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Left Behind: The Vanished, Part 2
Speaking of Vanished, what happened to Josh’s arms?
We’re on the farm! The deal is that Damon is a prepper and has been building Sanctuary, his cult compound, for years. Sarah has just arrived, as have most of the cult members. This is within 48 hours of the Rapture, by the way. How did they hear about it? How did they get here? Who are these people? *shrug* It's just a show; I should really just relax.
The next part of the movie is absolutely baffling in a number of ways, but also is interesting in that I have seen scenes like this in a lot of right-wing media, where the protagonists are toured around an off-the-grid farming community and the prepper explains that they are food and/or energy independent and don’t need nothin’ from the gub’ment. Atlas Shrugged has a bunch of scenes like this. The big twist here, of course, is that the prepper is the villain and the main conflict here is between conservative Christians and a far-right militia. This actually caught me by surprise. Again, it’s not good, but it’s better than I expected.
The farming in it, though, is terrible. These people have never seen a farm before, let alone worked on one. We see that there’s a huge property that has animals on it but no apparent crops. Then we come to the hydroponics tent.
We have, at this point, two pieces of critical information
- It is fall.
- Damon has been at this for years.
The only crops we see are some spindly herbs for flavouring the chicken, the seedlings under the grow lights, which you’d expect in spring, and the fully-grown corn, which is how corn looks in fall, except that he’s grown enough to feed about twenty-two people, once, or 11 people twice. He has tons of acreage with sunlight where he can grow corn properly but instead he’s put it in the shade and starts explaining how he’s going to use gravel rather than soil.
I expected this to be a tie-in with Chaim Rosensweig’s miracle-gro formula that made the desert bloom in the first book, but this is not where we’re going with this. No, this man, who is such a genius that he turned down Harvard and MIT, who has a massive property and a cult, has decided to grow 22 corn plants inside a tent for some reason.
No one is going to be surprised that this guy ends up dead from stupid.
Damon explains that they’ve all been hit by an EMP, which is why none of the technology works, except for:
- The lights in the apartment building
- The cellphones
- The computers in the church
- The lights in the farmhouse
- The grow-lights
- The computer that we’re about to see in the farmhouse
But other than that, no technology works. Some people are more electromagnetic than others and that’s why they disappeared. It is the worst theory, well below the Rapture for plausibility, but according to canon this is the cover story that everyone is going to end up believing.
He also says that EMPs cause solar storms, which they very much do not. Solar flares, such as the Carrington Event, can cause an EMP, but not the other way around. Again, Harvard and MIT wanted this guy and he turned them down. Maybe they wanted to study him to see how he could still walk and talk with a brain as smooth as a bowling ball. He debunks the Rapture theory as a fringe religious superstition and says he deals in fact, which is a bit rich coming from a guy who thinks that the North Koreans have the technology to cause a solar storm.
Notice the tents. The farmhouse had at least one extra room (probably more, since Gabby said it was a lot of space for one person), where they put Claire, as well as a number of out-buildings. But Damon’s cult followers are all living in tents. Rude. This guy is the worst cult leader ever.
Gabby asks Sarah if she knew Eric, and Sarah is obviously lying when she says no. Flynn, proving once again to be the more competent of the two boys, tells Gabby that he thinks Damon’s vibes are off, man. She says she wants to go back to the city anyway. It would have been sensible not to leave in the first place but okay.
The EMP knocked out all technology except for the laptop, which despite Damon’s paranoia, is not password protected. Josh watches the In Case Of Rapture video. Looks like Pastor Billings has gotten a racelift, which is nicely progressive, except that you might have noticed that the only named Black characters in this movie are dead.
I will say that this video is not particularly informative to anyone who is not already an evangelical Christian.
Flynn and Gabby unfurl more angsty backstory. Flynn’s parents lost custody of him because they were on drugs, and he ran away from his foster home. Gabby’s mom was alcoholic but then she found Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, Josh interrupts yet another moment of sexual tension to show them the Billings video on a cellphone that works despite the EMP.
Not to be out-cucked, while Claire is asleep and Flynn is fuck knows where, Josh gives Gabby a rock and tells her that tonight was Homecoming. Then he puts on some more Christian contemporary music (you know, what all the cool kids listen to) with his cellphone that still works despite the EMP, and asks her to dance.
Before they can kiss, though, they’re cockblocked by Claire, who’s finally woken up.
Josh’s reaction shot is hilarious. Then Claire makes fun of her dancing. LOL.
We then get a baffling sequence of farm shots. I think the extras playing Damon’s cult members were just randomly shown to someone’s shed and told to get a farm implement and do something farm-like. Hence, in September/October, we have some people randomly digging holes in the ground and some people chopping one (1) piece of wood, and this one lady raking for some reason.
