Minilad
Established Member
Geostorm - So, I like apocalyptic dramas, I like Gerard Butler, I like gratuitous demolition of American landmarks. I should have loved this.
It was awful. 1.5/5.0
I will now explain at great length why.
So, the basic premise is that in 2019, a number of extreme weather events (floods, hurricanes, etc) caused the world to realise "****, we need to do something about this", so they build a massive network of satellites to control the weather. That this happens in 2019, when the US will still have a president who believes global warming is a Chinese conspiracy, quite literally made me laugh out loud in the cinema.
It didn't get much better.
Gerard Butler designs and builds this network off-screen, and at the start of the film he's giving evidence to a Senate committee who basically decide to make his brother fire him. Three years later, an Afghan village gets flash-frozen, and they realise something is wrong with the system. Someone in space gets blown out an airlock. The bald guy (turns out to be Secretary of State) says they should call Gerard Butler. This is the first sign that he's evil - because this is a reversal, it should be the brother saying call Butler, the SoS saying "we fired him for good reason". So Gerard Butler leaves behind his daughter with his estranged wife and goes to space. He promises the daughter he'll come back, she knows he won't, and that seems reasonable.
Oh, did I mention Butler's an alcoholic now?
Then Hong King explodes with a Smart Car being chased by explosions. Buildings quite literally fall like dominoes.
So, they send the alcoholic to space as the only cargo on a shuttle, and he meets the captain of the ISS and a team of people including a British jerk who is also clearly evil, because we saw him be a jerk to the guy who was blown out the airlock. They try to retrieve the Hong Kong satellite to get its hard drives but it tries to kill them and the hard drives get fried. Butler realises the airlock which exploded has hard drives too, and part of it is still stuck nearby, so they send the two highest value people on the station out to get it, and then Butler's suit tries to kill him but he miraculously just avoids floating off towards the moon but loses the bit of airlock. He and the rest of the station somehow also avoid being punctured by the millions of bits of debris he just created.
I shall interject at this point to say that somehow the entire ISS has earth-normal gravity, despite only small parts of it spinning to generate centrifugal gravtiy. This for some reason includes the docking bay, which is an incredibly stupid place to have gravity all the time.
Gerard Butler saved the hard drive! He hid it as soon as he grabbed the airlock, but he only tells one person because someone tried to kill him. The airlock was fine, so he goes back to the security cameras, and finds guy-blown-out-the-airlock took a download of the Afghanistan satellite and hid it, because there are no cameras in the locker room. There's a virus and they need to whole reboot the system to fix it, but they are locked out.
Meanwhile, Butler's brother is shagging someone from the Secret Service, and he also knows this techie who he uses to deciper an extremely simple code Butler sent him which says "trust no one". The guy from Hong Kong who was driving the Smart Car and works for the ISS somehow is attacked in this massive office building where he's the only person there. He goes to Butler's brother and is promptly run over after being pushed into the road. The Techie finds references to "Project Zeus", but she can't open the files without being on the White House network.
Secret Service agent comes home and finds Techie wandering around in her underwear and Brother makes things worse. He tries to convince her to let them use her access to the White House. In doing so, he uses the phrase "this is bigger than you and me"; which Techie corrects as "you and I". And this shows how this movie likes to think it's being clever but fails, because "you and me" is actually the correct case here. Anyway, Secret Service agrees and decrypts the files. It's about using the satellites as weapons! Now they realise they need to shut down the network, so they decide to steal the keycodes from the president. Brother lies his way on to Air Force One.
Bald guy reappears, and calls Brother on the lie. He says Brother can trust him. Brother explains, Bald Guy says the president himself is the keycode - it's biometric - then slips up and admits he is the villain. Brother escapes and decides to kidnap the president. He and Secret Service succeed.
Meanwhile in space, things are getting worse, satellites are going rogue, and one fries to flash-freeze Rio. It freezes lots of people in bikinis, drops a plane from the sky, but somehow this one person in a bikini is able to outrun it when no one else can, and they successfully launch another satellite to crash into the first one and knock it offline. But then the station's self-destruct activates. Why does it have a self-destruct someone asks, apparently it's in case it was ever falling to earth. Why they can't abort the self-destruct is never explained. It's also never explained why the self-destruct blows up a small bit of station every minute or so getting slowly closer to the control centre, rather than just blowing up the entire thing at once. Anyway, everyone evacuates, except Butler, who stays behind to input the shutdown command.
Brother and Secret Service are in a taxi with the President, being chased by goons through a massive lightning storm. Lightning which strikes everywhere except this massive metal crane, which then just falls over on its own. Very little effort is made to explain to the President what's going on or why they've kidnapped him. Bald Guy is waiting on the edge of town with an RPG, and when he sees the President's car he shoots it, because geolocation says it's them. Except then Secret Service shows up behind him and cold-cocks him. Miraculously at that point all the state police show up, and the earth is about 20mins from destruction, but POTUS lets aldie explain that what he planned was to kill everyone ahead of him in the line of succession and also all America's geopolitical rivals. Also quite a lot of America actually, leaving the Midwest and Texas and that's about it. Why he leaves that bit, heavily Republican when he's allegedly a Democrat, is unexplained.
Daughter is with her mother and points to say "Daddy's in space". She appears to have got about 10 years less able to talk since she left Butler.
POTUS is taken to Cape Canaveral. The director of the Kennedy Space Centre explains how imperative it is that POTUS put in his authorisation, but then spends a minute commiserating with Brother about how Butler's still in space. POTUS has his eye scanned by his personal data slate then leaves. Why he didn't do this half an hour ago is unexplained. Brother realises Butler is still in space and going to die. It for some reason takes a full minute for POTUS's eye test to make it to space, but Butler must now run to plug it into the right terminal on the other side of the station. Why he needed to use the holoroom and couldn't take the call from the server room is unexplained. He's running but then the bit between him and the server room blows up. But then he's in a space suit! How he managed to get in a space suit inside 30 seconds, given you literally cannot put on a spacesuit by yourself, is (say it with me) unexplained. He makes for the server room, but his keycode won't open the airlock. Oh no! But then the station manager turns up again, and shows him he was trying to open a broom cupboard and not the airlock. They make it to the server room, somehow avoiding all the billions of pieces of deadly shrapnel, and they manage to press the reset button with one second to spare.
In Dubai, a guy on a camel is killed in a tsunami, and in Moscow the Kremlin starts to melt.
Butler's still in space, and the station's still exploding, but still everything is working and he transfers control back to NASA. Then he sees a satellite which has miraculously hung around. This satellite has an entry hatch and space for two people inside, and he and Station Manager get in. "We have to get as far away as possible before the station explodes" he says, and one second later the station explodes. But he's still alive! And he uses the satellite's thrusters to signal SOS, which a shuttle, which is miraculously undamaged from all the trillions of pieces of deadly shrapnel, connects with and saves him. They land and the earth is saved. Daddy takes daughter and brother fishing, they all hate it.
In some ways this is a decent movie. There's a good story in there, and I have to say it was kind of fun. But it was just buried under so much cliché, obvious foreshadowing, cosmic coincidence and denial of reality that it was just in the end plain bad. It's like if there's a song you really like by your favourite band. But then One Direction do a cover of it, which is awful, and they also change history so the original song never existed. This is that song.
As a lover of all things Smart I have to ask.....did the Smart car escape?!
