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.

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.

To be used as an example of how not to make a movie!

What could be said about this production. Well, everything is bad about it.. the plot is cheesy, the script it cringe, acting is absolutely bewildering and the list goes on.

But i will say this one thing about it. In as many horrible movies that i have watched over the years (for science you see), this one is the only one to actually show you the production set/camera/support vehicles as they film the scenes. They could not even managed to pick their angles/b roll that hides that.

Anyway, aspiring film makers, watch this and do everything opposite and you will have success.

I really enjoyed watching this rubbish. Sufficient amount of cringe, terrible acting, ridiculous plot. I had a great laugh.

You'd think a movie about a totalitarian government repressing religion would feature references to reviled places like China, Soviet Russia or the DDR. You'd be wrong. Instead, the protagonists are "oppressed" by the most benign, milquetoast, unthreatening government I've ever seen in media or real life. English is the world language, most likely because this movie was made for American Christians and learning a "scary" language like Russian or Chinese would be too much work. Christianity is apparently illegal, yet information is freely available on Wikipedia. All the Christians in this movie live their life in the open, in relative wealth, peace and comfort, and never even bother to hide their face, turn off phones and other possible tracking devices or use any kind of secrecy and/or common sense.

Being a Christian (no word about other religions, but I digress) is apparently classified as high treason and punishable by death, but there's no censorship, no visible repression, no dedicated teams to seek out and neutralize this so-called threat. The worst thing the protagonist' sister mentions about the new world order is that she now feels mildly uncomfortable seeing the police. If that's genuinely the worst thing the directors can come up with, while a fear of police brutality is a daily reality for millions of real-life Germans, their countrymen, then they must be the most sheltered, privileged people on this planet.

But that's the point: this movie is persecution porn by people who never had to face a smidge of actual persecution in their life. The directors have no experience organizing, or resisting police repression, or dealing with a spying and sabotaging government. It's a bunch of rich Christian influencers role-playing being oppressed, and failing spectacularly. That, aside from the bad acting, lacklustre worldbuilding, horrible pacing, etc, is what makes this movie a pain to watch.