BEFORE: Ed Harris carries over from "Eye for an Eye" and I'm back in Gerard Butler-land for a few days before I have to pivot and head over to Easter-ville. It's Sunday today but I have to put in a shift at the theater, for the first time in nearly a week. Got to get those shifts where I can, because who knows if they may start to run out again. But also, I've got to keep making progress on my movie list, at the same time. Really, it's all about finding that balance.
THE PLOT: When the network of satellites designed to control the global climate starts to attack Earth, it's a race against the clock for its creator to uncover the real threat before a worldwide Geostorm wipes out everything and everyone.
AFTER: Wow, I can NOT believe how absolutely ridiculous this film is. Not that I expect a Hollywood action movie to present a fair argument over the risks our planet faces if we don't do something about climate change, but still, this is so far removed from reality, I don't know if I even have time tonight to properly do it justice and tear it apart. At some point, I'm going to have to stop, because I have to start watching tomorrow's film before it gets too late.
Here's the big one - this is set in the near future, after devastating destruction caused by worsening weather patterns - floods, wildfires, thunder snow, hotter summers and colder winters, and finally the U.S. Government, working in conjunction with other countries, finally puts a plan into place. BUT - bad news, here's the plan: let's not reduce our carbon footprint to prevent climate change, let's not lower our dependence on fossil fuel and foreign oil, let's not develop wind turbines and solar panels and take advantage of the FREE energy that our sun produces every day that's more than sufficient to power all our devices and heat our homes, but instead....
Let's build a network of satellites around the Earth, so they can use some form of mystery technology - I don't know, beams or radiation or something about moving molecules around - to just ZAP away any weather that we don't like. Tornadoes? ZAP them away! A blizzard? Just ZAP it away? How does it work, you might ask? Well, get used to disappointment, because we're just NOT going to tell you! And I guess we'll just make sure that the weather is great for everybody, every day, and who could possibly find fault with that? More to the point, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Better still, let's put the U.S. Government in charge of the whole project, because they're always SO efficient, that Congress really knows how to come to agreements over what needs to be done and how that should be funded, and the U.S Government would never, NEVER be involved in some kind of crazy scheme to take advantage of the less developed nations, right? Or interfere in foreign governments to tell them how their countries should be run, that's never happened before, either, right?
But don't we NEED the rain? Like, you know, crops and stuff? Don't we need winter, isn't it just built into the fabric of our Earth, because of the tilting of the planet's axis and all that? Also, who decides what the weather SHOULD be in every single location on the planet, and where are they getting their data from? Also, what happens to the "bad" weather, does it get sent somewhere else? Also, please, again, how does it work? We've been told for years about the "butterfly effect", where if an insect flaps its wings in one country, it somehow causes a hurricane somewhere else, so I'm not buying the idea that you can just point a beam at a tornado, make it disappear, and there's not some horrible repercussion down the line somewhere else. This is just NOT how weather works, you can't just wish it away and make every day better, everywhere.
Of course, we've got politicians now who think that you can fight hurricanes with nuclear weapons, or just change the weather predictions by drawing the lines on a map differently with a Sharpie, the big plan in this movie to control the weather would seem to make just about the same amount of sense. Sure, meteorologists are always taking their best guesses, but they're also frequently wrong - do we want to put THEM in charge of really deciding what the weather SHOULD be? That's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, no?
All right, now let's get to the littler NITPICK POINTS:
Jake Lawson, the man who invented (or designed, or built, it's not that clear) this network of satellites, and then got FIRED by his own brother, who works directly for the White House (it's a whole long back story, I guess) gets called back into service because something's going wrong with the system. (Gee, who could have predicted THAT?). It seems there's an Afghan village that got frozen somehow (and covered up, again, who could have foreseen the U.S. government would be capable of THAT?) and also, in Hong Kong, a satellite causes temperatures to increase so much that fire rises up from beneath the Earth's surface. Umm, yeah, right, put a pin in that one for a second...it's just not possible.
