MrTweej's video: Left Behind 2014 Atheist Rebuttal Review

Sara Stewart's Review: http://nypost.com/2014/10/02/audiences-get-an-earful-and-little-else-from-preachy-left-behind/ -Challenge accepted Willie. Before I review the movie though, there seems to be a bit of confusion about this whole rapture business. For some reason, many modern Christians derive their knowledge of Christianity and theology from silly novels and made for TV movies instead of from the bible. -Regarding the doctrine of being carried away to live with Jesus in the clouds, (1 Thessalonians 4:17) there are three main schools of thought in Christianity. Only one of them is supported in any way by the Bible. -The Pre-tribulation Rapture that the Left Behind series is based on isn't. -Pre-trib doctrine was invented from whole cloth by a lawyer turned priest named John Darby who saw the telegraph as "an invention of Cain and a sign of the end of the world" in the 1830s. -The biblical account of the rapture is post tribulation. I only mention this because like most fundamentalists, the pre-tribulation doomsday cult imagines that the majority of Christians, even those who have actually read the Bible, agree with them. They don't. My main objection as an atheist comes from the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21. -On the mount of olives, Jesus predicted to his followers the destruction of the temple, the tribulation, his second coming, and the rapture. Then he said: "Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done." -The generation Jesus was talking to however, did pass... almost two thousand years ago. This is what C.S. Lewis called "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible." To me, this is one of many conclusive reasons to believe that Jesus (if he existed) wasn't who he claimed to be and that a literal interpretation of Christianity is false. -That said, I don't have anything against fictional movies based on religion, mysticism, cryptozoology or any other impossible nonsense. I'm perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the show, however... -This movie is unwatchable. For starters, they didn't change screenwriters from the original series. A list of John Patus and Paul LaLonde's filmographies should be handed out day one of every screenwriting class as an example of how not to tell a story and how not to write dialogue. -They spend the first 40 or so minutes beating every inch of life out of the at best 2 minutes of exposition needed to catch the audience up to speed so we can get on to the actual plot of the movie. -An "action packed thriller" does NOT have 40 minutes of talking wallpaper boring the audience stiff before the inciting incident. Consider the movie JAWS. It was at one time the highest grossing film ever. The inciting incident happens in the first scene when the girl gets eaten by a shark. That's how you start a thriller. -Once you've hooked the audience, you raise the stakes and you keep raising them, building suspense, working towards a satisfying climax. -Probably the most spectacular example of how NOT to do this is found in the middle of Left Behind: Ray (Nicholas Cage) has the wing of his plane clipped by another plane whose pilots have disappeared. The wing is leaking fuel which catches fire. Ray simply shrugs and explains that the fire will put itself out and that as long as they don't lose too much fuel, they'll be fine. Not only does this kill any tension or suspense that the audience should be feeling, it also telegraphs the end of the movie and takes away any motivation that he or passenger Buck Williams have to do something about the fire. Inventing a scenario in which your protagonist is required to do nothing but sit there and wait is incredibly bad writing. -And as bad as that story line is, Ray's daughter Chloe is even more poorly written, essentially running from one place to another so that other disposable characters can deliver exposition. She runs home to see that her mother disappeared. She runs to a church so that a preacher can tell her that his congregation disappeared. She runs to a freeway so that a woman can tell her that her baby disappeared. She runs to a hospital so that some random woman can tell her that all the babies disappeared and that she overheard doctors saying that people all over the world have disappeared. -And it's not just Chloe who is running around aimlessly. Everyone is running. We don't know why they're running; where they're running to or what they're running from. In the internal logic of the movie, it doesn't make sense. From an audience perspective, it just looks like they're running and panicking because the director of the movie told them to. That's bad story telling.