2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus

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.

And this movie seems to have no idea what the wors "communism" means. It also seems to have no grasp on logic or reality. It's almost impressive how bad this is.

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.

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.

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.