Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (3)

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 claims to be inspired by ancient Mayan prophecies, but with its lovingly detailed CGI shots of the destruction of the temples of Mammon and saving of a small band of the blessed, it’s actually square in the Christian apocalyptic tradition - something that’s almost as old as Christianity itself. The last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation (also known as Apocalypse, from the verb apokalypto, to reveal), was written towards the end of the first century AD. It’s a visionary warning of the End Times, when the damned will flock to the AntiChrist, the Earth will be visited with every kind of destruction, and true believers will at last ascend into the infinite bliss of the New Jerusalem. Outbreaks of apocalypse fever have swept through Christianity ever since, peaking around 1500, when dozens of sects proclaimed the coming of the End Times (see Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of the Millennium), and again around the end of the last century. Millions of premillennialists (especially Evangelical Christians in the United States; one of the Founding Fathers, Cotton Mather, was an ardent premillennialist) still expect at any moment to experience the Rapture of bodily ascent into Heaven as a prelude to the harrowing of Earth by a returned Christ.


This apocalypse is the subject of Victorian painter John Martin’s ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ (above); this, and other huge, sensationalist canvases, were allegedly inspired by commercial dioramas animated by use of artificial lighting - precursors of present-day blockbuster movies. While Martin’s themes were biblical, most of the apocalypses in Hollywood movies are secular,with nuclear war, asteroids, or Arnold Swarzenegger as substitutes for God’s wrath. But an outfit outside the Hollywood machine, Cloud Ten Pictures, has been making movies for a Christian audience that deploy the tropes of premillennialism with deadly seriousness. They’ve produced a trilogy based on the bestselling Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a literal portrayal of the End Times of the premillennialists, as well as several thrillers that share the same post-Rapture setting, as well as the same villain, UN President Nicolae Carpathia, aka the AntiChrist (played by Gordon Currie - what must his fan mail be like?): Revelation, Apocalypse, and Tribulation (starring Gary Busey and featuring Margot Kidder and Mr T as, er, Mr T).

They look like science fiction, or science thrillers, but they aren't. As far as the people who made them and their intended audience are concerned, they embody a literal truth.