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.

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.

Still feeding off the success of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan amazes movie goers once again with a script that nobody else would have been able to sell to anyone. What could have been a powerfully portent addition to the apocalyptic genre does grave injustice to the subject of the story, the stars that play it and the humanity it portrays.

Without any hint of urgency, the audience is informed that the world as we know it is coming to an end because for some unidentified reason all the bees have gone missing. That must have upset the plants, explains the plucky hot-dog eating breeder, because plants are more talkative than most humans. Apparently, we plastic MacHumans are too spiritually morose, even, to show some decent hysteria when our fellow men jump off buildings by the bushel or offer both arms for lions to devour. Blood-and-guts gush, sound effects thunder, but no tear is shed as the invisible foe prowls along in windy undulations and makes us kill ourselves in the most creative ways.

But then, there's this curious, albeit completely over-acted, display of emotions when one single guy, who's demonstratively not affected by the killer pollen, takes up a riffle and shoots some other not-infected person. At once Zooey Deschanel's amazing blue eyes water up and fill the screen, and our hero - played by the usually well-composed Mark Wahlberg - bursts into feelings that weren't there before when he and thousands of others were trying to escape mass execution by patiently waiting for a train, courteously exchanging tickets or the muffled bickerings of toothpaste-cap level arguments.

And the audience is left to pray: If the three concepts of Holocaust, some guy named Joey, and munching tiramisu can somehow find a way to go together, please God, let there at least be a very good reason!

But there is none, and God stays silent. Now why is that?

Religion is ubiquitous in the US, whether you like it or not. How can there be an apocalyptic movie without some mouth-frothing extras screaming quotes from the Book of Revelation in it?

The Book of Revelation is the most famous member of a body of apocalyptic literature that was produced two millennia ago. This genre was a typical result of the formation of empires that were as large as the known world, because to any human individual, empires are so huge that only a divine power can bring them to an end. Apocalyptic literature invariably showed God's wrath being brought about by known natural events such as earth quakes, volcanoes or even meteorites.

In the twentieth century, the apocalyptic genre was revived by mankind's growing global awareness but the rise of technology sired an apocalyptic sub-genre: movies and books began to identify mankind as rival God as the cause of global destruction. During the cold war we thought that nuclear weapons might do the trick, or else some martial virus that would escape from secret military labs. But in recent years our increased concern for the environment opened a market for the classical nature-strikes-back story. Hence we see Armageddon come in the wake of a mindless meteor, or The Day After Tomorrow mathematically triggered by pollution.

Shyamalan's Happening however lets us guess at the nature of the story and leaves us indignant with the desire to know what we're getting killed for. Is Syamalan saying that our collective behavior of the recent age translates into, or triggers, this mass self-suicide? Or has nature consciously declared war on us? Or are we all the victims of some transgressed critical-mass threshold? Why is the girl near the window with the tree saying that she sees "in calculus"? Why does neither the math teacher nor the science teacher submit some scientific substance to this ordeal, other than the glorious insight that there are some forces of nature that we don't understand?

Are we supposed to quickly forget that to help us deal with exactly that, mankind has come up with religion, and that excursions into religious thought are deeply human? Shyamalan's movie, however, is peopled by puppets that have not a thing to do with human beings, our true need to know, and the consolation of the belief in a God. Unless you count the sinister Mrs. Jones, who maintains her signature ignorance with signature zeal, while displaying Bible texts and Jesus statues all over her house. When she goes, and she goes grimly, she's singing Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd, while the green pastures that He leads us to are known to be the very fields that kill us.

Luckily, our hero is a stud and our heroine is hot. And that kid's cute too. Too bad the kid's not clairvoyant, the heroine a retired missionary and our scientific hero an Indiana Jones kind of theologian. He would have revealed within the first minute of the movie that the Hades-trailing fourth horseman of the apocalypse is chlorophyll-green, that the Biblical word for bee is closely related to the word "Word" (of God), and that the Biblical word for wind is identical to the word for spirit.

Nah. That would have made that movie perhaps too scary all at once.

But where a wrathful God would have saved a city on the merits of five righteous inhabitants, so Shyamalan's The Happening is rescued from complete failure by Mark Wahlberg's smile in the last minute of the movie. That two-second smile alone tells more story and shows more character than the entire preceding drag. It makes the movie mesmerizing and shows that somewhere deep under the roots of the killer grass there lies an initial intention of making a truly great film.

