2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus (2021) – What The Actual Hell?

Released: 15th January 2021
Seen: 21st January

Technically I don’t need to review this. I really don’t, there is no requirement. I’m not being paid here and I have a personal rule that once a year is over I just move on, only returning if a film is Oscar-nominated and I need to watch it for the inevitable Oscar post. This film had its release in Jan of 2021, I could move on with my life and just pretend this never happened… but I saw the trailer for this, found it and watched it. I have suffered and I must scream about it.

Let me make this clear though, do not look this film up to watch yourself… I did this, you don’t have to!

2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus is a shitty story of a time in the not-to-distant future where Covid has kept running rampant and (obviously) led to communism being installed everywhere which naturally means that no one is allowed to be Christian because that’s a thing that could totally happen. We follow a technically human person called Roy (Joshua Wesely) who is living in this hellscape as a secret Christian along with some friends of his (they have names, I don’t care what they were or wish to try and name them) who want to fight against the evil government that’s forced them to not be publicly Christian anymore and so they send out DVD’s with sermons to people because that will beat the communism.

If you ever wanted to know what it looks like if the concept of a martyr complex decided to masturbate using a reel of film, then 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus is for you. From start to finish, this thing is an absolute waste of time in every sense of the word. Life is finite and you only get so much, and I apparently decided to waste an hour and a half of my finite time staring directly into a narcissist’s asshole while he exclaimed how he is so persecuted for believing in God. That’s all this film is, from start to finish it’s one guy who has never been even slightly inconvenienced imagining that he is public enemy number one.

Obviously, the Christian martyr complex film is nothing new, God’s Not Dead is an entire series just built on the idea that all Christians are being persecuted all the time (You’re not. You’re literally not. You could try to argue this point but I’m going to just laugh at you so don’t bother) but at least that franchise understood basic narrative structure and how film works. They weren’t great but there was no problem following their (stupid) logic… you can’t follow the logic of 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus unless you’re drunk off your ass, and even then you probably won’t give a fuck. It’s bullshit, it’s all total bullshit.

The entire premise of 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus basically takes the current rules put in place to try and prevent Covid from spreading (you know, basic health orders that any sensible person has no problem following) and ramps them up by throwing in communism (without understanding what communism is) and pretending that all Christians would be shot on sight. This is meant to happen three years from now, a time that was probably chosen because the filmmakers assumed everyone would be dead from Covid by then and no one would be able to call them out on their rampant stupidity.

Calling the people who put this thing together “Filmmakers” feels wrong because they’re not good enough to deserve that description. Do you want to see a film that was made by people who clearly had no idea what they were doing? Watch anything other than this because this is bad even by “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing” standards. No shot is properly framed, the audio is awfully recorded and mixed, the performances feel like someone is holding a gun to the actor’s heads and demanding they sound everything out phonetically. 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus is easily the worst film ever made by German hands (Say what you will about Leni Riefenstahl, at least she knew how to frame a fucking shot!)

2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus is bad, it’s truly the pinnacle of awful filmmaking on every level. No one here can act, edit, light or frame a shot. If you made this film for a film class and handed it in, the teacher would be well within their rights to punch you in the face as hard as they could because clearly failing wouldn’t be good enough for you. Everything from the framing to the set design (which can best be described as “We couldn’t afford 2 trips to the discount furniture outlet and only use what we could move in a single trip) to the royalty free music they probably just flat out stole and threw in, it’s all awful. Even the font used for place names or the end credits is just wrong, it’s a bad font. They would’ve been better off using Comic Sans than the shit they ended up using because at least Comic Sans would’ve been a choice!

It’s almost impressive, you’d think that something might work out of pure accident, like a thousand monkeys accidentally writing the works of Shakespeare if given infinite time but nope, turns out monkeys are smarter than the people who made 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus. Nothing works, nothing even comes close to competence… and yet you can just feel the ego oozing from the screen. The people who made this actually think they made something good… they think this was worth their precious finite time on this earth. They’d of been better off just taking the money they spent on this film and buying a whole bunch of drugs… at least that might’ve ended in something productive.

Make no mistake, the sentient creatures that assembled 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus think they’re doing something important. They think they’re standing up for all Christians who have ever been told Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, they’re defending the God warriors who have to be reminded that their religion isn’t the only one, they’re fighting for the right for those who pray to do the thing they’ve always been allowed to do any time they want… and they suck at it. Again, I don’t wanna praise the God’s Not Dead people but at least I can get how a Christian could watch those films and come out feeling like the most important people who is fighting against the world… if you think that after watching this? Well you’re delusional and there is no hope for you.

Throughout 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus, I kept having to remind myself that the people behind it not only got to make a film, but they also got it on a streaming service. This is a real thing that’s available to watch, meanwhile, I know a lot of talented film students who will never get to make the films they want to make. It’s a reminder that life isn’t fair, that bad people get to make movies like this (and I feel confident in calling the film-makers here bad people, hell the lead actor/director/writer recently posted about his girlfriend of four years finally turning 18, meaning they’ve been dating since she was 14 so I’m really allowed to call him a bad person). Meanwhile, good people live in poverty because everything is awful.

2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus is proof that God is dead. No kind loving God would let this exist, certainly not one who cares about how his name is used. It’s a disaster of a film that fails technically, morally and spiritually. My only regret is that I didn’t see this a month ago because it would’ve topped my worst list for 2021… this film makes me hope that the world explodes before 2025 because we allowed this film to exist and we deserve fire and brimstone because of that.