Case study for why people hate Christian based film. Poorly written, adapted, acted, shot and edited. Cage's wife is the only one that's raptured and he's gotta land this plane (ConAir) with the help of us unsaved, estranged daughter.

As a non-fundamentalist Christian, I remember when the Tim LaHaye book (on which this is based) came about. It stirred a lot of excitement in those fundamentalist circles. I was never especially interested in it; never read it. To be honest I wasn't especially interested in the movie either (and never watched the earlier Kirk Cameron version.) But - hey - it's on Netflix; I had a free afternoon. How bad could it really be? Well, pretty bad. It isn't as awful as some people say it is. To be honest, the actual moment of rapture was kind of well done. People's clothes just dropping to the ground as they disappear leaving everybody else with either mouths agape or screaming in terror. It was kind of cool. And it's true that millions of people (whether Christians or anyone else) just simply disappearing all at the same time would cause chaos around the world - although we didn't see much of the world. Just a bit of New York City and mostly the airplane.

You see, most of this movie is set on an airplane. Nicolas Cage plays the pilot - Captain Ray Steele (which is a kind of a cool name - kudos to LaHaye for coming up with it in the novel.) The Steele family is divided. Ray and his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) are non- believers (Ray's having an affair with a flight attendant played by Nicky Whelan),while Irene (mom) and Raymie (young son) must be believers - 'cause they get taken to heaven, meaning we don't see much of them. I thought the scenes on the plane were semi- believable at times. Passengers had a variety of reactions - aliens or time travel or conspiracy or whatever. There were times of panic - although by the end everybody seemed surprisingly calm. There's a wee bit of suspense as the plane approaches New York City with no fuel. But overall the story and characters were pretty weak.

As for the theology, or at least the moral message? Well, first of all all children go to heaven. Because we get told that there are no children left. No age was attached. Do you get a free pass to heaven until you're - 10? 13? 16? I don't know. And, boy, once those Christians are gone it turns out that most of those who are left are looters or related thug-like folks, because there's lots of looting. And most of the Christians who were portrayed before the rapture were of the - shall we say - extremist variety, so this is clearly a triumphalistic sort of message from the fundamentalist community - come over to our side because we're gonna win! And there was really no great attempt to explain the idea of the rapture. It's not an idea that's universally accepted among Christians, and it's really a kind of bizarre idea. This is obviously supposed to be a sort of religious propaganda; an evangelistic tool meant to unfortunately scare people into believing that they better believe or this terrible thing is going to happen and you're gonna be "left behind." But scaring people into faith rarely works in my experience, and if it does it calls into serious question the very reason why a person would believe. The Christian faith as I understand it is supposed to put the focus on caring for others; this kind of evangelism tells you that you should be worried about yourself. And there's that irritating song that closed the movie out that I hadn't heard in years. "I wish we'd all been ready. ... The Son has come, and you've been left behind."

This isn't as absolutely horrible as some people say it is - although I wouldn't have objected to being raptured during it. I could have seen that as an act of divine mercy. Of course, I wasn't raptured during it, but I will confess that I fell asleep and missed the last 20 minutes of it - but I was interested enough to go back and see how it ended. Everything's kind of left up in the air - maybe leaving open the possibility of a sequel, since there have been Lord knows how many books in the series. I doubt that will happen. I would think this has a very niche market. Fundamentalist Christians might yearn for more. Others (like me) might check it out on Netflix, but I certainly wouldn't pay to see a sequel in a theatre or specifically rent a DVD of a sequel. (3/10)

I only wanted to see this movie because I love the series "The Leftovers", this movie has the same theme and from the beginning it is clear it's a rippoff. It is clear that the amount of money Cage is in dept in, is so large, he literally takes on every B or C movie they make, he is even worse then Seagal. The acting, the story, the directing, it is pretty bad, I guess all the money went to Cage. For a really good disappearance story, you really have to watch The Leftovers.