When Jake arrives at Cape Canaveral to go back to the space station and get to the bottom of things, we see one Space Shuttle taking off, but hey, that's OK, he can just catch the next one. HUH? The fact that space shuttles are taking off practically on the hour to take people to the International Space Station - is this really the best use of space shuttles? And he's the ONLY passenger on the shuttle? What a waste - couldn't they just run the shuttles daily, and ferry like 12 astronauts and techs up to space at one time? How is this helping our energy problem, by wasting all this rocket fuel, plus aren't we littering the oceans or Earth's orbit with all these booster rockets? Maybe they cleaned up all the plastic out of the oceans, but now they're filled with rockets? Meanwhile, we've filled the whole sky with satellites, doesn't that block out the sun, to some degree? Plus now we're filling Earth's orbit with tech and more trash, that can't be good, either.
Jake's brother, Max, is the guy who works in the White House, and he's involved with a Secret Service agent - which they keep pointing out is against the rules, they're at the very least supposed to disclose this relationship, because it compromises the integrity of the separation of powers, or makes the government more susceptible to bad people kidnapping one of them, holding them hostage and making the other give up state secrets. So they KNOW all this, but they keep living together and sleeping together anyway. Terrible idea - it's necessary as a plot point later on, but that doesn't make it right, for the reasons just stated. If there's a rule against them dating, it's not OK to have characters say, "OK, we just won't follow the rules..."
Back to Jake - the guy who designed the satellite tech that somehow controls the weather, who's spent months and months aboard the space station, but still doesn't know his way around the place, and mixes up the doors? Well, is he smart or stupid? Does he put his shoes on the wrong feet or something? I guess Einstein sometimes left the house without pants, so this is something we'll just have to reconcile somehow.
This film then turns into a sort of "Whodunit" with the suspects all being aboard the space station - or perhaps in the White House. Nobody can be trusted, because the conspiracy could reach as far as the highest levels of government - sure, we know NOW that the President can't be trusted, but nobody figured on that when they started shooting this film, in 2014. That's maybe the one thing they got right here, the story turned kind of Trump-like but Obama was still President when this was written.
If they can't stop the satellites in time (umm, and why can't they just turn the system "OFF"?) then all of the dicey weather things happening will eventually unite and form one giant Geostorm, and then it's game over for the Earth, I think? I suspect this bit of writing was just to create a ticking clock that the hero characters just had to beat, though. Global weather is a very complex thing, and it really stretches the truth to think that it can be predicted, down to the second, when your local meteorologist basically gets so many predictions wrong, every damn day.
And then when they do beat the clock (come on, that's not a spoiler, you knew the good guys were gonna win here) the weather everywhere returns to "normal", like somebody just flipped a switch. Gotta call a final whopper of a NITPICK POINT here, because you don't just set a bunch of tornadoes and tsunamis and ice storms in motion and then POOF, they're gone just because you rebooted the system. I can see the bad juju weather dying down eventually, but it just can't possibly be instantaneous. Come on, already, give me a break.
Also starring Gerard Butler (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Jim Sturgess (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Abbie Cornish (last seen in "Bright Star"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "My Dinner With Hervé"), Alexandra Maria Lara (last seen in "Downfall"), Robert Sheehan (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), Eugenio Derbez (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Adepero Oduye (last seen in "Widows"), Amr Waked (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Daniel Wu (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Talitha Bateman (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Billy Slaughter (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Tom Choi (last seen in "Red Notice"), Mare Winningham (last seen in "The Seagull"), Jeremy Ray Taylor (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween") , Gregory Alan Williams (last seen in "Brightburn"), Drew Powell, Daniella Garcia, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), David S. Lee, Richard Regan Paul, David Jensen (last seen in "Mudbound"), Derek Roberts (last seen in "One Night in Miami..."), Randall Newsome (ditto), Judd Lormand, Corey Mendell Parker, Sean Paul Braud, Randy Havens (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Douglas M. Griffin (last seen in "Freelancers")
RATING: 3 out of 10 tidal waves in the desert (and the water came from...where, exactly?)
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