There's a trick to reading the reviews in this day and age. You have to winkle out the review intelligentsia and that's best found the critical end. It can be quite tricksy. I think I mentioned a book a while back (it's
here). It lumbered under a weight of five star reviews. The people, they apparently loved it. Now I'm obviously a bit of connoisseur when it comes to the bad, worse, and the awful, and this was all them and tied with a bow. One of the worse things I've read. Even accounting for taste and lack thereof, you couldn't stretch beyond a single star. Maybe a second star out of pity.
I'm giving
Left Behind 1 star for the soundtrack and
Knowing -3 stars because it makes no sense*.
*OK, I'll bite. You're aliens. You can see the future. You, for some reason, want to save the Earthlings (I'd not bother) from solar cataclysm. How are you going to do it? Send some cryptic numbers back to the 1950s and hope someone figures it out. You're only taking kids and, unaccountably, rabbits. Squirrels are a no-no. You might note an immediate problem here. The world is ending in 2013. You've sent the message back to 1950ish. You're only taking kids. Of course, your message just might get buried in a time capsule (well, they can see the future, but they rescue loads of kids and rabbits at the end, so that's a lot of time capsules) to be opened fifty years later. Or you could have skipped this entire step. So there's a message for the kids. Except the kids don't figure it out. Nicolas Cage does. Becauses he's at MIT. Presumably because the campus police haven't managed to track him down yet. Having uncovered that message concerns disasters a plane falls on him. As predicted. Oh my. He's the only parent whose 10 minute drive to pick up his kid from school involves a lengthy stretch of congested interstate (the movie didn't seem sure whether it was supposed to be in Boston or NYC, and they're about four hours drive apart on a good day). Nic Cage tracks down the original 1950s recipient's (who the aliens have kindly driven to suicide with their message) daughter and grandchild. We're not sure why. After some more cinematic treading of water, our Nic decides the best way to avoid cataclysm is to go to the coordinates on the message, which given that all the other coordinates refer to disasters, wouldn't seem to be a good idea. The woman dies a car wreck because they're being chased by aliens (why?), fortunately her daughter isn't too traumatised by this. Anyway, the aliens arrive at the coordinates and save all the kids and rabbits. But not Nic (because they're only saving kids remember). None of the kids solved the puzzle. They could have whisked off the kids from anywhere. There was absolutely no reason for any of the movie or plot that went before. None of it leads to the ending. Nic goes back to his estranged father, a pastor as it's all hideously unsubtle millennialist rapture crap, and the world ends. Kaboom goes the remaining CGI budget. Kids and rabbits end up in
Garden of Eden on alien planet.
