. (Completely back to normal, strangely, with the missing children now regarded as old news.)

So I guess this church-based little MASH unit is in response to the random violence and criminality that the movie erratically suggests characterizes the post-Rapture world. And seen from one angle, that’s a nice corrective to what we read in the book. It shows Bruce and the other new believers at New Hope putting their faith into action in a way that none of the believers in the book ever do. And it provides Bruce and Chloe with more of an active role than they have in the book, where they both spend months and months locked away studying Bible prophecy lore that any semi-literate person could master in a day or two.

But how are we to explain the way this emergency field hospital suddenly appears in the church at sundown before disappearing the next morning? Where are all those patients now? Did Bruce and those firefighters finally come to their senses and move this emergency overflow clinic to the newly available elementary school? Or have that poor burn victim and the others been stashed away in some quiet Sunday school room so that Bruce can use the sanctuary for his prophecy lecture the next night?

And at a more basic level, the existence of those firefighters contradicts the whole premise of the scene. The idea of all that post-Rapture criminality and violence is that once the salt and light of real, true Christians are removed from this world, everyone left behind will be irredeemably wicked. As it was in the days of Noah, everyone will do what is right in their own eyes, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc.

So explain those firefighters. They weren’t raptured, so we have to count them among the wicked. Yet they don’t seem wicked. They seem like, well, like firefighters — doing exhausting, back-breaking, dangerous work for paychecks that barely keep them in the middle class. That would seem to indicate the possibility of altruistic and virtuous behavior among the unregenerate unsaved — and if that’s the case, then what’s with all the sirens and chaos and Escape From New York streetscenes?

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Left Behind II: Tribulation Force; part 1.

Two things must be said at the outset.

1. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force is a bad movie.

2. This movie is far better than the book.

Both of those truths are demonstrated in the opening scenes of this film video.

Director Bill Corcoran begins by slowly panning over a bulletin board covered in fliers pleading for information about missing people. Corcoran oddly emphasizes the text of these posters, rather than the faces in the photographs, and there’s a uniformity to the size and design of all the posters, making it seem more like they were done hastily by a single lazy and uninspired production assistant rather than like they’re the handiwork of dozens of disparate, desperate people. And yet the image itself, evoking the sight of such desperate message boards in the aftermath of 9/11 and other tragedies, and the accompanying sounds of children laughing and playing, does more to suggest the human toll of the Event — the Rapture that began this serialized story — than anything Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye ever attempted in the novel.

As this scene inexplicably dissolves into a fireball, we hear Kirk Cameron’s voice, as Cameron “Buck” Williams, providing an expository news summary from the set of the “Global News Network.”

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Tribulation Force, pp. 445-450

Stymied by traffic jams and nuclear war, our heroes will be forced to hike half a mile on foot to reach the just-bombed hospital where their friend Bruce Barnes was lying in a coma.

“I’m going,” Rayford said.

“Me too,” Buck said.

“We’re all going,” Chloe insisted, but Rayford held up a hand.

Silly little girl, this is a man’s job.

“We’re not all going. It’s going to be hard enough for one of us to get past security. Buck or I will have a better chance because we have Global Community identification.”

What does “get past security” mean here? Is this part of the military response to the insurgency? Or are military checkpoints some previously unmentioned aspect of life in Nicolae Carpathia’s “Global Community”?

“I think one of us with an ID should go, and the other should stay with the wives. We all have to be with someone who can get past the red tape if necessary.”

“I want to go,” Buck said, “but you make the call.”

“Stay and make sure the car is positioned so we can get out of here and get to Mount Prospect. If I’m not back in half an hour, take the risk and come looking for me.”

Those GC ID cards are a nifty perk of being top-level employees of the Antichrist, ensuring that Rayford and Buck can always “get past the red tape.” (That totalitarian police state can be such a nuisance.) But you know what’s an even sweeter benefit from their jobs working for Nicolae? Not having to do them. We discussed Buck’s journalistic negligence last week, but Rayford is also remarkably unconcerned with having to check in with his boss. He’s in charge of Nicolae’s plane. Nicolae’s plane is being targeted for attack by insurgents. But he’s in no hurry to call the office.

“Daddy, if Bruce is any better, try to bring him with you.”

“Don’t worry, Chloe,” Rayford said. “I’m ahead of you.”

I think he’s a bit ahead of himself as well. Last he heard, Bruce was in a coma. It’s not clear, then, just how Rayford — alone and on foot — is planning on bringing Bruce back.

Buck, meanwhile, is chafing at not going along with his father-in-law. Just staying back and waiting is fine for “the wives,” but not for a manly person of action like himself. And, yes, Buck actually thinks of himself in exactly those words, “person of action”:

As soon as Rayford had jogged through the muddy weeds and out of sight, Buck regretted agreeing to stay behind. He had always been a person of action, and as he watched shell-shocked citizens milling about and commiserating, he could hardly stand still.

Reading that description of Buck Williams here — “a person of action” — makes me wonder if Jerry Jenkins remembers anything at all of what he typed in the previous 446 pages of Tribulation Force, or in all of the previous volume. In those hundreds of pages, the only evidence we’ve ever seen that Buck Williams is a “person of action” is from several scenes like this one, in which Buck sits passive and inert, but stews over how hard it is for him to do so because he’s “a person of action.”

Throughout these books, every time Buck fails or refuses or chooses not to act he mutters about how this angers him, because deep-down he knows himself to be a man of action. And the converse is also true: Every time we hear Buck congratulating himself for being a manly man of action, we see him failing or refusing or choosing not to act.

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Tribulation Force, pp. 443-445

After crushing insurrectionists in several locations with deadly force, the “potentate” of the one-world government addresses the world via radio:

“Loyal citizens of the Global Community,” came the voice of Carpathia, “I come to you today with a broken heart, unable to tell you even from where I speak. For more than a year we have worked to draw this Global Community together under a banner of peace and harmony. Today, unfortunately, we have been reminded again that there are still those among us who would pull us apart.”

Here again we encounter the all-sheep-are-wolves problem. I fairly sure that we’re meant to be appalled by this talk of “peace and harmony” from the man who just obliterated Washington, D.C. And I’m guessing that the next paragraph is meant to underscore Nicolae’s hypocrisy:

“It is no secret that I am, always have been, and always will be, a pacifist. I do not believe in war. I do not believe in weaponry. I do not believe in bloodshed. On the other hand, I feel responsible for you, my brother or my sister in this global village.”

In any other book, I’d be certain that this was meant as a heavy-handed display of that hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is only possible when the principle being violated is a legitimate one, and in the world of Left Behind it has been firmly established that there is no such thing as pacifism. We can’t read this as a criticism of Nicolae’s phony pacifism, because in the universe of these books, all pacifists are phonies.

I call this the all-sheep-are-wolves problem because that seems to describe how the authors arrived at this conclusion. The Antichrist, they believe, will rise to power “under a banner of peace and harmony,” but he will actually be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, using such talk to disguise his true purpose of global tyranny. Thus, for students of Tim LaHaye’s school of “Bible prophecy,” any leader who speaks of peace and harmony is a potential Antichrist. LaHaye urges his disciples to follow his example by presuming that anyone who speaks in such terms should be presumed guilty until proven innocent — proof of innocence, in this case, coming only when the person in question dies without having created a one-world government and declaring himself the Antichrist. Barring such proof, treat every apparent sheep as a wolf.

Thus after more than 800 pages of the authors insisting that pacifism is always a sham and an illusion, we can’t really be disillusioned by Nicolae’s sham pacifism.

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