They’re re-making Left Behind.
Please contain your excitement.
Growing up in the church, I heard things about Jesus coming back, and I didn’t fully understand what was going to happen. All this talk about being “taken” scared me a little. Then Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins came along and wrote vivid fictional novels about the end times, and those depictions ended up being more than fiction to eight-year-old me.
Then in 2000 came that terrible, terrible movie. Kirk Cameron was no longer goofy, lovable Mike Seaver from Growing Pains, but some dude who didn’t love Jesus and had to suffer the consequences. My poor overactive imagination.
The new version of Left Behind is looking wonderfully terrible. The obvious thrill is Nicolas Cage. We don’t have to wonder about how he will portray Rayford Steele because he’s basically played the same character a bajillion times (I checked IMDb for that number). The remake features Chad Michael Murray as Buck Williams, the character made so famous (infamous?) by Kirk Cameron. The cast also includes American Idol contestant Jordin Sparks and Scrubs guest star Nicky Whelan.
Interestingly enough, there is no credit in the cast for the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia. This movie only covers the first few hours after the rapture, and there are no plans to continue the series. Rest easy, my friends. We don’t have to meet the Antichrist this time around.
This is a relief for me, someone who has been terrified of being left behind since watching the movie as a preteen. So terrified, in fact, that I can vividly recall the time last winter I got Kirk Cameron’d.
A bunch of friends and I were out eating dinner after a church event. At the end of the evening just before we collected our things to go home, I made a quick trip to the washroom.
“Don’t leave without me,” I made sure to tell one of the guys who had promised to walk me to my car. He nodded.
When I returned to our table, I was shocked to find an entirely new set of people sitting there. I was puzzled because I was certainly not gone long. I searched around the pub, hoping maybe they were waiting for me inside somewhere. Nope. I walked outside into the bitter cold. Not there either. All of the Christians in the pub were suddenly gone.
I began to panic. It happened without me. I was afraid of this. Jesus came back and I couldn’t hear the trumpet call because I was in a dirty pub bathroom. And everyone knows Jesus doesn’t come to fetch people from dirty pub bathrooms.
But WHY was no one panicking? People VANISHED and no one seemed to care! WHERE DID THEY PUT THEIR PILES OF CLOTHES? IS A PLANE GOING TO CRASH? NICOLAE CARPATHIA IS SURELY BEHIND THIS ALL!
I sent out text messages. No responses. I made phone calls. No answers. I made a second round of phone calls. Still no answers. My worst nightmare had come true.
I had been Kirk Cameron’d. Totally and completely Left Behind.
I hope that seeing the new movie will help ease some of my childhood fears about the rapture. I hope the screenplay is so terrible that my imagination is able to see it as fiction and not as a true theological interpretation of the end times. I also hope that the actors do a bad enough job that people can’t stop talking about it. I want this movie to be incredibly memorable so the next time I’m left behind at a pub I can tell people that I’ve been “Nicolas Cage’d.”
Left Behind comes out in theatres on June 20, 2014.
Photo used is the film’s official teaser poster.
