The first wave of reviews for Melania — the glossy, big-money documentary Amazon MGM Studios just dumped into theaters — is rolling in, and they’re brutal. Marketed as an “intimate chronicle” of Melania Trump’s life as First Lady, the film delivers, according to early critics, something closer to a two-hour hostage situation — minus the intrigue.
Released without press screenings after an invite-only premiere in Washington, D.C., the film is only now reaching critics — and the verdict is scathing. It landed with a thud loud enough to echo through empty theaters, dismissed as a hollow puff piece that’s mind-numbing, tone-deaf, and, in some cases, straight-up propaganda.
The Daily Beast didn’t just pan it — they spiritually evacuated. The outlet described an opening drone shot set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” before declaring, “The truth is, my soul left my body during the very first seconds of the film,” adding that it lingered throughout the runtime “with a mixture of disappointment and anger, like an owner would at their dog after it ate the garbage”
Business Insider went for clinical devastation, calling the film “something akin to a wedding film” and accusing the director of padding out a hollow project with visual gimmicks. “I think even director Brett Ratner knows he’s made a dull, inert product, where zero interesting things happen,” the review states, likening the result to “crumbing some crackers on top of a sodden hot dish”
Across the Atlantic, The Independent gave Melania one star and zero mercy, branding it “a ghastly bit of propaganda” and describing the former First Lady as “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness.” The paper compared the Trump aesthetic to historical excess, writing that the film will exist “as a striking artefact – like *The Birth of a Nation* or Triumph of the Will”
The Guardian, whose critic reportedly had an entire cinema to himself, also slapped it with a one-star rating. The verdict: “Dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing,” dismissing the film as “an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy… ice-cold to the touch.”
BuzzFeed’s review didn’t bother with subtlety. Calling it the worst film she’d ever seen, the critic said she’d rather relive an infestation of bugs crawling over her kitchen sink “a hundred times over” than endure another minute of Melania.
Even outlets attempting restraint struggled. The Express labeled it a “painfully sincere Trump puff piece” filled with “painfully stiff, orchestrated scenes,” while the Sydney Morning Herald landed on “beautifully shot but short on substance.”
The Atlantic summed it up cleanly in its headline: “The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace.”
