Lately, I've been on a "bad Christian movie" kick, and when I watched "New World Order" on Amazon Prime, it managed to crouch even lower than my expectations. While I was expecting this film to have a low budget, it appears that this movie was not only funded by one married couple, Duane and Antoinette McCoy, but also directed and written by them. And this pair, while clearly knowing nothing about filmmaking, decided to make their own Hunger-Games-Divergent-Maze-Runner-esque dystopia while giving it a Biblical spin. Some great films were made on a low budget, but those at least relied on a decent story or interesting characters to make up for their absence of visual grandeur. This film has almost no good qualities to fill the empty void of boring visuals.
The actual Book of Revelations is very interesting. It can be interpreted allegorically in a thousand different ways, and contains some epic, almost psychedelic imagery if taken literally. If you read some verses, it sounds like a great film premise, and could lead to all sorts of creative license. But this movie contains only the bare minimum of what you'd expect: the Beast from the Sea is actually an evil dictator, he demands everyone get a tattoo to buy goods, nations form an alliance to worship him, so on and so forth. The McCoys have probably never heard the valuable phrase "show, don't tell". They squeeze out their exposition in dialogic tidbits as the story progresses, assuming that their tiny budget gives them an excuse not to show some creativity in how they flesh out their world. Indeed, their futuristic dystopia seems to look EXACTLY like our world. Now, this could lead to some interesting commentary that we are living in that world right now. While that seems a bit doom-and-gloom, it's a clever way to get around those budget constraints. But this movie's society is nothing like ours: there's a Supreme Chancellor that rules over the entire population (which seems to be about 20) and he forces everyone to get decal tattoos of some zigzaggy circular nonsense under penalty of death.
Our heroine is a well-endowed girl named Demi, played by Melissa Farley, who wears tight-fitting grey tops to make up for her total absence of personality. Curious that the Christian version of Katniss is more sexualized than Katniss herself. She gets a love interest named Jason, and with her friends Christen and Cedric, forms one of those friend groups that never happen in real life but seem to be "in" after the success of Harry Potter. There isn't enough chemistry between them to fill a thimble. Our female leads spend half the movie playing with their already-outdated phones (Because we need to relate to the young crowd! So let's show teens calling each other rather than diving into their emotional state!) and the other half whining and crying. The girls in this movie are annoyingly submissive, and they always end up an emotional wreck that runs to their man for comfort. Kevin Herrmann as the unnamed villain is at least enjoyably awkward, and one of the only bits of entertainment I salvaged from this film was seeing him walk onto the screen and not even pretending to know what he's doing. The only other bit of entertainment I got was one mid-sentence death scene later in the film, which was so abrupt and poorly acted that I burst out laughing.
The other user reviews criticize this film for taking the Bible too literally and being too Christian. Honestly, it isn't even that religious. They barely even mention Jesus or God, maybe twice or thrice in the entire film. It's never addressed that accepting the Mark means conscious worship of the Devil; the characters just sort of don't like it. They even misquote the Bible at one point: the Beast that emerges to rule the Earth has ten horns, not two. If you're going to make a film about crazy religious doomsday prophecies, at least get them right! Of course, they eventually go for the generic "band of freedom fighters" route. As if dividing society into five factions wasn't silly enough, now we've got Jesus-loving Merry Men fighting against the evil Satanic government. This film has a high death toll, obviously to make it dark and edgy like Hunger Games, but since you don't care about any of the characters, the viewer is left emotionless.
I wasn't expecting much out of "New World Order", but I wasn't expecting it to fall below student film level. In the realms of acting, cinematography, dialogue, and pure storytelling, this movie fails badly. I save the one-star rating for films that fill me with disgust and loathing, and it wasn't able to do even that. I'm open to its premise, but it only trudges along through its clichés, boring the audience and the cast, without the courage to explore any of its ideas on a deeper level.
