LEFT BEHIND II: TRIBULATION FORCE

TRIBULATION FORCE, the first movie sequel to the best-selling LEFT BEHIND series, is now out on video. It will be released in many movie theaters early next year.

Once again, Kirk Cameron plays globetrotting TV journalist Buck Williams, who fears the rise of the so-called Antichrist. Buck, and his friends Ray Steele and Rev. Bruce Barnes, want to expose the Antichrist, a man named Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia has taken over the United Nations after millions of Christians have been taken away by the Lord Jesus Christ in the Pre-Tribulation Rapture.

Buck begins a tentative romance with Ray’s daughter, Chloe, while Ray tries to deal with the rapture to heaven of his wife and his son. Meanwhile, Pastor Barnes has started church services and opened a makeshift health clinic to deal with all the destruction and violence that has broken out due to the sudden disappearance of all the Christians.

Carpathia plans to lure Buck into taping the head rabbi in Jerusalem declaring Carpathia to be the Messiah, but two Christian prophets appear at the Wailing Wall with a Gospel message. Buck and his friends hatch a dangerous plot to use Carpathia’s plan so they can discredit the dastardly villain.

LEFT BEHIND II: TRIBULATION FORCE deals with the aftermath of the post-rapture chaos and gets much more personal with its characters. For example, the first half of the movie often focuses on the personal lives of the characters and the people they encounter, such as the budding romance between Chloe and Buck. Regrettably, these scenes sometimes slow down the first half and get in the way of the suspense thriller and apocalyptic aspects of the struggles with the Antichrist, which come across as kind of silly, absurd and disjointed at times. It might have helped if the movie had introduced the two prophets at the Wailing Wall and Carpathia’s efforts to stifle their message earlier during the first half, to set the stage for the dramatic ending in the second half. A stronger storyline and higher production values would improve the movie’s cinematic qualities and the acting performances. The filmmakers seem to be afraid to add fresh ideas to the original novel.

Of course, not all Christian theologians and historians, and their followers, accept LEFT BEHIND’s dispensational, pre-millennial interpretation of biblical prophecy. Thus, some Christian viewers might find the story and its end-times scenario a bit unbelievable and unnecessarily pessimistic.

There are, however, some powerful salvation scenes in the second half of LEFT BEHIND II. The movie’s second half also clearly and dramatically portrays the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It also contains an important scene which clearly demonstrates that Jesus Christ clearly fulfilled many Old Testament prophecies during his life, death and resurrection 2,000 years ago.

For more information on this topic, which supports the messianic point of view in LEFT BEHIND II, readers may want to consult THE MESSIAH IN THE OLD TESTAMENT by Christian scholar Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. [Zondervan, 1995], or Appendix IX of Alfred Edersheim’s classic text THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JESUS THE MESSIAH (Hendrickson Publications). These books refute the viewpoint of self-proclaimed Jewish scholars who say that the Old Testament passages cited by Christians aren’t messianic. In fact, as these scholarly books clearly show, the earliest, most authoritative Jewish rabbis support the Christian position on these messianic passages.

Thus, LEFT BEHIND II gives an excellent cinematic presentation of the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah that is helpful and insightful to all Christians and Non-Christians, including all Jews. In fact, it’s one of the clearest presentations in all the movies made by Cloud Ten Pictures, the production company behind the first two LEFT BEHIND movies.