Animal Farm

The whole internet wants this pig dead. I watched it from my sofa, and I am not joining the mob.

Let me start with the numbers, because they are wild. Animal Farm sits at 2.8 on IMDb. Not 4. Not 3.5. A 2.8, the kind of score saved for films made on a phone over a weekend. It has 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and 1.7 stars on Letterboxd. Read those scores and you expect one of the worst films ever made. Then you watch it, and that is simply not what is on the screen. This is a flawed, confused film. It is not a 2.8 film. Nothing about it deserves that.

The story has been updated, and the Orwell fans hated that on sight. Farmer Jones loses his farm to the bank. A billionaire named Frieda Pilkington (Glenn Close, clearly having fun) wants the land and plans to kill the animals. So the animals revolt. Snowball (Laverne Cox) writes the Seven Commandments, the humans get kicked out, and Seth Rogen's Napoleon slowly turns from comrade into tyrant. You know the ending. Orwell wrote it eighty years ago, and it still works.

What it actually gets wrong

I will not pretend the film is innocent. Its real crime is simple: it does not know who it is for. Serkis spent fifteen years trying to turn one of the darkest political stories ever written into a family film, and you can feel the fight in every scene. One moment teaches kids that power corrupts. The next moment is a fart joke. Woody Harrelson narrates as Boxer like he is reading a bedtime story, while the actual plot is about lies, fear, and a revolution that eats its own. A film for kids and a film about tyranny pull in opposite directions, and this one gets torn in half.

But the bones of Orwell survive. Napoleon's rise is still chilling. The commandments still get rewritten in the middle of the night. The pigs still end up exactly like the humans they replaced. Rogen finds something genuinely creepy in a funny pig with real power, and Kieran Culkin's Squealer is the best thing in the film, a spin doctor so smooth you almost admire him while he lies to the whole farm. If one kid watches this and asks one hard question at dinner, the film has done more than most cartoons even try to do.

The sofa factor

Where you watch it matters. I watched it at home in Dubai, not in a cinema after paying for tickets and parking. At home, the film is an easy 94 minutes. The silly jokes are background noise instead of an insult you paid money for. The animation is mid-level, far below Pixar but far above the bargain bin, and on a TV screen that gap barely matters. As a quiet evening stream, it is a perfectly fine way to hand a big idea to a young viewer in a small, silly package.

So why the hate? I think three angry groups piled on at once. Orwell fans were angry anyone made it cute. Parents were angry the cute film is secretly about dictators. And the box office crowd smelled blood, because the film opened to a disastrous 5.7 million against a 35 million budget, and nothing draws a mob like a flop. Add review bombing on top, because a 2.8 on IMDb is not an honest score, it is a punishment. None of that anger answers the only question that matters: is the film watchable? It is.

The verdict

Animal Farm is a film at war with itself, a dark fable wearing a clown nose. It is messy, uneven, and sometimes lazy. But messy is not the same as worthless, and the gap between its scores and what is actually on screen is the widest I have seen all year. Stream it with low expectations and you will find a flawed film with a working heart and the best villain pig of 2026. A 2.8 on IMDb? Really? Some animals on that website are clearly more equal than others.