Part 3 on Slacktivist begins in the early part of the clip I have as part 2.
Buck and the woman with the diamond (actually it is more like a triangle) on her forehead are watching his film of the prophet, and much to Buck's astonishment, he is speaking in Hebrew, though in the same flat, expressionless tone as he spoke in English. (One person in the comment section said he speaks Hebrew with a strong American accent. Certainly he sounds like someone speaking Hebrew who doesn't know it very well. That presumably accounts for the flatness of his tone). The woman says she can't see how he heard anything over all those explosions. Fred Clark describes this as a Scully-ish remark, which seems accurate, and runs into the same problem Scully always did. It's one thing for Scully to disbelieve in paranormal phenomena once or twice and be proven wrong. For her to disbelieve and be proven wrong every single week strains all credulity. Triangle Forehead has the same problem. It's hard to be skeptical after seeing all Israel's attackers miraculously crash and burn. Her attempt to play the Scully role later gets even less plausible after the Rapture. But that lies ahead.
Nicolae Carpathia then appears on the screen somewhere in Africa and says how can we find peace when people are starving. Buck's incredibly repulsive boss then walks in, jeers at Carpathia as "Father Teresa" and says if people listened to him "we'd all be one big, happy family." He says that Europe just joined currencies with Korea and calls Triangle Forehead away, calling her "darlin'." Suddenly Burton's incoherent rant doesn't seem all that crazy to Buck. He did say, after all, that all the world's currencies are merging. Buck asks Triangle Forehead (calling her Ivy) to get ahold of Dirk. She makes another Scully-ish sneer. Apparently she and Buck have been playing Mulder and Scully for some time.
The scene then shifts to London and we meet the villains, Cothran and Stonagal, two London bankers who speak with American accents. This raises the obvious question of why make them London bankers at all? Why not New York bankers? Granted, London is one of the world's top two banking cities, but New York is the other. Dirk Burton was in England in the book and moved to New York in the movie. It later transpires that he is in contact with a policeman who is with Scotland Yard in the book, but an FBI agent in the movie. So if everyone else is being Americanized and they can't find any actors with a decent British accent, why not just make them New York bankers? I will give my suspicion a little later.
Anyhow, when we meet Stonagal, he is an obvious villain. If he had "evil villain" tattooed across his forehead in fluorescent orange it couldn't be more obvious. And he is meeting with "father Teresa" Carpathia! I'm not sure what the audience is supposed to make of this. Or I should say, what a naive audience is supposed to make of it. Presumably everyone who watches the movie version of Left Behind has already read the novel and knows that Carpathia is the anti-Christ. The book attempts to build some suspense by trying to make the audience wonder whether Carpathia or Stonagal is the anti-Christ, but is not very successful. Here, the movie makers quite successfully play up Stonagal and Cothran as villains and downplay Carpathia. Yet there he is, right in Stonagal's house. So how is a naive viewer to see him, as an innocent puppet being manipulated by Stonagal, or as a charismatic figure agreeing to serve as front man? Stonagal never says anything explicitly evil in Carpathia's presence. Quite the contrary, he talks about world peace and feeding the hungry. He still has "evil villain" tattooed across his forehead, but movie characters are notorious for not being able to read tattoos like that. On the other hand, he does sometimes speak of Stonagal's past achievements in obvious euphemisms, suggesting he knows that Stonagal is an unsavory character. Either way, what's going on is clear. Stonagal wants him to buy Rosensweig's formula. Carpathia says that Rosensweig is resistant. Stonagal gives Carpathia some architectural plans (of the Jewish Temple, it turns out) and authorizes him to exchange it for the formula. Carpathia leaves on his assignment. Whatever else may be the case, Carpathia certainly appears to be subordinate to Stonagal.
Once Carpathia leaves, Cothran steps in, and Stonagal stop even pretending not to be a villain. They scheme together and reveal an important fact. Cothran is annoyed by the attack on Israel, which is disrupting their plans. "And who will deliver the Arabs? Their children cry from hunger, yet they still chose war." Stonagal answers, "I've rearranged some shipments. When their children die of hunger, the Arabs will cry for peace." In other words, these worldwide food shortages aren't just happening. They are being engineered by Stonagal and Cochran. And at the same time, they're trying to get their hands on a magical fertilizer that will create unlimited bounty. Sounds to me like they are trying to corner the market on food.* Cothran then reveals that Dirk Burton is doing some snooping, so Stonagal tells him (using the usual movie villain euphemisms, of course) to have him killed.
