Left Behind (2014).
Oh boy. There are comedians out there who would give a kidney to make a movie this hilarious. I consider this to be, without any hyperbole, on par with Tommy Wisseau's infamous
The Room in terms of being so bad that I literally howled with laughter throughout.
I'm writing this long post as my way of psychologically processing the trainwreck I just witnessed.
I decided to watch it because I saw it on a list of "worst movies of all time" and also saw that it starred Nicolas Cage, a combination thereby guaranteeing a good time. I was not disappointed.
It's not even bad for the reasons that you'd assume it would be - I had braced myself for a series of Christian strawman arguments (à la
God is not Dead) which were indeed to be found but not as prominently as you'd expect.
Actually, I read the
Left Behind book series a few years ago and in their defence, they're pretty damn good. Yes they're religious books, but they're still well-written enough to be enjoyable even by someone like me who doesn't believe in their god.
The movie's problem is that it totally abandoned the source material and went in an absurd
Snakes on a Plane direction. The movie could have been called "
Wrathful God on a Plane".
I don't know if I'll be able to list everything that was wrong with the movie but a few highlights include:
- One shot suggests they're planning to fly a Boeing 737 from JFK to London. A 737 is not designed for long range flight.
- The make of the aircraft changes multiple times in the movie, a detail you'd think they'd have looked at given its importance to the plot. (It's a 767 later on. Also the livery changes from blue to red a few times.) I'm pretty sure much of this movie was constructed from old stock footage.
- The acting. With the exception of Nic Cage (who somehow turned in a respectable performance from this awful script), I've never seen such terrible acting outside of a Wisseau film.
- The passengers have remarkably easy access to the cockpit, considering this was filmed long after 9/11 and therefore long after pilots started locking their doors as a standard procedure
- Apparently when Jesus comes in the rapture, he will take time out to disable any autopilots he comes across. There is no reason why a raptured pilot should cause the autopilot to disengage.
- Also, a long-haul flight wouldn't have such a small crew or leave a single pilot in charge for any amount of time. There is no way the other pilot would have ever been alone at the controls when the rapture happened.
- Very unrealistic portrayal of a TCAS system. There's no way a pilot would wait until they were within visual range of the other aircraft to climb.
- And the mid-air collision scene? In real life they'd have crashed and died. No aircraft would survive that.
- One of the passengers pulls out a motherfucking gun for no reason, somehow having slipped it past post 9/11 airport security.
- There seem to be an awful lot of self driving cars in this movie. Considering the drivers disappeared, who is pressing on the accelerators? God I guess?
- The landing on the freeway scene is theoretically plausible but just terribly written. I don't think even God would be willing to perform the kinds of miracles needed for such an absurd chain of events to occur.
So yeah, all in all this movie would have been better if they'd unironically gone down the "Why oh why did I choose to be gay" route. I think this movie is probably as insulting to people who believe in the premise of the Left Behind series as it is to anyone else.
But hey - it does feature Nicolas Cage, an angry midget and a hilarious combination of terrible writing, terrible acting and
Ed Wood-level bad directing.
Seangoli wrote:Radiatia wrote:Pacific Rim Uprising (2018).
I was shocked by how much I enjoyed this movie.
The movie was thoroughly unintelligent, extremely predictable to the point of being comical and consisted of nothing more than a series of tropes and clichés strung together one after the other to create one of the most truly formulaic movies I've ever seen.
But honest to god, I enjoyed it. Perhaps I'm suffering some form of intellectual and cognitive decline, but I was enthralled from beginning to end - it was just pure, lowbrow fun.
I still haven't seen the first Pacific Rim movie as I hitherto had no interest in the franchise but I might actually give it a go now.
Pacific Rim is great because it knows exactly what it is, and gives zero shits about being more than that. It's not trying to be anything more than a spectacular Kaiju fighting movie, and that's all it is trying to do. It's a perfect example of less is more. The movie didn't need a deep plot, layered dialogue, etc. In fact that stuff would likely be detrimental. The plot of the first is dumber than the second, but frankly it just works. Its a masterclass in dumb action movies and how to do them correctly. Great world building, huge, dumb fights, often bordering on the absurd for the story. Too many action movies try to be more than what they are, and try to interject a more serious story line or be clever.
100% agree with this assessment.
Posted: Fri May 06, 2022 10:21 pm
