The viewer is shown Sharon, a woman who leads a partially monotonous life as a phone operator and a promiscuous life having foursomes. Apparently, she finds no fulfillment in either aspects of her life. When the missionaries come to her house to talk to her about god, she is easily and completely willing to believe in god. Her new-found belief, seemed to me at least, completely baseless. She does not go through a dramatic and arduous process to find and understand god. She simply decides she wants a different kind of life and becomes a believer.

The two characters Randy (before he also converted) and Sharon’s friend, Paula, give multiple speeches (that seem more cool-headed and logical than Sharon’s arguments) about why they don’t believe and why so many others do. Randy says that people believe in god because of social conditioning and because they feel powerless and want something to make them feel special. We don’t even get to see his transformation into a believer and despite his godliness (or even because of it) gets killed. After Randy dies, Paula says she wishes she could believe in god because it would give her stability and help her feel like everything happens for a reason. She doesn’t believe though, and tries to convince Sharon not to go to the desert.

It seemed to me that the movie was supposed to be portraying Sharon as a pathless person who clings to god “like a drug”, as Randy puts it. The characters speaking against god seemed more believable than the people who listened to the prophecies of a 5-year-old boy. When Sharon is in the desert for a month, ends up killing her daughter to “save” her,  and denounces her beliefs, it seems like the viewer is supposed to believe that her religion has led her wrong and driven her crazy.

Then, not only do we see the beginning of The Apocalypse, complete with the horsemen (though nothing else seems to follow The Book of Revelation), we also see the rapture happen to Sharon and Foster. Foster immediately goes to heaven when he tells Sharon’s daughter he loves god, but Sharon can’t. She denounces god after experiencing everything she had been promised. She can’t forgive god for letting her live a life of pain.

How am I supposed to feel about this? Did my original interpretation stem from my previous views of the rapture? Did the writer intend for the viewer to believe the rapture really was going to happen for the whole movie?

Perhaps, the movie is meant to show that someone who is as sinful as Sharon was can never really have god in her heart and therefore can never be saved. Perhaps, her flashback of her sexual escapades is to remind her and the viewers that she is like the Whore of Babylon and therefore too corrupted to know Jesus. John makes it obvious in The Book of Revelation that sexual acts are the most sinful. However, this wasn’t an idea that jumped out at me and I’m not sure I can fully subscribe to it. For one thing, it’s hard to peg this movie as an interpretation of THE Apocalypse when so little of the ending portrays The Book of Revelation. I’m interested to see how everyone else interprets it.