Buck goes to the appointed place to meet Dirk, but Dirk fails to show up. We next see Buck on Rayford Steele's flight to London, doing some on-line research on Stonagal and Cothran. Why? The movie never says, but here is my suspicion. After Dirk Burton failed to show up to reveal what Stonagal and Cothran were up to, Buck decided to head to London to confront them in their lair. (Another display of heroism). That would also explain why they are London, rather than New York, bankers. In order to give Buck an excuse to be on Rayford's plane when the Rapture strikes. But would it have killed the directors to throw in a few lines to explain all this to those of us who are a bit slow on the uptake?
In coach, the lights are dimmed, and flight attendant Hattie Durham (played, Fred tells us, by the real-life wife of the actor playing Buck) is tucking in the children. This, naturally, is an eerie bit of foreshadowing for the audience, who are expected to know the children are about to be raptured. She steps into first class, passes a strangely obnoxious looking man who is drinking, and talks to Buck. She and Buck are old friends. He has just helped her get a new job with the United Nations. She then sticks her head into the cockpit. The copilot congratulates her on her new job at the United Nations, and she informs a stunned Rayford that tonight is her last night.
Rayford steps out of the cockpit to confront her in the flight attendant area, and we discover it wasn't just his wife and son he has been less than honest with. He also led his daughter to believe that he was just burying himself in work to get away from his wife's preaching. Now it turns out he has something going with Hattie. Fred Clark thinks the book was wrong to portray his flirtation with Hattie as a less serious offense because it never reached the physical stage. He thinks that keeping Hattie in emotional suspense, keeping her thinking he has an interest, but never committing to anything is just as bad. I am less sure. Some people like flirting but are terrified of it turning into anything serious. If Rayford and Hattie are both in that category, it could work just fine. The movie, however, agrees with Clark over me. Hattie tells Rayford she's tired of waiting, the looks, the flirting, tired of waiting for him to give her a reason to stay. If their relationship is not going to develop into something more, she is leaving. They kiss. So apparently they have something physical going, although it is not clear how much.
Meanwhile, back in first class, an old lady next to Buck wakes from a doze to find her husband missing. With more alarm that the situation would appear to call for, she wakes Buck and says her husband has disappeared. Buck, understandably unconcerned, says he's probably just gone off to the restroom. She asks Buck if he will check. Buck says sure. The old woman give him her husband's jacket and says to take this, she thinks he's gone off naked. Buck looks at his seat and sees his empty clothes. Okay, that explains the old woman's alarm, but it raises two other issues.
First and less important, why is she asking Buck? Airplanes, after all, don't have multi-user men's and women's restrooms. They have have restrooms for one person at a time, man or woman. (One of my favorite Dennis the Menace cartoons showed Dennis on an airplane for the first time, asking if he was Vacant or Occupied). Why can't she go herself?
But more importantly, this doesn't work dramatically. Fred Clark often criticizes Left Behind for not following accepted literary conventions. I disagree. There's nothing wrong with breaking a literary convention for any one of several reasons -- realism, originality, surprise or just to keep the audience guessing. But when you're dealing with mass disappearances into thin air, something that has never happened in the real world, literary convention is all you have to go by. And this slow, initially unalarming introduction of the Rapture that only gradually morphs into something disturbing is better suited to something else. It would work if you were dealing with the sort of disaster that gradually creeps up on people. It would work if only the super-devout disappeared at first and everyone sought a rational explanation of what happened. The explanation might even sound convincing at first. But then gradually more and more people would disappear and a whole succession of attempted rational explanations would fail, one after the other, until the terrible truth was undeniable. The that isn't how the Rapture happens. The Rapture does not creep up on us. Everyone worthy of being raptured (and all children too young to decide) is raptured all at once. It takes place in one sudden, devastating blow. The Rapture should be announced by a shriek from coach and all-out panic and pandemonium. This gradual creep just doesn't work.
Slacktivist review is here for comparison.
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*For some reason, Fred Clark totally fails to pick up on these obvious hints and sees nothing but "babbling nonesense."
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