The science in Geostorm is so bad, I honestly wish the film aligned itself with the troglodytes who deny climate change. It’s 2019 and the nations of the world have finally seen the solar paneled light and made the necessary strides to combat climate change. And those strides are … building a giant outer space and curiously meteor-resistant metal web around the planet that delivers weather influencing materials on demand.
Hoo boy. This is like the mother of head slaps. A giant net … in outer space … around the Earth … that can change the weather instantly. Well, gee, what did you call this masterpiece? The “Hurri-clean?” It cleans up those pesky hurricanes in a flash!
Ok, sorry, but I have to do this. Lemme just outline the major problems. First, the practical: even with every single nation on board, you couldn’t build an outer space shell over the entirety of even one tiny country in my lifetime. Take any random small country, say Tunisia. Tunisia is 63,170 square miles. Imagine building an outer space net over Tunisia that covered an area of 63k square miles. (It would be bigger in space, of course, if you think about surface areas of spheres with larger radii, but I’ll ignore that part.) Even if you had all eight billion members of this planet on board, how do you cover that kind of surface area in space? And what material do you use? What material is available to cover that kind of area and ship it space? How do you get it there?
After the practical comes the political concerns: “Say, North Korea, the United States is going to lead an effort to build a metal net over your country that can control the weather you get. You cool with that?” The nations of the Earth couldn’t begin on this project without unanimous sign off from all NATO nations. Then, of course, let’s deal local — would one expect a country whose xenophobic ruling majority thinks national health care is a sign of weakness to embrace a love for all the people of the world? And, oh yeah, there’s that little issue of our country being currently led by morons … rich morons who have no taste for science or facts.
The biggest concern is not practical or political, however, it’s plain science. This isn’t how weather works. You can’t defeat years of global warming with “smart rain.” You can’t diffuse a hurricane or a lightning storm from space. Given the science displayed in this film, my immediate reaction is: well, gee, wouldn’t it be cheaper to dig a hole to the core of the Earth where the planet triggers are kept and flip the breakers whenever there’s an extreme weather system? That makes equally as much sense.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the science were the only problem with this film? Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is the architect and chief of “Dutch Boy” (Not “Hurri-clean”); he gets taken to the woodshed for stopping a typhoon without express written consent from Major League Baseball. Jake and his caustic personality are immediately fired and replaced by… wait for it … his brother Max (Jim Sturgess). I am immediately reminded of Larry Miller response to “you’ll never find someone like me again”: “Does anybody end a bad relationship and say, ‘By the way, do you have a twin?’ “ Max is having an illicit relationship with Secret Service agent and Presidential shield, Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish). Apparently, our nation’s vetting procedures missed the part where none of the top government employees are American.
Three years later, Dutch Boy becomes more of a Dutch Oven, fouling the planet instead of keeping it clean. An Afghani town is frozen in mid-filth. Is Dutch Boy behind it? And how did it manage the part where the town doesn’t melt after being frozen? (The latter is never answered.) Now, here, one might speculate that this
being a global crisis with an obvious culprit, perhaps an international team of detectives, engineers, and scientists will be selected to solve the Dutch Boy problem in as public a fashion as is possible to bring immediate peace to the world. One would be wrong. Exactly one man is sent to solve the global space station crisis: Jake Lawson. And his approach has to be clandestine because the evil element remains on the space station.
It was about the time that a secret message was encoded within a Jake monologue that this film plummeted into the bottom 10 category. And this is before Jake and Sarah kidnap the President by themselves. Simply put: there isn’t a believable scene in this entire film. Not one. The producers were so desperate to make another Independence Day, they forgot to do an ounce of research into anything, including Independence Day. Geostorm is kind of film which believes if it can pass one tongue-in-cheek joke or give us a happy ending, then we will forget the trail of evil that led there. Believe me, while the bad news is you can’t press a button and magically make the world’s weather problems disappear, the good news is you can press a button and make this film disappear. And, believe me, you will.
♪Oh, the weather on screen is blightful
And science is so darn frightful
Turn reality way down low
Watch it blow, watch it blow, watch it blow
Well it doesn’t show signs of stopping
And expectations are dropping
Next door has different show
Let me go, let me go, let me go♫
Rated PG-13, 109 Minutes
Director: Dean Devlin
Writer: Dean Devlin, Paul Guyot
Genre: Plots written by children
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The children who wrote it
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Rational beings
♪ Parody Inspired by “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!”
