Photo Gallery
Assuming that viewers, while they might have heard of or read the Book of Revelation, won't be too familiar with the particularities of evangelical thought about the 'End Times,' the film lays out the four supposed stages for the end of the Earth and the return of Jesus Christ. First comes the Rapture, which in addition to inspiring those neat bumper stickers ('In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned') is also a sort of instantaneous judgment in which all the righteous believers get zapped straight up to heaven, while the sinners are left to wonder things like, hey, where did the pilot go?
This will be followed by the Tribulation, which is the time that most of the interviewed evangelicals seem to get the most excited by, and it's no wonder: with all the horizon-spanning battling armies and devastating natural disasters that they so rapturously describe, it sounds like it will be some muscular hybrid of 2012 and Return of the King. According to one particularly bloodthirsty believer - who doesn't do much to prove the proposition that Christianity is a religion of peace - the resulting slaughter will be 'a lot of fun to watch' from heaven, where he assumes he will be. The film, seemingly much like its subjects, deals with the End Times' final two stages, the Apocalypse and the Millennium, in much sketchier fashion.
The Tribulation passage of Waiting for Armageddon provides many of the film's ugliest and most elucidating passages. The camera follows a tour guide leading his flock of evangelical tourists around Israel, pointing out all the places where the final battles will take place and grousing about how the Dome of the Rock mosque just doesn't rightly deserve to be where it currently is. A hatred and fear of Islam features heavily in the beliefs expressed here, along with a not-so-hidden desire that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process never quite come together. The evangelicals followed here (and seen fulminating at a 'Pre-Tribulation' conference in Dallas about the evils of Islam and, oddly enough, post-modernism) are so infatuated with their fervid desire for the end of the world, that they seem willing to sacrifice any period of peace and any number of lives to get there as soon as possible.
One of the film's narrative threads briefly follows the idea that evangelical beliefs are studded through the practice of American diplomacy, that the evangelicals would in effect have the nation wage 'an apocalyptic foreign policy.' Like many other details - such as how did evangelical preachers translate the New Testament's many arcane visions into such a rigorously detailed schematic for the end of the world - Waiting for Armageddon doesn't satisfactorily study this element of evangelical belief. Overall, the filmmakers don't explore their troublesome subject as rigorously as possible, but nevertheless deserve points for diving into it in the first place.
