Revelations--and the people who talk about it

Revelations (exec. prod. Gavin Polone; with Bill Pullman, Natascha McElhone, John Rhys-Davis, et al.; Pariah Productions, 2005) is the latest attempt by secular entertainers--in this case, NBC Television--to skim some cash from the current popular fascination with matters apocalyptic. And, as is true of most such efforts, this project manages to get so many things wrong that the blunders overshadow the good that the series might have done. Unfortunately, deciding which is sillier--this project or the opinions of some secular reviewers--is even more difficult than watching the show itself.

If you can imagine spreading peanut butter on a hamburger, or pouring ketchup on a stack of pancakes, you will know why I am disappointed in this project. The producers have many ingredients, any one of which would be ideal for any number of projects. But these particular ingredients make a wretchedly unpalatable recipe.

What works:

• The actors, especially Bill Pullman as a scientist who, though skeptical to the point of bitterness, never forgets that the best thing a scientist can be is curious.
• Little things: An evolutionist holds forth on how a tornado in a junkyard would be more likely to build Buckingham Palace (actually the original metaphor read "to assemble a Boeing 747") than would random factors produce life, yet life exists. And as he insists that random factors were the only things responsible for that, he has no idea that half of what he has just said contradicts the other half. You couldn't ask for a better portrait of modern evolutionists and their clueless pontifications.
• Another little thing: doctors wait for a teen-age girl to die so that they can harvest her organs--looking for all the world like a flock of buzzards circling over a thirsty desert hiker. Imagine their disappointment when Mister Skeptic himself holds the girl's hand--and her EKG goes from asystole to normal sinus rhythm in five seconds! The producers couldn't have known this, but the sad case of Terri Schindler Schiavo cannot fail to make people take note of such a scene--again, a perfect metaphor for our mixed-up medical profession that has slipped its moral moorings completely.
• More little things--like the academic groupie who babbles on and on about how honored he is to meet The Great Professor. I've been in academia, and I've seen those hangers-on. They behave just that way, and that the professors don't tell those rubes to get lives of their own speaks volumes about academic ego.

Unfortunately, that's about all that works. Because the basic premise is not end-times prophecy at all. This is horror masquerading as end-times prophecy. Worse yet, it has every other contemporary myth thrown in--things that aren't in the Bible at all. Put this in your not adding to or taking away from the Bible [Revelation 22:18-19] files: The clinically dead do not "trance-channel" the souls of the departed. Even if they did, as a teen-aged girl struck by lightning does (after walking across a golf course in an electrical storm--how stupid can you get?), they wouldn't quote the Latin Vulgate! They'd far more likely quote John the Revelator, Paul the Apostle, and so on in the language that those men originally spoke, which was Koine Greek, not Latin! Nor will Jesus come back as a baby, which the show hints at with a brief set of sequences involving the rescue of an infant from a shipwreck. (Actually, the show doesn't say what it's hinting at with that one, but I can forgive that because it's the first installment of a series with a continuing mystery story arc.)

Worse than all the extrabiblical elements that the show contains is what is missing. Aside from a few pictures that look as though they were adapted from CNN and BBC footage from the Middle East and elsewhere, where do we hear of the political situation that will obtain, and come to fruition, during this period? Where is the movement crying out for "leadership for a world gone mad" that we saw to such good effect, say, in The Shoes of the Fisherman? And while I can understand not having a portrait of the Rapture, I cannot understand failing to mention the Tribulation.

The producers did borrow one technique from Vic Sarin's film adaptation of Left Behind, namely filming everything in dim light to give you a sense of impending doom. It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now. To illustrate, it made the hospital scenes play out like an episode of Kingdom Hospital, Stephen King's abysmally failed project about a haunted hospital with characters who were weird enough without the strange goings-on.

As bad as this project is, most of the secular reviews are worse. Tom Shales, for example, can't stop talking about how religion is bunk, anyway, and that the real issue about kingdom rising against kingdom involves greedy multinational corporations--private businesses doing things that Mr. Shales no doubt would rather see done in common by government. His characterization of Revelation as "the wackiest...book of the New Testament" speaks volumes about his whole attitude, and makes him no better than that professor boldly asserting that the tornado in the junkyard did build life after all. He was supposed to produce a review of a TV show. What he gave us instead was yet another anti-sermon against religion in general.

Hal Boedeker at The Orlando Sentinel, as quoted in The Houston Chronicle, manages to come closer to the central problem of the project. He actually interviewed Bill Pullman, who told him straight-out what NBC's problem is: "We don't want to offend anybody!" That won't cut it, of course. You can't tell a story about the Bible without offending someone. Jesus Himself could have told them that--and did, too, as they'd have found out if they would but read the Bible before they put together a dramatic project on it.

Mike Duffy at The Detroit Free Press is more typical of those who get some of the point, but not all of it. "Formula paranormal hokum" is his phrase for what the series might wind up being no better than. True as far as it goes--but when he quotes head writer David Seltzer as he talks of mankind playing a positive role in the last things, he shows his own weakness. The trouble is that I doubt that even the religion editor would have known to tell him that David Seltzer cannot be correct about that--because prophecy will work itself out according to a definite plan, and puny man cannot stand in the way.

The bottom line: Don't bother watching the rest of the show. But then again, don't bother relying on secular reviewers, either. Sometimes people come to the right conclusion on faulty premises. This is a prime example.