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APOCALYPSE: CAUGHT IN THE EYE OF THE STORM (1998)
The power of stock footage compels you! So far as these fundy rapture movies go, compared to the leaden reverence of Left Behind and the stuffy mechanics of The Omega Code, the first half of Apocalypse is a howl. In screentime largely composed of stock footage masquerading as news reports (much of it would be utterly amazing footage, if it showed what it's claimed to show, like the destruction of buildings and the launch of nukes), we meet a reporter, who is Time magazine's Man Of The Year for being "The world's most trusted man". Amazingly, he does not work for Time magazine. He's reporting on a growing battle in the Valley of Armageddon in Israel, a battle which gets the undeniably badassed name of the Battle of Armageddon. Meanwhile, an old lady watching the news looks on and says, "Everything is falling into place." The news network here is called WNN, and it's broadcast worldwide on 70,000 giant electronic billboards in cities everywhere, apparently with sound. On public streets. You know how in Blade Runner, you knew just how much government had become the corporations' bitch when we saw that they were allowing blimps to play loud, echoey, booming-through-the-canyons-of-the-city advertisements to the deafened annoyance of everyone in town? At night? The entire world must be WNN's bitch, then. A delightfully overacting Israeli general describes an oncoming cloud of life-destroying chemical weaponry, every country in the world gets involved in the conflict (come on, does anybody seriously believe Iceland is going to bother? Vietnam? Chad, does Chad have forces there?), the nukes are launched, and a reporter stammers helplessly on live TV, "I think probably the best thing we could have done would be perhaps to go home, say goodbye, and perhaps..." and then poof! Rapture. Christians (which is to say, the right christians - no Mary-worshipping idolaters need apply) just disappear into thin air, leaving their clothes behind. Unlike in Left Behind, these clothes are left neatly folded - one can only speculate on which Bible verse lets us know that the saved would take such great care to make their disappearance so presentable. One lady who was driving had her shoes left tidily on top of her clothes on the car seat. Another one had time to write a rapture letter to her granddaughter! Even christian corpses vanish out of their graves, clothes folded by what one assumes are rotten christian zombie hands. Thirty minutes into the movie, the head of the UN declares himself god. So far, so fantastic - this movie is a lot of fun. After this, it gets pretty dry though; all those Bible verses read to us by Jack Van Impe (whose ministry produced the film) are a little preachy. I know, you approach a movie like this expecting it to be preachy, and The Omega Code wasn't too bad, but this one is a real eye-roller. Never mind the preaching though, how about the music? Christian pop has to be the most banal kind of music out there, and goddamn does that point ever get hammered home in this movie. There's maybe a dozen songs here and nothing makes me more glad to be a heathen than christian pop. How do you go from Beethoven's 9th to this? The last act collapses into that most masochistic fundy fantasy, in which christians become a persecuted minority subject to arrest and execution. Oh, those hard-done-by christians. After decades of being silenced by the jew media, mocked by the godless eggheads, and shackled by a liberal government that won't even let them put six-ton ten commandments monuments in public schools, christians now have to deal with being rounded up and hanged. Of course this victim fantasy is ludicrous, but this late in the movie it hasn't been all that funny in a while and the climax depends on the ol' "surreptitiously recorded footage of the villain incriminating himself is broadcast for all to see" trick, which needs a "Dick...you're fired!" kind of punch line to work. This doesn't have one. Shot on video, half comprised of stock footage and starring a cast of people who are certainly not film actors and probably aren't actors at all, Apocalypse nevertheless went on to inspire two or three bin-at-the-supermarket sequels which I suppose go on to portray the further hardships of christians in a world gone one-world-government. One of them has Mr. T! (c) Brian J. Wright 2009 BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |