In the 1951 original, an alien named Klaatu comes to Earth seeking peace. As soon as he arrives, he is shot in the arm.  An eight-foot-tall robot named Gort steps from the flying saucer and begins destroying guns, tanks, and cannons.  Only code words spoken by Klaatu makes him stop.  Taken to Walter Reed Hospital, doctors find that  Klaatu is a human alien who represents a federation of advanced civilizations. He decides to go among the Earth people to learn more about them.

His message: the nations of the world must learn to live in peace or the Earth will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.

The original "DTESS" has much Christian symbolism.  For example, when Klaatu escapes from Walter Reed, he takes the clothes and name of a Mr. Carpenter.  Jesus was a carpenter.  Klaatu is shot and killed (Crucifixion) but is "resurrected" by Gort.  At the end he takes off in his flying saucer (the Ascension) after promising to return someday.

In the 2008 remake,  Klaatu comes to Earth alarmed by mankind's abuse of the environment.  Again he is shot  upon arrival but this time Gort is a towering "biological" robot.  It turns out that Klaatu is a weird-looking alien who has taken on the appearance of a human.  Klaatu represents a federation of advanced civilizations that question whether the human race deserves to live.  He escapes from the hospital rather than be dissected It turns out that his message is: humans must learn to treat the environment better or they will be destroyed.

Of course, in our secular world, there is no Christian symbolism.  Klaatu mostly walks around with an expressionless face like a zombie.  He is "just Klaatu", an alien with a salve that can bring people back to life, including himself at one point.  There is no mention of an "almighty spirit" as there was in the 1951 original; there is only science and ecology.  Heaven forbid we should offend the 20% of Americans who do not believe in  Jesus.  Let us just offend the 80% who do.

Anyway, Scott Derrickson is not half the director Robert Wise was.  There is a lot of action and visual effects here but nothing you have never seen before.  Jennifer Connelly, a beautiful and talented actress, is the best thing about this movie.  Seeing it in IMAX helps a little, but all IMAX gives you is a bigger and brighter picture. Instead of spending money to see this thing check out these movies with a similar theme:

• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• E.T.
• Starman
• It Came From Outer Space

Anna Lynne McCord

Okay, so last night was Halloween night. Okay, so I thought it would be a shame to let the season pass without seeing a good horror flick. Okay, so how could I know that what I and a friend were about to see would make me want to renounce my views about over-the-top gore and make me wish I had seen Saw V instead?

In fact, you need not even go as far as that. I believe I would even have rather seen the High School Musical movie that is now out rather than have had to sit through what is surely the most phenomenal upheaval of every tired cliché from every suspense horror film involving teenagers, their high schools and what happens if you can get Satan to make a name-only cameo in the hellish mix.

The film starts out with a flashback to 1997. We see the standard set-up scene of an attractive teenage girl alone in a wilderness area. We find her following notes that are spaced-apart on a line of twine beckoning her to go further. (Which - smart girl that she is - she does). She is led to an abandoned house where her boyfriend, fun-loving prankster that he is, scares the living daylights out of her and after the anti-climax, both proceed with the obligatory make-out scene. They are (of course) interrupted by the girl's psychotic-looking father (again, standard fare) who makes her get into his truck and speeds of down the dirt road where we are introduced to the film's sub-plot of bad decisions made by parents long-ago and nefarious dark forces at work and about to culminate on the girl's eighteenth birthday. After a botched attempt to kill both himself and his daughter by swerving into on-coming traffic (all the while literally thumping on the Bible and asking for forgiveness), they skid to a halt, look at each other, and end-up getting creamed by a semi any way. With his dying strength, the father takes a piece of broken glass and kills the daughter. (By this time, the dread I was already beginning to feel had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever “scary” thing might be coming next).

Open to the present day and we find our heroine, Molly Hartley, (Haley Bennet) in the midst of a nightmare and waking up violently. (And at this point, the film has already met about three-quarters of the recommended horror-movie clichés to get itself categorized as unimaginative garbage). One thing you need to know about this girl is that she has a nosebleed every other scene. In fact, without her nosebleeds, this would be one horror film that would be almost entirely bloodless. We find (much to our non-surprise) that she is someone who (after nearly being killed by her own mother - and is now locked-up in an asylum) is embarking on a new life, new school and a new relationship with her guilt-driven, doting father. (And these are the only areas where the adjective “new” can legitimately be applied). On her first day of school, she is at once button-holed by the same quartet of likely suspects; the nerdish, Bible-thumping girl (more about this later), the hot guy, the hot guy's rabid ex-girlfriend, and the class rebel wild-girl who wants to free our heroine from all of her frumpish inhibitions.

As if this miasma of everything-you've-seen-before-to-the-nth-degree weren't enough, the writer of this celluloid drive-heave even includes a school psychologist who turns out in the end to be (you guessed it) one of the baddies. She is about as subtle a factor in this whole thing as Damien's nanny in The Omen was. From this point, Molly is set on a course to find out her true destiny which she does by way of hearing voices, hallucinations of her whacko, institutionalized mother, dizzy spells and of course, by continuing to bleed all over the place from her nose. (All necessary pieces of the puzzle, you understand).

We finally get to the bottom what is going on with this girl when her mother, freshly escaped from the asylum, finds her daughter alone in her house and once again, attempts to kill her. Only this time, we get the entire explanation from her as to why she is embarked on a course to off her own daughter. It seems that eighteen years ago when her daughter was born (and after several miscarriages), there were some complications, and her brand new baby daughter was about to die. As quickly as you can say “Beelzebub,” a mysterious woman (who turns out, of course, to be the school psychologist) appears on the scene and offers them the classic deal; they get eighteen years with your daughter, and the devil gets her after that. They agree. From here all of the blanks are filled in and one finds that one can pretty much predict the outcome of the film as if one were directing it him or herself. (In the end, she agrees to join the devil's side - as if we are surprised).

However, what I am writing here is every bit as much as a commentary on the condition of this genre of film as it is a review of the film itself. (And if I have dissuaded even one person from going to see this hound or even renting the DVD - which should be out the day after tomorrow! - then I feel I have done my duty!). Earlier, I made a reference to one of the characters in this film who was the “nerdish, Bible-thumping girl.”

And also to the father in the opening scenes who is “literally thumping a bible and asking for forgiveness” before he kills his daughter.

Hollywood has (has had for quite a while, in fact) a large degree of schizophrenia going on in the area of how to depict both Christians and the Bible in its films. Nowhere is this schizophrenia more evident than in the area of the supernatural/horror thriller. The reason for the schizophrenia basically boils down to this: In order to make a film of this type, you usually have to borrow heavily from the Bible in general, and Christianity in particular as source materials if you want an effective background for your archetypal battle between good and evil. You really cannot have Satan show-up in a film (or even being present, yet unseen) and somehow divorce him from all of the theological underpinnings which go to make him, and his attributes, believable.

This has always been the basic rule of thumb since the inception of the horror movie genre. Even if Satan is not actually present in a film like “Frankenstein,” the whole concept of “playing God” (and it's attending ramifications) is. And in any horror film where Satan is not present, he usually leaves his hoof-print. In every Dracula film from the original with Bela Lugosi, to sixties and the seventies with Christopher Lee, to all of the later efforts, the Satanic element is either heavily present, or else tacitly implied.

Yes, Hollywood (particularly the segment which makes the horror films) has a big, schizophrenic problem alright. You see, it doesn't take one who can put together legos, let alone a rocket scientist, to tell that Hollywood doesn't like Christians very much. In fact, it would be a pretty safe bet to say that Hollywood thoroughly despises Christians. One can therefore see the problem with making this type of film from the point of view of a screenwriter who is a bit of a Christianophobe; he has to give both the Bible and Christianity just enough credibility to make his story work, or else he doesn't have a story. He can no more put God and Satan in a story framework without both these as a context than he can put pirates on a prairie and make the whole thing believable.

Therefore, Hollywood has been pillaging the Bible for years with greater gusto than those whom they claim are pillaging rainforests. They don't like Christians or the Bible, yet they simply cannot dispense with either one of them. The only way to make vampires immune to the Cross is to make them some kind of hideous genetic mutations such as in Blade or Underground. In so doing, they have gone and divorced the entire of idea of “vampires” from its long-held (and cherished, by horror fans) legacy of being undead, supernatural (and plenty scary) beings.

Sooo, screenwriters have to make some kind of a compromise and strike a balance between their own dubious sense of aesthetics and a practical approach that won't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (Even if in their esteem, it is a rather homely goose). Therefore they decide that while they will go on raping the Bible (and the Book of the Revelation in particular) for ideas, they will also continue, at every opportunity, to depict the Christians in their films as vile, psychotic, cringing, buffoonish and downright villainous. (At one point in the film, the girl who is the Bible-thumping nerd attempts to kill the heroine by drowning her in a baptismal font - in order to “save her soul”). They therefore get what they want; they cull from the Bible (and any attendant literature - Paradise Lost gets a mortifying mention in this film) all they need in the form of apocalyptic symbology or supernatural personae and yet still have good ole' Wally and Wanda Christian on the side to poke fun at.

