Apparently, there was another cinematic installment of the Left Behind series that debuted in January of 2023 directed and starring Kevin Sorbo that grossed a quiet $4 million at the box office. Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist functions as a sequel to the 2014 film starring Nicolas Cage, only that the main cast has been replaced. Sorbo stars as Ray Steele and is the director of the film. Entering the film with only a cursory knowledge of the Left Behind series, this movie ultimately falls into the various clichés of Christian filmmaking while failing to convey the gravity of the eschatological events, perhaps because it is shackled by its underlying source material and poor acting performances.
Plot Synopsis
The movie takes place six months after the rapture from the 2014 movie, albeit set in modern times. Rayford Steele (Sorbo) is still mourning the loss of his wife and son while his daughter Chloe is still alive and lives with him. Cameron “Buck” Williams is the “Tucker Carlson” figure at the Fox News equivalent in the movie. The first act of the movie recaps the ongoing fears surrounding the “Vanishing” as it was called, with the global powers seeking to instill fear that another vanishing event will occur, something Buck disputes on the air. Buck wants to know more about the data that is being used to predict another vanishing event, which leads back to Jonathan Stonagal’s company.
To solve the global crisis, Stonagal seeks to globalize the financial system through Eden Pay. Buck learns through conspiracy theorist Professor Dirk that Eden Pay’s code contains far more than a payment system since it is the mark of the beast. At the same time, there is a second “vanishing” that occurs which the government and media promote. The event is believed despite no confirmed disappearances. Buck loses his job but somehow continues to act in his media capacity as if he were not terminated, which results in the death of Dirk via a bomb and a pursuit to retrieve Dirk’s laptop that contains the pertinent information on Eden Pay. Buck speaks with Israeli scientist Chaim Rosenzweig, who developed Eden Pay but did not intend for it to contain the biometric social credit system. In the movie, Israel and Romania are the two holdouts for the new world order, with Rosenzweig being the Israeli ambassador. The seven-year peace with Israel is on the verge of being achieved with the promise of a $400 million temple being built right beside the Dome of the Rock so that Jews and Muslims can worship beside one another.
Throughout the movie, Steele functions as the audience’s rapture theology lesson where he comes to saving faith with Bruce Barnes, a pastor left behind. After being assaulted on the street, Chloe too comes to saving faith during the course of the film. The film has her digging a grave to find a corpse that has vanished, signifying the rapture of the dead, causing her to believe.
During the UN meeting, Buck exposes Stonagal and the Eden pay system as a nefarious plot. The movie ends with Nicolae Carpathia betraying Stonagal by shooting him. Carpathia is revealed to be the antichrist and deceives the non-Christians present to believe it was the work of an assassin. The movie ends with a video altar call by Buck Willaims who comes to faith.
Analysis
The movie is clearly low budget in both quality and acting performances. The world feels empty rather than chaotic, and the scenes involving the UN lack the diplomatic ambiance that would be expected for a globalist function. This is due to budget constraints and poor set design. Much of the acting is rather wooden and one-dimensional throughout the film. Amongst the worst was the Romanian Nicolae Carpathia who was especially unconvincing as a charismatic Eastern European leader without the proper accent. Throughout the movie, the dialogue is both cheesy and ham-fisted, with repeated cringeworthy conversion scenes. Sorbo’s character even participates in a sinner’s prayer altar call, while each individual character has their own conversion dialogue. By the end, Steele becomes an expert on rapture theology in a matter of days, something that took the church 1800 years to discover.
The movie’s plot is rather limited in that it attempts to set up Stonagal as the antichrist only for a confusing “twist” whereby Carpathia deceives the room, which is conveyed by Sorbo choosing to alter the coloring of the scene. This is either a stylistically poor choice or the constraints of portraying the source material, but it is depicted as a miracle. Having Bruce Barnes’s character function as a narrator for the movie removes the serious tone a movie about the end-times should possess.
Reactive Social Commentary
Having never read the Left Behind series, the source material appears to shackle the movie. Where the movie does well is that it can utilize the recent events into the storyline, which includes references to Covid, the Great Reset, Davos, and the “trust the science” mentality. There is even a quip about a vaccine against vanishings that Buck makes early in the movie. Even the premise of the government faking a second vanishing was a good idea. The social commentary is poignant, but reactive instead of proactive.
For example, Mr. Robot portrays a world in which hackers engineer a cyber-attack against E-Corp, resulting in financial chaos and the introduction of E-coin, a crypto alternative, to stabilize the financial system. In 2016, the introduction of Ecoin as a centralized cryptocurrency alternative to the US Dollar was a revolutionary idea, but not so much in 2023. In the same way, Left Behind is reacting to the culture, not proactive in its commentary. The movie fails to account for how depraved a post-rapture world would become, failing to see beyond the obvious financial woes and criminality. What about rampant sexual degeneracy being worse? A post-rapture world should be seen as having widespread abortion, legalized prostitution, forced transgenderism, and whatever else is being prevented by the white evangelical bulwark of moral sanity. Even with an invisible church, 2023 is more depraved than the source material could have imagined.
Conclusion
Overall, the film is not one to be recommended and contains all the terrible tropes of Christian filmmaking. 2023 has been a good year for Christian films, with Big George Foreman, Nefarious, and Jesus Revolution all being decent, respectable movies with Christian messaging. In the end, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist is just another installment in a franchise that has peaked in interest without really any box office success. A movie about premillennial eschatology could be interesting, but perhaps the Left Behind series should be left behind.
