a review of 末日迷踪

2020 Cult Movie Challenge Week 38: Christian Scare Week Right off the top, I want to say that although this movie (and the book on which it is based) is billed as a religious supernatural thriller, I found the actual spiritual themes to be largely beside the point. The story's main preoccupations are all extremely late-'90s political and conspiracy wackadoo nonsense of the New World Order variety, which have basically nothing to do with the actual message of Christian scripture and more to do with the weird alternative universe occupied by the nominally Christian right. As far as the actual structure of the film goes, it seems abundantly clear that the authors of the book took a great deal of inspiration from the immensely popular disaster movies of the 1970s, with most of the characters and situations seeming like direct lifts from the Airport series or The Towering Inferno. The major subplot in which the Antichrist is a nebulously-European creepazoid named "Nicolae Carpathia" (because "Boo-Scary Dracula" was too on the nose) is the head of the United Nations is pretty much just a transparent ripoff of The Omen. It's definitely an indication of when the authors' cultural sensibilities were formed, and the whole movie just kind of creaks along feeling like something much older than it is.