However, I do not write this simply because I am a Christian (and I am). I write this also as a former horror movie buff. (Add to that present fantasy and sci-fi movie buff). I say “former” because the genre that once produced some to the most genuinely (and legitimately) scary movies when I was growing up, has long since lost it's way in a quirky quagmire of the cheaply visceral (blood and body parts everywhere) and the boringly predictable (hordes of teenagers getting slaughtered every year or else darkly-woven conspiracies affecting those who come of age with Satan as persona-non-gratis in some for or another). Gone are the true chills that only the likes of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney (Sr. and Jr.), Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing could produce in me. There is a ten-year old in this forty-six year old frame who feels much betrayed. Those days are never coming back and it would be foolhardy of me to sit around pretending that they someday might. I will simply cut my losses by a third and say goodbye (with perhaps a hesitant visit every now and again) to the horror genre. In the realm of the fantastic, there is only science fiction and fantasy really left. (And they have been showing signs of decay for some time now as well).

However, at any rate, this review of mine will probably be somewhat of a maverick anyway. I believe that if Hollywood keeps pumping out bilge like this last installment, it will find not Christians who are the ones lobbing fire-bombs of criticism at it. It will instead wake-up to discover that it has been besieged on all sides by the very ones it was seeking to entertain; horror fans themselves who have now become tired of grafted-on devils and human innards pasted everywhere. Such is the fate of those who pander the same recycled formulae year after bloody year.

In the year known as “The year that changed movies”, 1999 saw an upheaval in Hollywood culture. With releases such as, Magnolia, Run Lola Run, Dogma, Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club and several others, we saw movies all dealing with something greater than ourselves. For further information on these movies specifically, I suggest the book A Matrix of Meanings, part of the “Engaging Culture Series”. These films address the concept of searching, something Hollywood has become, a place of searching. These films are giving Americans questions and making them look for the answers on their own. This is fantastic for believers as us, who know where the search for truth will end, with the Author of Truth. It has grown into entertainment that makes people think. Unlike one Walt Disney who said, “I'd rather entertain people and hope they learned something, than teach people and hope they were entertained.” These words embodied the thinking of 20th century film, and 1999 then revolted into a new era of filmmaking that teaches and thus entertains. It is this reason that the movie theatre is being called the new church of America. Now I also must clarify this last statement. Notice the “c” in church is lower case; this statement is not trying to say that movies are going to take over the Church at all or that it threatens church in anyway. All this is saying is that like Church, the movies are becoming a place to search for the divine.

Many people see the most recent movies coming out and believe that this trend is completely Christian. And I can see why they think this, with movies such as, “The Passion”, “Constantine”, “Bruce Almighty”, “Saved”, and “Kingdom of Heaven” all coming out within the last couple years. And most people also feel that this movement was begun with “The Passion”. This is in a sense a good observation, but it seems as though to take this point of view on, is to look at it backwards. For years (basically as long as they have existed) movies have been under attack by the Christian Organization. All The Passion really accomplished, and I don't mean to sound trivial because it is a huge accomplishment, was to show Hollywood that there is a new era of filmmaking, where the Christian audience will not automatically shun whatever product is made, as in 1988. So this is just one path, another avenue of exploration that Hollywood is traveling, and don't expect it to stay forever. It is a piece of the great quest Hollywood began in 1999.

Now is an exciting time for Christians in Hollywood, Christian movie goers and non-believers. Marvel as God works through his servant Hollywood to touch the lives of hundreds of millions throughout the world. A word of caution though, do not be discouraged if Hollywood strays from the Christian route and wanders onto other paths. Please do not revert back to our old ways of disgust and hatred revolving around what many Christians thought to be a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. Just know it is but a part of the search that we all must take, and again we all know where the search for truth leads, to the Lord our God.

Weapons of mass-destruction have been nearly eliminated from the nuclear and biological stockpiles of the world's most powerful nations. Old fences that had been built once-upon-a-time-ago to keep people out have been torn down and now the citizens of the world can travel without borders. All world leaders are made equal, except for that of President Nicolae Carpathia, whose power supercedes all other world powers combined.

A super-secret super-bug has mysteriously infected members of the underground church movement of believers in Jesus Christ and began slowly and painfully killing them off.

The American President (Lou Gossett Jr.) Gerald Fitzhugh has started to suspect that something is wrong after experiencing a failed assassination attempt on his life, but killed his vice-president instead. Now, starting to look for some answers in the enemy's camp “The Christians”, Fitzhugh finds himself face-to-face with Buck Williams and Buck faced with a gun to his head.

Rayford Steele commits to new love and marries finally closing an old, but opening a new chapter in his life after his first wife and his son vanished years before. Rayford is able to forge new alliances and help Buck save the American President.

