2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus

This is probably the worst movie I've seen all year, yet I've watched it twice now in just this month. It's a magical kind of bad- the rare movie that might actually be so bad it's good, thanks to its implausible premise (where Christianity is outlawed worldwide by 2025!), blatant preachiness, terrible acting, hilarious dialogue, insane music choices, incoherent editing, awkward romance, and incredibly lame attempts to be exciting.

It's the kind of movie where the protagonist flubs one of his lines during his big, dramatic speech at the film's halfway point, a hacker can apparently do anything but is also just shown using Wikipedia, Google Image search, and Word documents, and a cover of Amazing Grace is rapped over (terribly, at that).

To give anything more away would be spoiling it. I mean, just look at the title: even that's awkward. There are some boring, very long scenes of preachy dialogue here and there that are tough to sit through, but the laughably bad stuff makes up for it.

This has the potential to become an infamously popular so bad it's good movie, and will just age worse and worse as the years pass.

If it's satire, I apologise, and will instead declare it genius and change my rating to a 10/10. But I'm leaning towards it being serious, and as such, I can't help but feel it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

The acting is dull, one-note and stilted, the cinematography is amateurish, the script is awful, the editing appalling, the sound design distracting, and generally this movie sucks.

The plot is your standard Christian Fundamentalist martyrdom narrative, where the filmmakers are so deep into their culty mindset that they don't realise they've cast their protagonist in the role of Jesus Christ. Genuinely blasphemous stuff.

Genuinely, this is borderline unwatchable. Almost every scene drags its way through talentless actors lifelessly mumbling their way through appalling dialogue, apart from the numerous sweeping background shots that are clearly in the film because of how pleased the makers were that they got a nice camera drone.

The people involved have clearly seen a few movies, but have utterly failed to understand what makes a movie good. There's an attempt at a subplot with a character that's almost totally unrelated to the others, and which only seems to exist to patch over one of this movie's (many) gaping plot-holes.

It's barely worth a hate-watch. Guaranteed to be one of the longest one and a half hours of your life.

This movie answers the question: what if a bunch of nobodies and incredibly giant babies got together and made a movie which comically tries to convince us that Christians are persecuted?

Started watching and soon got into FFW mode. Skip ahead a bit, cringe, FFW. Repeat until I'm about 1/2 way through the movie. Couldn't stand it anymore and bailed. If there was anything good I'd say it, but there isn't.

Wow, this is a hot mess! Entertaining only for how horrible it is.

The setup is your typical paranoid Christian persecution fantasy: Covid has been used as excuse to institute world government with "communism everywhere" and to outlaw Christianity - you know, all of Dr. Fauci's recommendations.

It takes place just four years in the future, but somehow everyone has forgotten "the way things used to be" until the protagonist explains it. No details of the New World Order are ever given, and everything takes place on a very small scale. Really, it just seems like one overzealous local police chief.

The "heroes" are a group of people who have decided to spread the word of Christianity again. They start with the bold act of spray painting fishes on things, once on piles of leaves. Eventually, they are aided by a woman who works in the police department, who is "what you would call a hacker" and she helps them identify "secret Christians" and invite them to rallies.

The story takes place in Germany, and most of the actors are German, reading horrible dialog in English with very strong accents. Some of the actors are American, reading horrible dialog in English with American accents. In one scene, two women start in English, and then inexplicably switch to German with subtitles, presumably because one of them didn't speak English well enough to get through it.

It's not clear how much of the dialog is written and how much is improvised, and the only director's note seems to be, "Speak more slowly and stretch it out. We've got to pad 90 minutes!".

The sets and props would embarrass the most humble community theater. The police station appears to be a middle school auditorium, with some furniture in the corner. The main characters all live together in an an apartment, which for some reason has black plastic draped on the wall, a tiny Christmas tree, and a random string of twinkle bulbs. Late in the movie, someone apparently donated a fog machine, so they fill the police station with fog, just because they can.

The movie remains weirdly agnostic about the virus, masks, social distancing, etc. Is it a hoax or is it real? I would assume the people making it are anti-mask, but the good guys always wear masks outdoors and socially distance, even when holding their super secret illegal meetings. On the other hand, they never wear masks indoors, when they're huddled together around the little Christmas tree. The bad guys randomly wear masks or don't, presumably based on the individual choices of the actors.

This really doesn't even rise to the "so bad it's good" level, mostly because it's just not that interesting and all the actors are so low energy. Without the goofy exploding birds of Birdemic or ... everything about Tommy Wiseau, it just sort of falls flat.

So only watch it if you're truly committed to seeing every bad movie.