Hollywood Ending

by Jed Heyman

To anyone who isn’t a biblical scholar, NBC’s miniseries Revelations, the finale of which airs tonight at 8 p.m., presents something of a mystery. Those of us who skipped Sunday school — or, egad, went to Hebrew school — wonder whether writer and executive producer David Seltzer knows something we don’t about how the end of the world will occur, or almost occur. Seltzer has the spooky spiritual bent for it: A couple of decades ago he wrote The Omen. (He also wrote Billy Crystal’s 1998 bomb, My Giant, but even prophets gotta put food on the table.) Is Seltzer’s depiction of the apocalypse realistic? Is Limp Bizkit’s doughy frontman, Fred Durst, really the satanist he plays on TV, and will he have a major role in the end of the world? And if a nun attempts to save the world, will she be as foxy as Revelations’ Natascha McElhone? In an effort to find the truth, we consulted a real live expert on the Apocalypse, one William Terry James, evangelical author and half of the two-man team that runs raptureready.com, a website that quantifies world events into data predicting the coming Rapture. (According to the site, you just might want to hold off on buying property.) James, who happens to be blind, was kind enough to “watch” the series and report back. His final judgment: Eh, it’s not the end of the world.

Radar: So, are you digging the show?

James: The production quality and the acting are great. But when you’re talking about Bible truths, as we see it you’re talking some serious stuff. So I wish I could say something to commend the series from the standpoint of content, but I can’t. It is so far off base biblically that it doesn’t even relate to what God’s word has to say about prophesied future.

R: Wow. What did they get wrong?

J: The most egregious thing is that they have Jesus Christ being reborn as a baby in the second coming. This is so far off from what the Scriptures say. I mean, in Revelation 19:11 it plainly says that clouds are going to roll back and He is going to descend on a gleaming white steed with the armies of heaven behind him. He’s going to come back as the king of kings. There will be no coming back as a baby, I can assure you.

R: That seems like a whopper of a mistake. Anything else?

J: Jerusalem is hardly mentioned at all! Lemme tell ya, if you take the Bible literally, God says that everything is going to be wrapped around right back to Jerusalem and the conflict of Armageddon, which isn’t just one battle but a whole war.

R: Anything else?

J: They also have the Antichrist being born of the relations between a woman and a beast. Now, we don’t know who he’ll be yet, but he won’t be the combination of a beast and a human being, I’ll tell you that. He will be born of human parents but will be demonically possessed.

R: But didn’t you find it a stretch to think that Bill Pullman and Natascha McElhone could prevent the end of the world?

J: It’s absolutely ludicrous to say that a nun and an astrophysicist could somehow delay and stop the coming of the Antichrist by catching him before he was born. If you just watch it as a horror story, that’s fine. But they’re presenting it as truth.

R: Do you think The Truth: The Miniseries would really be any good?

J: It would make wonderful television. I guarantee you, if I could do a script for TV it would be as exciting as anything they could put together. I just wish to goodness I could have been a part of the show, because I guarantee they would be finding an audience of the magnitude of [Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ blockbuster] Left Behind books to watch this thing if they had gone the direction that we feel they should have.

R: Do you think the Antichrist is alive today?

J: I do, and I think he’ll be stepping onto the stage before too long.

R: Uh-oh. What should we be looking out for?

J: The Antichrist will be loved and cherished by everybody, because he’s going to get Israel, all of its enemy neighbors, and the whole world involved in a peace process. He will be considered a great, charismatic leader, like a JFK.

R: A Democrat, huh? Do you think he could possibly be, say, more like George W. Bush?

J: Believe me, George W. Bush is not the Antichrist.

R: I’m not 100 percent convinced of it either, but the guy is trying to broker peace in the Middle East.

J: I like George W. Bush, but he is totally 150 percent off base to force Israel into a false peace, because that’s what it is. I do believe that this road map to peace is a forerunner of this very thing the Antichrist is going to introduce. It won’t be Bush, though, because he doesn’t fit within the parameters for the Antichrist. The Antichrist has to literally come out of the geographical area of the old Roman Empire.

R: We’ll be very wary of Italians from now on. If you directed your version of the end of the world, would there still be room for a hot nun?

J: Yeah! We’re not prudes. We procreate like anybody else. And it’s fun.