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Conspiracy theories ran rife this week on social media as people speculated that Leave The World Behind was warning to Americans that a foreign invasion was imminent. These theories were further stoked by news that Obama’s production company, Higher Ground Productions, were involved in the making of the movie.
Judging by a Rotten Tomato viewers’ score of 34%, Leave The World Behind is a real stinker, with viewers particularly upset with the abrupt and nonsensical end. However, as fuel for conspiracy theories it scores 100%.
As one X user posted: “So Barack Obama’s production company released the newest Netflix hit “Leave the World Behind” where America is hit by a terror attack and he wrote notes and gave input on the film? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but that’s a weird thing for a former President to do”
Another user posted: “A portion of my TikTok chud algorithm right now is conspiracy guys who are obsessed with “Leave The World Behind” because Obama had a role in giving notes for the script, so in their minds this is quote “predictive programming, meant to show us what the cabal plans to do.””
Leave the World Behind is an apocalyptic thriller. A couple from New York, Amanda and Clay, rents a luxurious home for a weekend breakaway with their kids, Archie and Rose. Their vacation is interrupted by an archetypal insufferable angry black woman and her farther, breaking the news that America is under some sort of cyber-attack.
The farther (portrayed by Mahershala Ali) explains that all information and communication channels are disrupted, they are being attacked by some sort of audio and radiation weapons and eventually kinetic weapons.
The closer the movie is examined, the more strange messaging are seen. Apparently the hunter becomes the hunted, or nature turns on humans is the messaging behind deer attacking people. Then there is the cargo ship that runs ashore, named White Lion. According to Wikipedia: “The White Lion was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque which brought the first Africans to the English colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower in New England. Though the African captives were sold as indentured servants, the event is regarded as the start of African slavery in the colonial history of the United States.”
Sam Esmail, producer of Leave the World Behind, said of the conspiracy theories: “I think the silly thing about the whole thing is President Obama really came on a couple of months before we started shooting, so the script had basically been written and done. He obviously gave notes on the script, but the bones of the story and the sequences were already written. I would just say they’re pretty wrong in terms of his signalling. It had nothing to do with that.”
Leave the World Behind, based on the same named novel by Rumaan Alam, was published in 2020, therefore well before the making of the movie. Does that mean that the conspiracy theorists are wrong? What if the cabal behind the book too?
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