I just caught it on pay per view with a friend.
I was kinda slow to pick up on this one, took me till about half an hour after the movie to fully figure out what it was. I really think its one of those where you can't take it at face value, kinda like he took a card from the Cohen brother's playbook.
The idea I got - he's making fun of leftist environmentalism and secular/materialist thought from a Christian standpoint. I think he deliberately made the natural disaster so patently absurd (killer tomatoes could have worked here just as well) that your forced to realize that either the disaster is meaningless and that the whole movie is about society and what the disaster says about it's mental hang ups (from his perspective of course) - or, otherwise its really such a bad movie that it never would have been released.
Retrospectively I think he did the same thing with the alien's from signs - these beings that could make ships that could travel to earth and back in their life times but couldn't find their way out of a pantry if you closed the door; I think that's meant to seem very cardboard and contrived as well. I hated Signs when I first saw it, part of that I think was just because the characters were so weird and morose, I couldn't relate to any of them. He did that in this movie as well though and I think that's another deliberate part of the plot structure and what he's trying to talk about; usually his heroes and heroines are clumsy, awkward, innocent - like he's trying to push the idea that these are the people most likely to stumble across the truth.
02 Mar 2009, 12:22 am
