Tim Weber, a historian in church history at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, says that the growing popularity of books and films with an apocalyptic theme may reflect questionable theology, but also reflect a populist bent. They have cornered the market, so to speak, on this kind of delivery system. The amillennialists don't write fictional books about the end of the world, and the postmillennialists don't. It's the pre-millennialists who do this, and it's jazzy. It's easily transferable into this kind of fictional model.
Many evangelical leaders see the movie as a way of reaching a more mainstream audience, though.
After opening weekend, though, secular critics have panned the film, and criticized its strident emphasis on conversion and sectarian religion. It may woo a few theatergoers to pre-millennialist Christianity, and it certainly resonates with modern angst and the sense that the world is, somehow, spinning out of control. The very mathematics of the rapture, an eschatological division into those who are children of the Christian God and those of us destined to lick the boots of the Anti-Christ, provides an easy rationale to stereotype those who fail to sign on with a particular theology. It also smacks of that old Calvinist doctrine of predestination, although many pre-millennialists insist that good works and faith in Jesus is a ticket on the Rapture sky ship. There is a political agenda at work here as well.