A Distant Thunder (1978)

 

    I was unaware of what kind of movie this was when I started or I would have likely chosen something else, so briefly here’s a list of things I will not be discussing in-depth: acting talent, budgetary constraints, editing choices, wardrobe, filming locations, set decoration, and the specific details of mid-20^th century Evangelical Christian eschatology.  Everything else is fair game.

Scare quotes right in the title.

    ‘A Distant Thunder’ is the second movie in a four-movie series produced by Mark IV Pictures Inc. between 1972 and 1983 as explicit propaganda for fundamentalist Christians foretelling a literal interpretation of the coming Biblical apocalypse.  I didn’t know that.  The entire Tubi description reads "A female fugitive is relentlessly chased by an anti-Christ group of operatives during the end of days and given a choice to join them or be killed."  This is broadly true, but I was expecting something more in line with ‘Satan’s Blood’ or ‘The Devil’s Rain,’ some low-effort horror quickie that I could kick back and enjoy.  Instead I was exposed to a live-wire feed of Midwestern paranoia.

    The first movie in the series was 1972’s ‘A Thief in the Night’ and tells a relatively straightforward story.  The main character Patty wakes up post-Rapture to hear about it on the news, it immediately flashes back to her life before the Rapture, we spend the first forty minutes meeting her friends and family and learning who does and doesn’t believe the correct things, then after the flashback ends the one world government is set up in about five minutes, she’s immediately captured for refusing the Mark of the Beast, then spends the last twenty minutes running from the bad guys before being thrown off of a dam and waking up to find it was all a dream, only to learn that this time she’s really woken up post-Rapture, ‘Nightmare City’ style.  The second movie picks up directly after she wakes up at the end of the first, and the third and fourth movies are more-or-less completely independent of the first two, concerning a guerilla uprising and the post-apocalypse, respectively.

    This is why aspects of the movie like acting or editing are relatively immune to criticism, they are mostly irrelevant to the intended function of the movie.  It’s not meant for entertainment or art, it’s overt propaganda.  Any technical shortcomings are really only a problem in the instances where they distract from or lessen the impact of the messages being conveyed, which luckily for me it manages to do often enough. 

I undserstand this to be the simplified version.

    As I said I have no interest in this kind of material and had I known what I was in for I probably would have just skipped right over it, but I’d added it to my watch queue and once I started I decided I might as well finish.  I also had some curiosity on what might have inadvertently snuck through during the process of making the movie.  Could some accidental art have happened, some glimpses of an underlying humanity that they didn’t intend but were captured anyways?

    There were two things I kept focusing on and finding fascinating during the watching and I was never able to determine the exact cause of either of them.  The first is the seeming contradiction between establishing a very detailed, very complicated eschatology that extrapolates very specific real-world predictions about how the world is going to end from snippets of scripture while at the same being completely unable to think through any of the actual consequences a Rapture-like event would have on the real world and the people remaining.  The second is such an inability to portray fully-realized people that the entire thing could have been portrayed by people standing in a row reading a series of pamphlets to the camera for a similar overall effect while at the same time having some of their actions be so random and unnecessary I was left wracked in utter confusion.

    To a certain extent I’m able to wave away the deficits in world-building as a function of budget.  I’m not complaining about the lack of plane crashes in the background from pilots vanishing mid-flight, this thing was basically shot for around $500,000 in the late 70’s in deepest Iowa.  At two different times they show buildings on fire and employed a full cast and crew, they did well enough.  I’m also not going to criticize them for the lack of exposition about things like the Mark of the Beast or explain why one world government banners suddenly start showing up.  The intended audience for this is not going in blind and has almost certainly seen the first movie.  This would only be a problem for a film meant to be understood as an actual film.

    However, they’re the ones who chose to make this a movie and include a narrative, so they don’t get to entirely escape criticism.  Certain things are either left vague to the point where plot points don’t make sense or what is established contradicts things that happen later.  Immediately post-Rapture our main character Patty moves out of her home to move into her grandmother’s now-empty farmhouse because she can’t afford the mortgage.  This implies that the global financial system has continued more-or-less undisturbed.  At the same time she states that in the week since the Rapture the mail hasn’t been delivered, which implies some level of disruption.  Once they’re at the farmhouse it’s variously stated that it’s at the edge of town or five miles away from town, depending on the needs of the scene.  It’s eventually stated that food and gas start to become scarce, but it’s never established what is causing either of those things to happen.  After the Mark of the Beast is introduced it’s announced that within a couple of weeks its adoption will become mandatory, yet the main characters are instantly arrested for not having the Mark.  When the main characters are being held before their execution in an unlocked church with no restraints there are never more than two guards around who could be easily overpowered, yet they meekly accept their fates.  If the point of the movie is to portray how much it’s going to suck if you don’t get Raptured these details matter.

    The second issue is both more and less obvious and it took me a while to tease out what exactly was bothering me.  The more obvious part is that none of these people have any kind of interior life, they exist as line-spouting machines for the message of the filmmakers.  Questions are never asked out of curiosity or to establish character, they are there to tee up the next point they’re making.  The structure of the movie is a series of nested flashbacks before Patty’s upcoming execution for refusing the Mark.  People ask her questions to set up the next flashback.  Patty asks a question to prompt the person she’s with to start monologuing to her and by proxy the audience. 

About as much characterization as anyone gets.