I think this part of the farm would be a better place to grow corn than in a tent, don’t you?
Gabby talks to a random cult member named Rachel. I assume she’s played by someone funding the movie. They have a girly talk about how farming is hard (yes, if you are trying to plant corn in fall with a rake it will be very difficult) and how the only blister Rachel had ever gotten in her life before was from unscrewing a nail polish bottle.
Wait. What. This was written in 2016 so no way AI could be involved in that line. What kind of nail polish bottles are the writers opening?
While all the women rake and dig random holes, a guy with a rifle patrols. Rachel gets very squirrely when Gabby asks if she met Eric.
i’M fArMiNg!
With Josh looking on jealously, Gabby and Flynn sneak off to the woods. He tries an “it’s okay” and she counters with the radical proposition that it may not, in fact, be okay.
Then she cries because her mom’s disintegrated and her father is possibly dead. Flynn being the smooth chad that he is, figures this is the best time for a makeout session.
Premarital kissing? In my Christian movie? It’s more likely than you think!
She’s into it though, don't worry.
Sarah is reading to Claire from an entirely age-appropriate picture book when Claire decides to suddenly convert to Christianity. Sarah explains that you can only get to Heaven through faith, not works (c’mon, we’re not bloody Papists here) so Claire says the correct magic words and gets saved. It’s, by the way, not the standard magic words that people say in the other Left Behind books and films, so I guess there’s some wiggle room there.
I thought this was very sweet when I realized that there are no children on the compound, so why do they have a picture book????
Gaby has been cheered up by the makeup session and is now quite giggly despite her mom having been disintegrated 48 hours or so earlier. She runs around in the woods but is stopped short by the sight of several militia guys carrying around large sticks and guns. I don’t know what the sticks are for, by the way. They bring out her dad, Eric, and shove him in a crate. Don’t worry, the crate has airholes. Why is he going in the crate? No idea. The dialogue does not provide a lot of clarification; they are building something, they need Eric to build it, and it’s “us and them.”
The whole cult is quite honestly bizarre. A bunch of people, within 24-48 hours of the Rapture, somehow found Damon’s compound and asked him for help. He said they could stay if they could contribute. Considering they get blisters opening nail polish bottles and try to dig random holes with a rake, they are not very useful. Some of them, including Eric, go “fuck this noise” and try to leave, and then Damon decides he needs them so he puts them in boxes. What is he trying to accomplish here? Is it too much to ask that my cult leaders have a plan?
Gaby and Flynn play the least convincing game of Hide and Seek ever in the pine forest and escape to find Josh, who is still understandably sulky and has made no progress since putting his one (1) random post in the ground.
Excuse me ma’am where are you going with that bucket.
He wants an explanation (for why Gabby and Flynn emerged with rumpled clothes from the forest, not why the woman is carrying an empty bucket across the field), as does the militia guy, who seems to know they were in the woods despite their success at evading him. He hauls them before Damon.
Damon menacingly picks at his fingers with a kitchen knife while Gabby says the community is “okay” and Flynn compliments his cooking. Damon starts out nice, admitting that he didn’t tell them that the woods were off limits, but Gabby says, “this is bogus”—you know, the way kids speak—and tries to leave, and he pivots to asshole pretty quickly.
This would have been an interesting time for Josh’s loyalties to drift towards the cult, but that level of psychological complexity is not allowed in a Left Behind movie, so instead he runs to tell Sarah what’s happened.
Gaby’s not having any of it, so Damon kicks her chair over. This time, she tells Flynn that she’s okay rather than him telling her that she’s okay. He pulls a gun on Flynn, but Sarah and Josh burst in. In front of everyone, Sarah says that the kids trust her and to let her handle them. He gives her the gun and tells her to make them understand how the cult does things. Please note that she has been in the cult for about a day longer than they have.
Sarah immediately moves to get the kids out of there, but Gabby mentions that her dad and others are being held prisoner. Sarah explains that there was a fight, and she’d contradicted Damon in front of the group so he’d lost it on her. Eric and the others had stepped in but disappeared the next day. Sarah assumed that he’d gone to find Gaby. This has all somehow happened within a day but sure.
Stay tuned for next time, wherein we investigate a non-Euclidean farmhouse.
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One of the things I teach my kids is that you can shoot on location and still have it not read properly on film. For example, if you were doing a classroom scene in my classroom, the arrangement of desks, computers, the emptiness of the classroom, and the distractions of bags, snacks, etc. would add confusion and lack focus. You'd want the desks lined up in rows, even though practically no high school classroom looks like that these days.
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