Geostorm

Geostorm, the movie and not the late 90s subcompact car, is a massive piece of shit. The subcompact cars only turned into massive pieces of shit after their third owners and lots of deferred maintenance. While both Geostorms were loud, boring, contrived and cheap, only the movie is stupid on an epic scale.

This “climate-change thriller” is as idiotic as the scientific wisdom of someone who buys magically-charged stones from Gwyneth Paltrow and won’t vaccinate her kids. It comes across like a debate speech by the kid in high school with the biggest gap between what his IQ actually is and what he thinks it is. He knows he's right, so just shut up with all those facts and research.

Geostorm is ostensibly about a very near future when global warming has destroyed so much of the earth that nations come together to create a network of thousands of weather-controlling satellites. 

By very near future, I mean 2019. Right off the bat, this turd expects us to believe that we are less than two years away from international cooperation, instantaneous climate control through thousands of satellites, a space station that can create its own gravity and has manufacturing facilities, and hourly space shuttle flights. More likely, this piece of shit was written long ago when 2019 seemed a long way off. It sat on a shelf for a long-ass time, finally got dusted off, but nobody cared enough to update it.

The satellites and the space station were apparently conceived by a single man: Gerard Butler, doing his damn best to look like he’s been spending his spare time in the Little Debbie aisle at Walmart. He’s thick and surly, seemingly upset to find only seven pieces in his KFC bucket, and living in a solar-powered trailer while souping up a muscle car with electric motors. This is Hollywood pandering to the blue-collar folk, telling us some guy who looks like a plumber and is miserable just like the people in the flyover states must be, can be a real God damned genius hero.

Only problem is, they don’t give Butler any brains. Because this movie was made by incompetent boobs with zero understanding of how things work, the electric car has a shiny air filter under its hood. Probably so the carburetor can feed the right mix of air and electrons to the internal combustion electric engine. Throughout the movie, Butler fails to exude any sort of braininess or plausibility that he built a space station and that only he knows how it works.

Instead, he pushes through like he’s the fattest running back in Pop Warner and the scenes are asthmatic kindergartners.

Even though he’s the only one who knows how the station works, he gets fired during an excruciatingly bad congressional hearing scene. I know, I know: all congressional hearing scenes are bad, but this one is particularly shitty. He gets into a fight with a senator and the entire hearing apparently has no point other than for this fight to happen. It plays out like the time at the Tavern when the Harelip made farting noises every time someone asked her a question. Man, she thought she was being pretty damn clever, and also right.

Then Butler’s brother (Jim Sturgess) fires him. His brother did not build the satellite system or apparently do anything of note, yet he’s the boss.  No time is spent on how his brother got that position, what his credentials are, or why he and his brother don’t get along.  It’s just hacky screenplay mechanical conflict bullshit so that when the satellites go bonkers, they have to work together. Oh, and they do go haywire. So, Butler must be asked to return to space to fix shit. 

The satellites freeze an Afghan village, and burn up Hong Kong. Then they freeze Rio de Janeiro. I don’t mean, chilly and hot. I mean, cartoonish extremes, like people becoming blocks of ice, streets melting, and ocean waves freezing mid-crest.

The brothers figure out that these climate events aren’t accidents. No! Someone has sabotaged the system. The satellites have been injected with a “virus!” A virus that can make each satellite act erratic and also eject pesky people into space from the space station, and also destroy hard drives, and also spy on people and also track people’s activity. We know it’s a really, really bad virus because its code shows up red on computer screens. Remember, folks: viruses are so bad they are written in red!

Folks, this is a movie in which people carry hand guns around on a space station. Yeah, what could go wrong with that?

Geostorm then devolves from being dunderheaded techno-trash into being piss-poor political thriller, the sort of whodunit every bit as satisfying and logical as grilling a pre-school class to find out who pooped in the sandbox. To save you some money and time, the bad guy is the Secretary of State (played by Ed Harris, presumably prepping for his next role as Skeletor). He wants to use weather to destroy American enemies, and everyone ahead of him in the line of succession to the White House. He’s so naughty!

You’d expect a disaster movie to have two things: a lot of big things falling down and a lot of action. Well, some buildings do collapse, but they look pretty damn fake. And there is action, but little of it feels like it fits in the story. Rather, it feels like the moviemakers used an egg timer and every time it went off, they threw in a car chase or a fist fight. It’s like, “Five minutes are up! Better have that self-driving electric car explode now.” 

It’s all more contrived than a Great Dane’s intestines. Worse, so much time is spent explaining shit that makes even less sense after explanation. This movie has no fucking clue how viruses, weather, climate change, politics, human emotions or computers work. It’s like listening to some rich guy at a party talk about his really expensive gadgets. He has no fucking clue how they work, just that they’re shiny. 

There is a “self-driving” car that for most of its screentime is driven by a woman. When it finally does drive itself, it does it to surprise the bad guys. Curiously, the heroes who were previously traveling in it arrive at the destination before the car does. I have no fucking clue how. There is a scene where a computer voice announces that someone is stepping out of a gravity area. Yeah, of course, in a few years we’ll not only know why there is gravity but also how to turn it on and off.

The titular geostorm is a confluence of climactic events wherein they feed upon themselves to create even more weather catastrophes. It never arrives. Rather, it is scheduled, and serves as a hokey ticking timebomb. “Warning, 90 minutes until Geostorm... warning, Geostorm will commence in ten seconds...” The grassfuckers who made this piece of shit think catastrophic weather can be scheduled down to the second, as though there are no contributing and mitigating factors, no variance. Storms arrive on schedule, just so you can have your fat fucking hero save earth at the very last moment. 

Geostorm was directed and written by Dean Devlin. He also wrote the shit-stain 1998 American Godzilla, Stargate, Independence Day and a bunch of Universal Soldier movies, so he’s got bonafides as an honest-to-god hack. True to his formula, this movie is devoid of likable and engaging characters and heavily dependent on blowing buildings up.

This movie is firmly in the camp of man-made climate change. Personally, I too believe in man-made climate change. Not because I understand the science, but because people way smarter than me do, and tend to agree. I don’t know climatology, but I know how fucking brutal the science world is. I know how many hundreds and thousands of scientists there are eager to disprove anyone else's ideas. There is ego and there is envy and there are a thousand other reasons that make it damn near impossible for new ideas to be accepted. There is just as much money available in science to disprove as there is to prove. So, for so many eggheads who hate each other and wish each other ill to grudgingly agree means that the evidence must be pretty fucking good.

But if I didn’t believe in it and wanted to change people’s minds, I’d send them to Geostorm. It is a far more effective tool than any chintzy, ill-conceived screed put out by the far right. I mean, this piece of shit is illustrates beautifully that there are clueless idiots who believe in climate change, idiots who have not a single fucking clue what it is or how it works, but still believe. That's true of any complex issue, but seeing a movie like this, made by people this fucking stupid, is enough to make a guy wonder if maybe he's picked the wrong team.

Just because they're morons, though, doesn’t mean their conclusions are wrong, just that their paths to them are. Even an idiot gets head on a coin flip half the time. One Finger for Geostorm. I would rather be run over by the car than watch the movie.