    The less obvious part is a matter of behavior and although it seems to stem from the same problem as the previous point it hits differently.  The actions of the characters are basically dictated by the plot and not the other way around.  At one point two characters go to a park despite the ostensible danger they’re in because the movie needs them to go to the park to get captured.  Another character literally walks up to the headquarters of the evil organization at the urging of two other characters she has spent the entire movie distrusting because there’s only ten minutes left and we need to wrap things up.

    It’s the smaller details of these behaviors that really makes me want to dig in.  At one point they meet an old man who wanders into their Bible study group held in an abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere looking for food.  He mentions he lives in town with no explanation of why he chose to then wander in the woods looking for food.  One of the women says she’ll bring some food to him the next day at the park.  They meet and although she does not in fact bring him any food they talk about Jesus and then she offers to let him stay with them.  Mind you, at no point has he expressed any fear for his life or anything other than a lack of food, which wouldn’t be solved by his moving in with them.  He accepts, she says she’ll meet him the next day, then he’s never mentioned again until years later when they randomly run into him in the park.  He ends up being a red herring, implied to be the one who turns them in to the authorities, but in the end he isn’t, the entire thing apparently just a misdirect for the audience.

Witness the might of the One World Government!

    Which is fine as far as it goes but the details become maddening.  Why does the old man think wandering around asking for food is a decent strategy?  Why does the woman offer to have him move in with them and why does he accept?  Why do years go by without addressing any of this?  The answer is probably sloppy writing and filmmaking incompetence but all of this is easily fixable.  Have the man wandering by, hear their bible study, and express interest.  The other women are uncomfortable but the true believer offers to meet him the next day in the park.  She does so and they start talking and he proves reluctant to believe but she offers to keep meeting with him as often as she can.  This way when they meet later in the park she has a reason to be there and if she hasn’t seen him for a while it can still establish him as a possible suspect.

    Another example is her reverend.  He’s around post-Rapture so clearly he’s made some mistakes, but when Patty confronts him about this, criticizing him for not emphasizing the Rapture and criticizing the scare tactics of other preachers pre-Rapture, but he turns it right back around and blames her.  I would have thought the movie would embrace this point and have the reverend explain exactly how he was wrong to show preachers how to do it correctly, but nope.  He says she had access to the Bible and really it was her fault for not correcting him or finding another church.  When last we see him he’s in slight disarray preaching to no one in a darkened, boarded-up church while Patty walks sadly away.  I think the intent here is to put the onus on the individual believers and maybe poach them from other churches, but I had to watch the scene three times to even start to parse what was going on.  In a post-Rapture world where these two characters are in agreement about exactly what happened I would have thought some humility was in order, especially from the religious figure who apparently got it extra wrong, but instead it’s just another opportunity for the movie to lecture the audience directly, which it later directly undercuts by showing that same character as utterly unhinged.  Were we supposed to understand the reverend as in the wrong when he was criticizing Patty?  He was framed as being correct, all forceful language right at in her face while Patty was abashed and teary-eyed, and everything he was rebuking her for was also stated by other characters already established as heroic.

    It’s entirely possible that there are facets of the filmmakers’ eschatology or overall belief system which explain all of this.  There could be specific Bible passages these are alluding to, although considering how characters tend to explicitly quote and cite scripture whenever possible I doubt they’d ever be that coy.  And the illogical actions of characters in a movie as genuinely terrible as this is hardly surprising.  How these actions are illogical, however, are in ways that would never have occurred to me and imply the contours of a worldview that I feel like I’m trying to reconstruct from far too few pieces. 

    It might all stem from a place of utter certainty.  Most artists, to a certain extent, are exploring ideas in their works rather than consciously working towards a definite conclusion.  Even in works with predictable endings there are always moments of uncertainty along the way, explorations of possibility or moments of introspection.  The natural inclination of bad filmmakers to treat their characters like action figures to be moved around dovetails rather naturally with the idea that you know, for a fact, how the world is going to end and your only job is to lay out how that for sure is going to happen with a light dusting of narrative fiction on top.  This might explain why the details are so sloppy: if you know where you’re ending up the little things are ultimately unimportant, but I still can’t figure out why she offered to let that old guy move in with them and why he accepted, or why the reverend was utterly unapologetic about failing at the one job he had to do.

    In a way this was a useful movie because by its very nature the easy criticisms that would usually work just bounce right off of it, forcing me to look a little closer.  Writing’s bad?  Doesn’t matter.  Acting’s terrible?  Not the point.  The only interesting things are those cracks in the movie which complicate the dogmatic message it’s intended to convey, either through confusion or possible contradiction.  What would be the biggest flaw in any other version of this movie, the utter implausibility of the person who eventually betrays her friends to the evil world government, is instead a kind of culmination of the entire endeavor.  We were never meant to see it coming, in fact all of her previous actions actually argued against this reveal, and that’s not a problem as instead of a narrative payoff this is the movie teaching a lesson that you, the viewer, should fundamentally distrust everyone around you, even those who say all of the right words, trust only in your own understanding of the world, and actively resist anyone who would attempt to convince you otherwise.  The entire movie is an indoctrination into a paranoid, anti-social, and above all imminently eschatological worldview that expects your actual death at any moment and is convincing you to look forward to it.

    Which makes pointing out that a prop in the final scene is clearly a laundry basket spraypainted silver rather beside the point.

I mean, that's just what it is.