Doomsday Reels: Left Behind - Vanished - Next Generation

Left Behind: Vanished: Next Generation (2016)

The Director

Larry A. McLean

The Actors

Amber Frank (Gabby Harlow), Mason Dye (Josh Jackson), Dylan Sprayberry (Flynn), Keely Wilson (Claire Harlow), Tom Everett Scott (Damon), Brigid Brannagh (Sarah), Jackson Hurst (Eric Harlow), Randy LaHaye (Nicholae Carpathia)

The Trailer

The Cause

The Rapture

The Story

"The event that has happened is called The Rapture. Believers have been caught with Jesus in the air to spare them from the coming tribulation on Earth." - Video

The Rundown

Left Behind: Vanished: Next Generation (as the title card says) or Vanished: Left Behind: Next Generation (as the box art says) is a spin-off of Left Behind based on the book The Vanishings, which was the first of a 40-book spin-off series of the Left Behind books geared toward younger readers which was known as Left Behind Kids. The books dealt with a cast of characters parallel to the protagonists of the adult novels who occassionally cross paths with someone from the main books or notice events from the series. Think of it as a humorless young-adult Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for the Left Behind series.

Five minutes in, the rapture happens and Gabby (Amber Frank) is left alone on the streets of Chicago as things devolve rapidly (perhaps a bit too rapidly) into chaos. She goes and finds her CW-approved platonic best friend (who is clearly in love with her) Josh (Mason Dye) waiting for her at her apartment, his parents have disappeared and they're looking for Gabby's little sister. Now Gabby's sister Claire (Keely Wilson) is 11, an age of person that seems to be sucked up into Heaven by default in these movies so I am left to assume that Claire must be a complete piece of shit because she wasn't taken. Instead she just walked down to an icecream shop and was attacked and saved by some wrong-side-of-the-tracks greaser type named Flynn (Dylan Sprayberry).

They flee down an alley into a nearby church where series mainstay Pastor Bruce Barnes (William Gabriel Grier) is handing out flash drives with a message explaining the rapture. When the church suddenly explodes, the kids escape and Gabby receives a call from her father (Jackson Hurst) only to be cut off as cell phone reception dies. So the four youths head out into the countryside in search of the girls' dad.

When they get to Gabby's father's home it's filled with a group of creeps from an episode of The Walking Dead. The group escapes, horribly injuring Claire's leg in the process and flee into the woods where they find a farm run by doomsday prepper/genius Damon (Tom Everett Scott). Damon's been prepared for the end of the world for a while so this whole thing is no biggie for him and since all kinds of refugees keep showing up at his door he has no issues building his new perfect society. Naturally something dark is lurking beneath the surface, you know the drill.

Vanished: Left Behind: Special Victims Unit is among the better produced installments in the Left Behind series. The actors are all way too prettied up and the sets are a little too authentic to look right but the acting is decent and the plot moves along pretty quickly. This is a movie primarily for preteens, after all. Unfortunately the "it's for kids" angle is Left Behind: First Blood: Part 2's biggest downfall because it's underwritten and boring.

The movie isn't a cozy catastrophe by any stretch, people die, things explode, cars crash, guns are shoved in people's faces. The characters are in near-constant danger but there's a plodding a-to-b-to-c rhythm to the whole thing. The story is trite, it's been done a million times before and there's just nothing new or special that Left Behind: Vanished: Deep Space Nine has to bring to the table.

The religious message of the whole thing, while much more blatant than in the Left Behind remake doesn't really intrude on the plot much and the movie doesn't talk down to its audience as much as the previous entries did. It approaches Christianity less as a thing that our characters turned away from than a thing they just didn't know about, which makes sense considering that teens are the target here rather than adults.

As I said, all the actors are fine. None of the main characters are terribly interesting. Gabby is your average teen-lit heroine with a bratty kid sister to whom she's fiercely devoted. Josh is the best-friend-who-wants-to-be-more and Flynn is the soulful-bad-boy type. The movie is leaning hard into trying to cash in on the Twilight series, though it thankfully only tries to emulate the teen-girl wish fulfillment portions of that series, not the bit about grooming girls to properly serve their emotionally-abusive stalkers.

The one stand-out performance is Tom Everett Scott as Damon. He's one of those actors who has been in everything yet I can't summon to mind any of his past performances. Here he's a manic, grinning, wild-eyed goon. He's making a lot of very specific acting choices and just chewing scenery like a madman. The weirdest/best part about his performance is that he seems to be channeling John C. Reilly whenever he gets excited.

Of all of the Left Behind movies, Left Behind: Port of Call: New Orleans tries the most to be an actual movie and that's commendable. Unfortunately, Left Behind: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World isn't very interesting, entertaining, or good. It's a movie that's excessively fine which makes it too good to hate-watch and not good enough to bother with. It might as well not even exist.