The 2021 film, 2025 — The World Enslaved By A Virus, opens with a series of title cards.

We learn that the Coronavirus has raged out of control.

We learn that fear of the virus led to the creation of a one world government.

We learn that “communism is everywhere.”

We also learn that English is now the official language of the world.  (Yay!  Take that, French!)

Finally, we learn that Christianity has been outlawed.

It’s a scary world, one in which everyone is enslaved by the fear of the virus.  It’s a world where free thought is no longer allowed.  It’s a world where everyone is expected to pledge allegiance to the “new Constitution.”  It’s a world where former friends rat each other out to the authorities and privacy is a thing of the past.

As you can probably guess from screenshot above, 2025 is not a particularly expensive-looking film.  This is the end of the world on a budget and one gets the feeling that the majority of that budget went to filming a fairly decent shoot out and car chase that occurs towards the end of the film.  As a result, this is one of those films where our characters spend a lot of time sitting in their apartment and talking about what’s going on in the world and how they feel about it.  We hear about what happens but we rarely get to see it.  Watching the film, one gets the feeling that many of the conversations were improvised, which means that there’s a lot of awkward pauses and meandering sentences.  On the one hand, that doesn’t make for a particularly compelling narrative.  On the other hand, it does capture the feelings of isolation and ennui that haunted many people during the Coronavirus lockdowns.

The film follows a group of Christians as they try to fight back against the one world government.  It starts with them spray painting Jesus fish onto walls and sidewalks.  (One of the sidewalks that they use as a canvas is covered by leaves so you can’t help but feel that one strong gust wind is going to totally destroy all of their work.)  Eventually, a hacker shows up at their apartment and helps them get their message out.  Christians start to meet in secret and our main character (played by one of the film’s two directors, Joshua Wesley) gives a variation of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart speech.

While the Christians are doing that, the government is plotting how to get more people to swear allegiance to the “New Constitution.”  Again, since this is the end of the world on a budget, the government is represented by one small office and a handful men wearing tactical vests.  They’re not extremely intimidating but, just as with the film’s sense of isolation, their incompetence tends to mirror the incompetence of the actual authorities during the lockdowns.

Eventually, even the Christians’s wussy neighbor is showing up at their door and telling them that they need to stop what they’re doing before they make everyone’s life difficult.  They need to accept the new world order.

2025 is indeed a bad movie.  The pace is slow.  The acting is terrible.  The dialogue is risible.  The film has been developing a reputation for being one of the worst ever made and there’s certainly a case to be made.  That said, much like Plan 9 From Outer Space, 2025 has worth as a historical document.  Setting aside the religious aspect of 2025,the film does definitely capture the paranoia that people were feeling during the lockdowns.  Some people were paranoid about the virus and other were paranoid about the government but the important thing is that, in the end, everyone was paranoid.  With all the gaslighting that’s going on from people who desperately want us to believe that the lockdowns actually weren’t as big or traumatic a thing as we all know they were, a film like 2025 serves as a useful historical document.  It’s a recording of the way many people felt about the world just two years ago.

Of course, that doesn’t actually make it a good film.  You can’t have everything.