The Rapture | | Cast : | Mimi Rogers, David Duchovny | | Director : | Michael Tolkin | | Studio : | New Line Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | October 04, 1991 | | DVD Released Date : | November 02, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 08, 2005 | | Summary | "How long mommy?" | Content
 | I love the work of Michael Tolkin, he also directed the great film "THE NEW AGE" starring Judy Davis & Peter Weller. Mimi Roger's gives an oscar-worthy performance. I have seen people extremely moved by this film. I saw it with a girl whom is now a fundamentalist Christian (she was struggling with spiritual beliefs at the time) at the end of the film she could not stop weeping, she kept saying "that's not fair". That should give you an idea of the profound impact this film can have on people. I am not a Christian, the film's religious characters are part of a new-age/fundamentalist christian group that always refers to something called 'the blue pearl'. As Mimi Rogers said "this film has no happy answers." And yes it does go where few films dare to go, which is wonderful. This is a film that needs to be embraced. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 12, 2005 | | Summary | A movie that will definitely provoke thought/discussion! | Content
| I've read some of the reviews already posted (from Christians who are touchy about the subject through to those who clearly are Anti-Christian and delight in poking fun at believers). The diverse opinions suffice to tell you this is not as simplistic or poorly done a film as some might suggest. I do not understand the reviews that say they are confused and don't understand. The movie is hardly that complicated that you can't get some coherent understanding of the plot.
NOTE: I may review more detail than you wish. Consider this a spoiler warning, although I don't give it all away, I wouldn't want you to feel cheated.
First off: I'm a believer. Yes, I believe in God, Christ, the Bible, the historic creeds and in the Rapture to come (I'm post-trib, for those who care). With all that, I liked this film. I enjoyed Mimi Rogers' performance and I enjoyed seeing the journey of this troubled character. We're not dealing with a character who does things in moderation. When she was pre-Christian, she didn't just have sex, she had SEX!, promiscuously, in groups, etc. We learn it's her way of filling this void she feels, the boredom of her meaningless existence. She attempts suicide. She's a mess. BUT...she has a vision of "the pearl" and it gives her a sense of peace and soon she's turned her life over to God and she's a Christian with a Z for ZEAL, evangelizing anyone she can--on the job, on the phone, friends, strangers. To some believers, this seems quite fine and laudable. To some, it will seem strange and immoderate. I think that's part of the interest. Where is this woman going now?
The movie has this haunting air about it. You get a sense of being on the edge of doom, which is suitable given the subject matter. Even when she's all aglow and talking about God, you get the sense this character is rushing headlong into another type of excess. The character may have found something that gives her purpose, and a stability, but something about her is still unbalanced emotionally. Even her "peace" is an excessive peace. Tragedy befalls her--SPOILERS--stop reading if you don't wanna know:--when her husband is murdered in a killing spree at work, and still she keeps this strange calm. You don't see her really break down or do anything a normal grieving woman--Christian or otherwise--would do. It's rather spooky.
When she has visions that beckon her to the desert, visions that gave me the willies and seemed kind of sinister, like a haunting--visions that have even her church's Prophetic Boy warning her that they stand unconfirmed by other believers and might be from Satan--we have a growing suspicion that something will go terribly wrong.
And it does.
One can look at this story as the descent into madness of a never very stable woman and wonder if anything in those last minutes is real or if it's all imagined, sanity banished.
From a Christian perspective, I take enjoyment in a more literal reading that, despite any directorial intention is the most taken away from the film. This is a woman we've seen crack up, a woman whose been kept in check by her faith, her husband and her church. When she loses her ties to a husband, who never had that weird, glazed look like the main character, and when she then distances herself from the accountability and safety net of a church by heading for the wilderness, and then when she allows her faith to buckle, she's left with nothing to stop her from rashness and crazed decisions.
What should this woman know? She should know from her church sermons that to go into the desert is typically a sign of temptation to come: Jesus went into the desert and the devil tried to get him to move away from his mission and disobey God. Here, we see a woman who is tempted, perhaps not by Satan, but by her own desires. She wants to be raptured. She wants to go to heaven. She wants to be done with life down here. She wants the culmination of her faith. She's tried to die before and failed, she wants to go to the better place. The temptation is great, so great, she forgets simple admonitions she surely knows by heart--
Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt love the Lord thy God, thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.