Chloe carries out her service for the Lord at the church mission and hospital as the first patients suffering from this new super-bug begin to arrive for some help. Not too long after Chloe and the pastor (family friend) draws ill and near death as yet new victims of the deadly illness.

The appearance of the underground (a rebel group and not associated with the Christians) first comes to the aid of the American President during the assassination attempt and now, the America President wants to have a few words with their commanders. Maybe, both sides can come to trust each other enough to work together against the ultimate powers given to President Nicolae Carpathia by the leaders of the world and the supernatural powers given to him by Satan.

This is an action-packed adventure that the whole family can enjoy, but if you want to know what happens next, then you will need to either buy or rent a copy for the mind-blowing beginning, middle and end of Left Behind World At War.

As the world faces unthinkable challenges ahead leaders around the world willingly transfers their elective powers to just one man, President Nicolae Carpathia and makes him and him alone the United Nations' President. The world's population is transfixed on this charismatic young leader who moves with haste to prevent the world's major currencies from completely collapsing and forms a One World Currency in the blink of an eye.

Most of the people of the world are memorized and hanging on to every single word the charmingly handsome leader speaks, but for a rag-tag band of brothers in Jesus Christ are aware of the true man behind the alluring smile and uncanny wisdom President Carpathia appears to process. For this small group of born-again Christians form their own Tribulation Force, so to try to share the truth the man that the world calls Messiah and to introduce anyone who will listen who can rescue their souls from the wrath to come in the afterlife.

Buck Williams, Rayford Steele and his daughter Chloe prepare to face the forces of evil head-on as they try to collect as much information as humanly possible about the new leader's plans for the future of mankind.

Buck Williams, a shining star of the GNN news network discovers new love and receives an offer that is cannot refuse (I think that you know what I mean) and all before bedtime.

Rayford Steele wrestling with himself to accept a captain's position piloting an airplane which will be responsible for ferrying potentially the world's most dangerous man and the new leader of the United Nations, Nicolae Carpathia. Eventually, this job leads him and Buck to Israel, so that Buck can report live the biggest announcement in the world's history, but Buck and Rayford has made other secretive plans.

Chloe remains back in America to help a church mission and hospital. Praying and pining that man that she loves will return home safely.

Nicolae Carpathia begins seizing the national and world media outlets, so in a vein attempt to stop the spread of Christianity around the world. It is though that it seems that all of the other major world religions are setting the stage for the next evolution in human history, but before anything major can happen - Rabbi Ben Judea is set to announce news that will forever change the world.

If you want to know what happens next, then you will just have to rent or buy the movie.

Onboard an overseas flight to London, journalist Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron) and pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) are caught in the middle of the Rapture when dozens of passengers suddenly disappear including all of the children. Panic ensues as distraught parents and passengers desperately search for love ones.

The whole world has changed in the twinkle of an eye as every single government, company, household and person has lost someone that they knew. The world's economies are tittering on the edge of complete collapse and nervous world leaders are preparing for all out war with the powers that they believe are behind the disappearances.

The disappearances actually marks the beginning “Days of Dire Tribulations” on the Earth as the prophesied Antichrist makes his appearance on the world's stage promising peace, security and solutions to the serious problems that the world now must face. For those that are left behind this is music to their ears and blindly follow this new leader's every word.

For Buck Williams this is the news story of a lifetime and as he begins to investigate the disappearances he is confronted with dangers beyond his own understanding and more importantly he discovers the truth, which profoundly changes young Buck's life.

Pilot Rayford Steele must try to calm his passengers and land the plane without crashing it into the ground in the mist of the chaos both on the ground and in the air. With the assistance of Buck, Rayford returns to the airport and prepares to return to his home to only discover both his wife and young son have both vanished. Fearing that his only daughter has probably vanished too, Rayford sinks into depression as he mourns his loss.

Buck Williams returns back to New York where he works, so to make some sense of the historic events. Ever step of the way danger lurks and his friends begin to be murdered by an unknown shadow government agency. Just when Buck thinks things cannot get any worse, he finds himself being personally invited to the UN by the Antichrist, so to record the closed-door announcement of world leaders as a journalist.

The events that take place after all the world's most powerful leaders has been seated are terrifying in many ways, but probably the most disturbing thing is how no one except for Buck really sees the truth.

Viewers can expect to hear no cursing or no gory violence and no sexual content in this movie. I personally would not recommend this movie to anyone under the age of 13, because the prophesied set of future events that are taught in the Book of Revelation can be scary to children if they are not put into proper context, which requires studying the Word of God to understand.

Left Behind receives a deserving yes, to rent or to buy.