Review Roundup: Brett Ratner’s Melania
Last year, Amazon released what might have been 2025’s worst movie: a controversial adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds starring Ice Cube and lots of Amazon product placement. And now, it looks like they’ve got the frontrunner for 2026’s worst movie: Melania, a documentary that chronicles the First Lady’s preparations leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration. But even before Melania opened in theaters, it was mired in controversy.
Amazon paid Melania Trump’s production company $40 million for the film while pledging $35 million in marketing, making Melania the most expensive documentary ever. Those amounts are so high, in fact, that some have accused Amazon of basically using Melania as a bribe to curry favor with Donald Trump. As for director Brett Ratner, he was accused in 2017 of sexual assault by multiple women, including Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge. Finally, multiple individuals involved in the film’s production have distanced themselves from the film, citing President Trump’s first term and Ratner’s on-set behavior.
Melania had its premier at a private White House screening that was attended by numerous celebrities and CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Tony Robbins, and Mike Tyson, and is now in theaters. And by the looks of the initial reviews — Melania was not screened for critics — Amazon really does have another whopper on their hands.
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.
Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be — and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner’s unrelentingly boring feature doc debut — only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe.
Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”
Aside from looking like the whole thing was written and produced by her staff, Melania makes the cardinal sin of just being simply, butt-numbingly boring, especially in the forever-taking last act of sitting through the inauguration all over again in eye-drooping detail. There is nothing in this section that Fox News viewers didn’t see the first time around, with one exception when Donald Trump lets Ratner’s cameras film his rehearsal for the big speech and catches Melania’s single contribution replacing the word “warmonger” with the word “unifier.” At least that cleared that up.
Ratner supposedly kept filming Melania well after the short frame this pseudo-documentary covers, yet covers her year of dubious subsequent accomplishments through a shamelessly puffed-up yet thinly described credits roll bragging about “initiatives” like Be Better and Fostering the Future, which receive screentime in the film mainly as Melania gestures at nonexistent plans (like “forming a coalition”) in chats with other power-adjacent women. She’s positioned as a champion of children, a stylish supermodeled version of Princess Diana. She notably does not appear on camera with a single child outside of her family.
The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad. It will exist as a striking artefact — like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will — of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.
Describing Melania as a documentary implies that there’s meaningful, thoughtful intention to its construction, which is very much not the case. Call it a document, instead, of 20 days in the First Lady’s life circa January 2025, with all the weight and depth of a Post-it.
What has been marketed as an insider look at the most mysterious and opaque woman in global politics is, for all intents and purposes, a part-propaganda film about the Trump administration, and an attempt to position Melania as a fashion guru with a unique knowledge of hemlines and color schemes.
To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it. Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon.
Melania is currently in theaters. Watch the film’s trailer below.
