My family just finished watching the Nicolas Cage version of “Left Behind.” If you want the short review, here it is:  Don’t watch it.

The book is 467 pages long.  In the book, the rapture happens on page 15 and the plane lands around page 43.   In the movie, the rapture happens about 50 minutes into the movie (1 hr and 45 min long), and the plane lands at the very end of the movie.

What I am saying, is that this is the equivalent of someone doing a remake of the Wizard of Oz, and the movie ends when the house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East.

Other than that, the movie was plodding and dull.  The director, Vic Armstrong, managed to take a topic that is at the same time exciting and terrifying, and make it boring.  Also, the movie is told entirely from the perspective of the unsaved people.  There are four people who try to give the Bible’s version of events:  before the Rapture, a snotty woman in the airport tries to witness to Buck Williams by using an end times passage (I believe it was Matthew 24).  Does anybody actually use that as an evangelistic tool?  But she gets shut down rather effectively by one of the main characters.  Then the same character (Chloe) goes home and tells off her mother, who tries to talk to her about spiritual things as well.  After the Rapture, Chloe goes to a church and finds a pastor who was “faking it” (he did not truly believe in Christ). When he tries to explain what happened, she shuts him down as well.   The fourth person is Rayford (played by Nicolas Cage) who attempts to tell a flight attendant that his wife was correct, that it was the Rapture.  She doesn’t believe him.

So the message seems to be that the Rapture is simply something that the world is going to have to get over.  At the end of the movie, one character says, “It looks like the end of the world.”  And another character says something like, “I think it’s just the beginning.”

That pretty much sums up this movie.  It’s just the beginning, because they left out the middle and the end.