2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus (2021)

The world changed in late 2019. A virus came out of Wuhan, China. As far as we know. This virus would spread through the end of 2019 and early 2020 before most nations took note of it. Then it happened. Everything began to shut down. People were told to stay indoors to prevent the rapid spread of this virus, called Covid-19. Did they listen? Some did, some didn’t. All the major sports leagues in North America shut down in March 2020. Movies stopped filming for a while. When everything came back, there were major protocols in place. Masks, distancing, that sort of stuff.

Covid-19 changed the way stories were told, too. Not all stories, of course. But there were a few movies and television shows that took the virus and made it an integral part of the story. Superstore’s final season showed the staff at Cloud 9 dealing with the virus in the workplace. Songbird was about a world that had been ravaged by Covid-23, a later form of the virus. Dumb Money showed people at their jobs masked up and all that. There were also a whole bunch of other shows and movies I don’t watch or haven’t watched and can’t really comment on.

Christian movies did something else during the pandemic, though. Most entertainment was about finding a way to move on, a way to live. Or they went dystopian. Christian movies decided to go the dystopian route, but with their own persecution themes. Maybe I’m generalizing the Christian movies of the pandemic era. Maybe I’m describing one specific movie that brought the Christian persecution complex and the dystopian Covid-19 storytelling together.

2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus was a dystopian Christian Covid-19 movie. Covid-19 was a Chinese creation to enslave the world under one government. People weren’t allowed to meet, travel, or practice Christianity. Roy (Joshua Wesely) and his sister, Hannah (Antonia Speer) lost their parents to… I think it was suicide because they couldn’t handle a world without Christianity. Roy wanted to bring Christianity back. He worked with his sister to build an underground Christian following and fight back against the man.

I’m going to put the persecution complex on the backburner for a moment. The first thing I really want to bring up with 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus was that they actively made Covid-19 a political weapon, as opposed to the deadly virus it is. The movie was clearly written from the perspective of a Covid-19 denier. You know, the same people who refused to wear masks, refused to get vaccinated, and would berate other people for doing so. People like Ricky Schroeder, who would go to a store and get confrontational about the store upholding a mask mandate. That was where the story came from. The only difference was that there was some religion mixed into it.

Think about the story of 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus for a moment. The Chinese made the virus as a way to create one world government. That was the sole purpose of the virus, if the virus was ever real. (It was, just not in the world of this movie.) The masking and social distancing was a form of control, rather than preventing the spread of a sickness. If people met, they could rebel. Meetings were outlawed. If people could travel, they could leave their homes to rebel against authority. The virus wasn’t really a virus in this world. It was an excuse for the government to enslave people. Hence the title of the movie.

However, 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus wasn’t satisfied with pitching this dystopian world that went against all scientific truth. Religious persecution complexes had to be thrown into the mix for good measure. As the opening text stated, “meetings are illegal, travelling is illegal, and Christianity is illegal.” It wasn’t just that the government was controlling who people could see or where people could be. They were also controlling people’s beliefs. Specifically, they were disallowing Christianity. Other religions may have been fine. They never got into that. Christianity, though. That was not allowed.

Many Christian movies fall on this same imaginary sword. They make a strawman argument that people are trying to kill Christianity, like there’s an active war against the religion. It’s a war that doesn’t exist. Sure, there are arguments that people sometimes take the wrong ideals from Christianity. Maybe we shouldn’t be against homosexuality or having sex before marriage. Maybe abortion should be allowed because women should be able to control what happens with their own bodies. That’s the kind of stuff people fight with Christians about. They don’t fight with Christians because Christians have faith. Okay, some people do, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as Christian movies make it seem.

2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus played right into the persecution complex that Christian movies frequently have. The main storyline was about the lead characters rebelling against their religious oppression. They met up to preach. They shared sermons through DVDs. They spray painted the Jesus fish wherever they went. Their religion was being brought back through an underground movement. It was a fight to bring religion back because the government in charge outlawed it.

The merging of the Christian persecution complex and Covid-19 denial made 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus feel more like a piece of propaganda than an actual movie. It wasn’t important to tell a captivating story. The importance was on pitching these two ideas to the public. The filmmakers wanted people to believe that Covid-19 really was a way for the government to control people, though it was taken to the extreme in this dystopian world. They wanted people to believe that Covid-19 was going to be used as a weapon to get rid of religion. That’s just not the case.

I’ve seen some half decent or, at the very least, entertaining religious movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies. 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus was not one of them. The performances lacked that natural charisma brought by someone like David A.R. White through his movies. The writing lacked the bonkers, off the wall nature of something like Miracle Man. The persecution complex lacked the anger of something like Last Ounce of Courage. And the dystopia wasn’t as threatening as something like what the Left Behind movies had. Every single aspect was inferior to other movies I’ve written about.

The Covid-19 era did a lot to change the movie industry. Certain rules were put in place to keep people safe while they made the entertainment that you or I watch. Masks, reduced casts and crews, smaller scale stories. Even a Covid denial movie like 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus followed the rules. There weren’t really any scenes with crowds. The scenes that had more than three people had them spaced far apart. As much as the story denied Covid-19, the movie followed the mandates. As far as I could tell by watching it.

What changed the most when Covid-19 hit, though, was the way movies were seen. 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus wasn’t in theaters. I found it on Tubi. More movies than ever have gone to streaming services because the lockdowns during the height of the pandemic pushed people away from the theatrical experience. Theaters were closed during much of 2020 and 2021. Everyone turned to streaming for their movie entertainment. Many haven’t gone back.

2019 and 2020 changed everything. Movies, shopping, and public spaces changed in ways nobody could have expected. Those changes stuck. They weren’t temporary. The world now is much different from the world only six years ago. We’re not being controlled by a government that wants to ban Christianity. Oh no. But we adapted to a world with a new deadly virus, and we didn’t turn back into what we were before. That one point in time had a major effect on day-to-day life, as well as many of the details within.

Let’s wrap this post up with a few notes:

• Of course, there weren’t any actors in 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus who were in other Sunday “Bad” Movies, nor did either of the directors direct anything else for the blog. Yet.
• I mentioned David A.R. White in this post. He was in Brother White, God’s Not Dead, God’s Not Dead 2, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, God’s Not Dead: We the People, and Second Glance.
• I also mentioned Miracle Man, Last Ounce of Courage, and Left Behind.
• Have you seen 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus? What were your thoughts? Share them in the comments, or find me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are good places to leave suggestions for what I should watch in future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Now we take a look forward. Right now, I’ve got two posts in the works. One of them is for He’s All That. The other is for Showdown. I have the ideas for both those posts and I think they’re pretty juicy. We’ll see how juicy they really are when I get them done. See you whenever that is.