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.

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.

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.

"It's 2025. The world as we have known in 2020 does not exist anymore. The virus has changed the world. Communism is all over the place. A global state developed. Meetings are illegal, traveling is illegal, and Christianity is illegal." I HAD NO IDEA I WAS ABOUT TO PUT ON A CHRISTIAN DYSTOPIAN MOVIE.

Oh boy, the minute that last line dropped I knew I had hit the jackpot. For those who follow my reviews I've been watching a lot of really bad Christian media lately, but this is pure happy circumstance.

I'm sick right now, so while I'm bedridden I'm taking the opportunity to search for brainless, hopelessly stupid movies that won't challenge me in any meaningful way, and what could be more promising than a movie with a title like 2025: The World Enslaved by a virus?

This movie opens with a hilariously incompetently edited and shot car chase sequence that leads into a monologue during an interrogation sequence meant as a stand-in for the late movie inspirational "look what they've taken from us" speech, something that occurs within the first five minutes. I mean seriously, have you people never heard of an obscure little concept known as buildup? Speeches like this with the swelling stringed instruments to underpin what you're supposed to be feeling are only effective when we've actually witnessed two acts worth of the main characters struggling, first. But what really gets me about this speech is how it simultaneously tries to double as the opening expository "here's what the world looked like before and what happened to change things" moment, in which the main character explains these things to a middle aged agent of the state who is very obviously older than he is. Like, what? This movie takes place in 2025, and it came out in 2021. It has only been four years. You really need to explain to this dude twice your age what the world was like less than five years ago?

Sadly though, the rest of this movie doesn't live up to the promise given by that banger of an opening. It's quite surprising how much of this movie is bogged down with inconsequential filler. There's an entire 97 second sequence dedicated to one of the characters somberly preparing their breakfast cereal, an event that is painstakingly documented as she slowly, sadly gets the cereal out, weakly pours it in the bowl, gets the milk out, and sadly pours it in the bowl on top of her cereal, then picks up her spoon, and slowly and sadly stirs it around a few times, and then she sadly takes her first few bites while reading a note that's just barely illegible to the viewer due to how it's positioned on the screen, but it lingers on this shot for so long I couldn't help but get the sense I was supposed to be reading it along with her.

I mean seriously, as incompetently written and framed as Donald James Parker's entire filmography is, at the very least the man is efficient with his screen time. His movies don't contain a single wasted moment. For all of their inconsequential non plot related diatribes laden throughout, every single scene is packed to the brim with him communicating something to the viewer, whether it be his politics, what he thinks of himself, how he views women and racial/sexual minorities and Jews and Muslims, his general theology, and whatever else he happened to have thoughts on in any random minute he spend writing. Not a single moment passed in which I didn't feel like I was learning something about how Donald James Parker thinks.

But after 90 minutes of this, what do I now know about how the creators see the world? Mask mandates are literally the Holocaust? This majority Christian planet is hostile to Christians? Communism is bad? After that opening ten minutes I found myself expecting something meatier and more revealing about the creators than that. But instead all I got is how these creators have a massive throbbing boner for American imperialism in an unbelievable mid movie speech:

"Remember, we used to fight for other countries. We've freed countries from dictators, gave the power back to the people. We organized food and medication. Why did we do that? Because the dignity of man is holy.... They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom." Now this mid-movie speech about 40 minutes in is just astonishing. This is honestly how these people view American imperialism. Also, there's a hysterical, sick irony in how people with an apparent admiration for the idea of organizing free food and medication for impoverished Latin American people in the form of foreign aid would think communism is evil. Lol what do you people think communism is? And oh dear lord how dare your invoke the most famous moment from Braveheart for this thuddingly brain dead speech. Honestly this speech alone would have made the entire movie worth it had I not had to sort through so much fat to get to it.

Like seriously, with as much contempt as I found myself developing for Donald James Parker personally throughout his sordid filmography, little did I know he'd end up becoming the gold standard for incompetent fundagelical-with-an-insufferable-persecution-complex media production.

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