Ben Stein goes through great lengths to convince us that this has nothing at all to do with religion. Maybe he should've watched his own movie. After informing us that this is about science, we hear tale after tale of scary godless atheists who were converted to this horrifying Darwinian thought. In case the audience wasn't bright enough to get the point, droning ominous music plays throughout the entire film, that is until Ben Stein's rousing and liberating speech at the end. I think we may just have another Martin Luther King, Jr. on our hands.

Now onto what the movie has to say. Basically, it's a grand conspiracy theory that attempts to show the way in which mounds and mounds of evidence regarding intelligent design (better termed "Creationism") is discarded and hidden from the public in an effort to turn the world into Nazis. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm actually half-serious. Stein actually does draw the comparison of scientists to Nazis on multiple occasions. But back to the topic at hand. Stein ignores one extremely tremendous issue: creationism/intelligent design isn't science! At best it could be described as philosophy but in reality only the conservative and fundamentalist religious branches tend to have any interest in the subject at all.

The fundamentalists are right when they quickly point out that evolution cannot explain the origin of life, but this is a limit of all science, not the theory of biological evolution. Science is a study of the observable, and there is nothing observable about life origin as it only occurred once. Unless a way is discovered to repeat it, this is simply outside the realm of science and evolution. Yes, religion may give an answer, but it is hardly evidenced or provable, meaning that it has no place in a science classroom.

To compound the film's already illogical base, individuals were actually conned into making this film. Famed author of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was lied to regarding the film's title and focus. He states that when making quipping remarks regarding intelligent design, the interviewer laughed right along with him. He also describes the way in which he attempted to discredit intelligent design, but was edited into the film as seemingly supporting it. For anyone even slightly familiar with Richard Dawkins, they would know this to be untrue.

Another such example of dishonesty is that which was shown toward the gentleman who discussed the "crystal theory," and was edited to appear as if he believed this theory. He in fact does not at all, but was simply attempting to dignify Stein's question regarding currently existent theories of origin within the scientific community.

Constantly repeated throughout this boring and artless film is the notion that the scientific community is unwilling to discuss intelligent design, which is beyond untrue. I have sitting beside me a book entitled Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism. This is a detailed and complex work thoroughly addressing the arguments levied against biological evolution. I would find it difficult to believe that anyone would find the book evasive. I also am holding a book titled Evolution and Religious Creation Myths by none other than Oxford University Press. For those unfamiliar with Oxford University Press, they are also responsible for the printing of America's most comprehensive Bible. So to say that academics or science doesn't take the arguments for intelligent design seriously is a bit ridiculous.

Lastly is this ridiculous notion of evolution leading to Holocaust-like violence. For those unfamiliar with Hitler, he was not an atheist, rather a Catholic. His hatred for Jews was rooted in probably large part to his Catholic heritage. To quote Dr. Dawkins, "Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that ‘All Jews should be driven from Germany.'" Bill Maher is quoted in the film as saying that we should "regulate religion" rather than guns or drugs. I see more of a tie from religion to horrendous acts than from the theory of evolution to horrendous acts when discussing Hitler. To insinuate that modern scientists are stupid enough to commit acts of genocide in the name of science is insulting to the entire hard-working scientific community.

Any biological scientist dealing with evolution will explain that this theory exists to describe natural behavior, not to encourage human interaction based on such behavior. One can actually see the opposite in fields such as psychology and sociology, which work to help people overcome oftentimes animalistic instincts by use of evolutionary theory.

So in the end, this film only serves to throw fire on the already sensationalized conspiracy theory regarding scientists and evolution. There are many explanations for why this debate rages on, but I have a theory. It seems to me that humankind wants to feel as if they are above all other forms of life, sort of an innate self-superiority. When admitting that all life relies on, and comes from, other life, a piece of that superiority is lost. They often mask this by saying that without this innate superiority, without being "in the image of God" as Creationists put it, we are unimportant.

However, this argument falls flat when one realizes one can approach this from an opposing perspective. When we become a part of all earthly life, and all earthly life becomes a part of us, one could argue that it raises the value of all life. The interdependency allows us to appreciate the beauty and complexity of life, something that people like Stein may never be able to experience.