A simple prophetic warning that is uttered by the Prophet Boy and subsequently by the character's daughter, one that is ambiguous at best--"Don't expect God to meet you halfway"--is twisted, as any advice can be, to suit one's emotional needs or fears.
To Christians, some things will irk. For instance, the innacurate rendering of a well-known Biblical doctrine/verse: We love Him because He first loved us. Well, here it becomes, "He loves us because we love him." A total turnaround of truth.
The Controversial Ending: To any orthodox (not as in Greek Orthodox but as in traditionally doctrinal) Christian, the ending is not controversial. Are we suprised that God both showers grace and forgives at the last minute or that he implacably judges and condemns? I think not. We know He does both.
However, God shows his grace by giving the character multiple opportunities to make a different decision. Providentially, someone she knows from her past shows up near the end. Then another character counsels her. Then another gives her an example. So many chances....Then character chooses her final fate, all the while unwilling to see where she is at fault. It's easier to just blame God.
The director/writer may have meant this to be Anti-Christian. Dunno. I didn't HAVE to take that away from it. I could choose to see it as an examination of a particular character with specific weaknesses and how it manifests in the context of Christian eschatology. The other Christians aren't shown being cruel or harsh or encouraging disastrous outcomes. Ultimately, this is about this ONE woman. One woman's choice. A very pro-choice film, actually. And the ending may cheer fans of INVICTUS, but it will make most of us feel pity.
If one wants to see it as a mental degeneration of a troubled woman, that works, too. But I don't think it works as well as accepting the ending as "real". The film's power works only if the woman's choice is a true-life scenario and not the mental figment of a lunatic.
The Rapture can lead to fruitful and interesting discussion after viewing, even for believers. I recommend it.
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| Rating | | | Date | June 01, 2005 | | Summary | Is This What They Teach You In Scientology 101??? | Content
| In this movie the former Mrs. Tom Cruise,Mimi Rogers plays a woman who tries to lose herself insexualencounters. Then she tries to lose herslf once agin in religion. AS Ms. Rogers loses herself through this movie she steals food from a fast food joint and even shoots her young daughter!!! Gee. I hope I never "lose myself!!!". The only redeeming factor in this movie is that we do get to see Ms. Rogers in various states of undress which is why I give this movie 5 stars. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 29, 2005 | | Summary | Dark Almost Gothic Portrait of a Tormented Woman | Content
| The Rapture is a brave film about a hedonistic woman who, bored and empty from her swinging, tries to fill the void with an ecstatic brand of Christianity in which dreams, revelations, and portents are the main focus of her new faith. She is so vulnerable and naive that she embraces the most dangerous elements of religious conversion--emotionalism, fanaticism, end-of-the-world fatalism. Mimi Rogers' performance is excellent as a woman slowly having a religious meltdown but the final act goes on too long and becomes to maudlin for my tastes. Nevertheless, this is a brave film filled with excellent dialogue that questions faith from many angles. Is the film anti-religious? I don't think so. Atheism and hedonism are not kindly looked at in this film. Nor is blind faith. But just because Tolken shows the dangers of a fanatic, doesn't mean he is hostile to all forms of religion. Those charges are unfair. The film is far more complex than being a screed against this or that brand of faith. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 15, 2005 | | Summary | Faith vs. Pride in a showdown that's the end of the world! | Content
| Someone on this page lobbed an interesting criticism of Michael Tolkin's astonishing and hypnotic The Rapture, saying that it's anti-Christian propaganda. I think that criticism has more validity than many would give it credit for - not because sex or violence is immediately anti-Christian, but because its central character takes her faith way too far, and then retreats from it to a defensive position of pride when the world actually does end. And because, despite all the things this movie does right, that depiction of the apocalypse is visually a bit hard to swallow - is the afterlife really that inundated with fog machines? The reason I think this movie is so good and so important, though, is that it presents the extremes of faith and pride, of redemption and personal emptiness as just part of the everyday concerns of this character, embodied with brave and gripping humanity by Mimi Rogers in an astonishing performance. Her character is so complicated and fascinating that it dismisses the hard-earned truth of movie to say its point is simply "Christians bad." Instead, it examines with empathy the very human factors that lead people to faith, the dark possibilities of excessive devotion to it, and the anger and pride at having been through it all. For that, I still find The Rapture one of a kind, a gripping parable and anti-parable in one. |
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