April 5: Easter Sunday — Watch something religious.

Listen, you think your local politics are a mess? Try being Jonah Thomas. He’s a U.S. Senator who finds himself trapped in the ultimate filibuster, where the lobbyists are literal demons, and the swing votes are decided by the Heavenly Host.

Director Danny Carrales, a man who spends his days teaching the craft at Liberty University and his nights chronicling the invisible war for our souls, dropped Heaven’s War on me like a prophetic ton of bricks. This is the kind of movie that feels like it was found in a time capsule buried beneath a Christian bookstore that went out of business in 1996, yet it’s talking about things that make today’s headlines look like yesterday’s news.

Thomas told The Worldwide Threat, “Heaven’s War is about spiritual warfare and I believe that spiritual warfare, at least from, I think the heat of the battle is probably taking place in DC. I think that’s where a lot of spiritual battles are taking place, and I thought what would be a cool way to represent people’s lives in danger, everyday walks of life, that the powers that be in DC can have a major push towards God or away from God. In this case, I thought, “Let’s go ahead and have some bad guys that are senators that are trying to put together this vaccine that will hopefully stop cancer, stop the pain that people go through in that cancer world.”

I thought, “What if the vaccine wasn’t actually what they said it would do? It would heal some people, but there’d be a small percentage, which turns out to be a larger percentage of people that would suffer because they took the vaccine.” I thought that would be a really cool idea to implement, explaining why there’s such a spiritual battle to stop this vaccine from happening. Little did I know that COVID would come right down the road following the making of this film.”

Yes, the bad guys are trying to cure cancer. And yes, one of them is Joe Estevez. You know the rule: if a movie features a member of the Sheen/Estevez dynasty and involves a government conspiracy, you’re watching Tubi.

Anyways…

Senator Jonah Thomas (Jason Gerhardt) wants to be a good politician, but is there such a thing? He’s been overlooking what’s really important — his family — and worrying about his future. If this movie has any say, he doesn’t have one. Terrorists blow up all the bad guys and try to flip him to their side, but everything is viewed through a lens of supernatural high-stakes poker.

But who is good? Who or what is evil? Why do the lightsabers in this invert the good-guy/bad-guy paradigm of Star Wars, so the heels get blue and the faces get red (thanks for noticing, Logan Harrington on Letterboxd)?

Why do American politics and flags, so many flags, matter to the spiritual world? Why is there so much dialogue? Why does God need a starship? I have so many questions, and this movie just hit me with a wall of flashbacks so dense I felt like I was undergoing a neurological exam. I tried, I really did, but I started to get lost in the temporal slipstream. At least the Senator gets the best help, because when you have Gabriel (Danny Boaz), well, I don’t know how you can do better than have the Angel of Revelation.

There’s also the whole debate over why God lets bad things happen. I think when you’re in the middle of battling actual demons with an angel, the point of all this is moot because you now know God exists, so your faith has been rewarded or your lack of faith has been shown. It feels like a very shooting fish in a holy water barrel situation.

Many of the IMDb reviews are punching down on this or over-praising it, saying things like, “…if you are a person of faith, you will enjoy it. If you don’t consider this a love story on several different levels. If you are trying to get into the business, watch and learn how to put all the pieces together to create a great story with conflict that has emotional impact.”

I don’t know about love story, unless you mean the love between a director and his green screen, but Heaven’s War is definitely a trip.

You can watch this on Tubi.