“The Rapture”, as a whole, is supposed to be the story of a woman who tries to find fulfillment in her life; first with indulging in the finer, and baser, pleasures in life before ‘finding’ salvation in a religion that she disowns by the end of the film in a bout of…selfishness. Overall, she shows no growth, condemns others to lives that didn’t make them all that happy, and tortured herself for no reason other than to have something to complain about. Normally, I would have analyzed the movie as a whole at the end of it but I ended up writing as scenes came up and then modifying my thoughts as it went on.

The beginning of the movie was as straightforward as it could get and gave us a pretty good picture of who we were working with. Sharon, a bored IT worker who fielded calls, and Vic, an endless source of fun, apparently. An open relationship very open and inviting of others in bed with them and one of those people end up being Randy, a character I find very important for representing the potential Sharon had in her life before being converted as well as the death of such a life afterwards.

Fastfoward to her getting visited by the two missionaries. The missionaries were almost out of line in how they approached Sharon and I feel that this served to foreshadow for just how aggressively and completely the idea of The End consumed her. There was no reason for them to stay at her door after she’d shut it or for them to even speak in the way that they did. Ernest and aggressive do not need to be in the same room and I was pretty uncomfortable just watching the scene because of that. However,I love that later one, the couple that Sharon and Vic next pick up are actually well-aware of how imminent the rapture is coming and provide her a direct way to begin involving herself. The clarification we get about the woman’s explanation in the end scene in the cell really sheds light on Sharon’s introduction to everything and I think that it’s very telling that Vic was still continuing relations with the woman even as she was explaining about the pearl and whatnot. Sharon’s view of religion, of God’s plan for them, is already tainted because of this, and is tainted in such a way that she insists of physical fulfillment of God’s plan when it is supposed to be a spiritual one.

Her trying to kill herself in the motel was probably one of the silliest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie and it most definitely was not supposed to be. We don’t see a gradual escalation for Sharon, just this sudden… revelation, the dream of the pearl, after just skimming a few pages of Bible. We don’t even know if she loves God, we find out she doesn’t as she confesses to the police officer about killing Mary, and honestly, she’s just afraid of being old and alone and wants to stop ‘suffering’. What suffering she was going through before this is totally beyond me because a ‘sinful’ life in any way doesn’t mean unfulfilled, you just won’t go to paradise if you believe that. We see that Randy’s perfectly fine with everything because he’s made amends with himself, even going so far as to tell Sharon that there was no God, only chaos, and that she was the only one with the guilty conscious, which was true. But then she gets him hook-line-sinker because he loves her, which just goes with the lonely bit from earlier, especially coupled with the following scene in the church with Randy and their daughter. I completely believe that she would’ve been just fine without suddenly falling into church as long as she had Randy and built a home with him, especially since Randy is still so obviously not buying the Jesus spiel. He might have pictured himself with his girls praying right before he had to deal with Luis but I feel that that was more a moment of contentment at seeing Sharon’s face more than him becoming one in the Lord’s faith with her.

All the scenes at the desert made me so mad though. It was like Tolkin took all the things the Bible said not to do when waiting for Jesus and made it a movie. Sharon was impatient, she was demanding, she was trying to get God to move at her pace. How does one ‘give God one more chance’? Who did she think she was? If any one part of the movie was telling of Sharon’s true nature, it had to be that she was able to kill Mary and not kill herself. A true believer would think that God would forgive them for taking their life because of their intense need to reach Heaven but Sharon is able to justify breaking a commandment by noting that suicide is frowned upon?

I find such irony in Sharon being in the same cell as the tattooed woman, the movie coming full circle and Sharon still with no real faith, not even actual salvation is the sense of having a better life on earth. I’m a bit mad at how they messed up the Horsemen portrayal, though. Death is supposed to be on the pale horse but magically, it’s War because of the red cape? And the ending? Are we really supposed to have gone through this whole journey with this woman, seeing her destroy her old life suddenly and reconstruct it while preparing herself and others for a future that she basically destroys for herself because of her inability to truly change? This cop, random and hardly a believer, is able to admit a love for God and be admitted to Heaven and with her intense love of her child, her narcissism at thinking she’s special in some way, Sharon can’t do it. Her character is essentially a false prophet, one that converts to feel good about herself all while preaching the Word, only for it to have been a complete farce.

I think that Sharon at the start of the film had just reached that point in her life where she has to grow up. It is as much that she’s just unfulfilled with her life, almost like a midlife crisis, as she is developing the urge to settle down. It just so happened that religion became the first outlet she turned to for fulfillment that wasn’t a physical pleasure. Even with Randy, who represents a very fulfilled person in the lifestyle she’s trying to leave, is symbolic of what she wants to attain. Considering she is a swinger, or starts out as one, the fact that Randy becomes a steady presence in her life after the first time they all hook up says something, quite possibly more than anything else between her pushing her way into her religious co-workers’ circle and trying to kill herself. She feels lonely and at first, the fun and the sex was working to fill that because it was what she’d known but one taste of an alternate way of filling up that emptiness has her completely bending over backwards to drown herself in it. Sharon’s character is immature, demanding in a way that is quite brat-like, and all the illumination in the world didn’t help her realize that the only thing that can save anyone, is just to be a good person, no matter what faith you have.

Honestly, I just love that Randy was shot by a disgruntled ex-employee when David was in “The Break of Noon” and his character was the lone survivor of an office shooting. More foreshadowing if anything.