A Hilariously Sad Waste of Money, Time, and Talent on a Creepy Climate Weapon Project

In the near future, after a series of natural disasters, the international community of scientists, engineers, and designers creates the “Dutch Boy” satellite system to control the weather. The world is free from abnormal heat, tornadoes, and tsunamis, but passions continue to boil within the leadership of the weather complex. Jake Lawson, the inventor of “Dutch Boy,” is suspended from the project for his difficult disposition. After some time, the system experiences several failures that appear to be random incidents. However, Jake’s brother, Max, soon discovers that there is a sabotage aimed at the entire planet – someone wants to cause natural anomalies that will lead to a geostorm, a global climate change on Earth. Only one person can deal with the hacking of “Dutch Boy” from the inside, and therefore the government has to turn to the fearless but uncontrollable Jake Lawson for help again.

At the final stage of bringing the film to completion, the studio had to bring in Jerry Bruckheimer, who, with his team of specialists, tried to save the film. Two weeks of work by the “rescuers” cost an additional $15 million.

Some films, like expensive cognac, should sit on the shelf for a while, infuse, survive the initial hype, after which they turn into immortal classics. Other films are good here and now – delaying their viewing is like death, because life today is changing too rapidly, changing the preferences and worldview of viewers. And then there is cinema that is hopelessly late in appearing on the screens, and neither brilliant actors, nor expensive special effects, nor an impressive picture can save it – it exudes the dampness of a crypt of unfulfilled hopes and wasted ambitions. Strictly speaking, no one has bet a broken penny on the success of “Geostorm,” Dean Devlin’s disaster film, for a long time – there were too many problems on the way to implementing this project, but the result surprised even inveterate pessimists. Such a film could have been interesting in the mid-2000s, but not later. Or better yet, it shouldn’t have existed at all.

The last remark sounds rude, but there is every reason for it, as the heroes of the popular Soviet television film said: “This is some kind of disgrace.” “Geostorm” stubbornly collects all the “childhood diseases” that blockbusters have long outgrown and discarded since “Armageddon,” “The Core,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” It’s painful (or funny, depending on what mood you took your seat in the cinema) to watch Devlin’s film – it is one hundred percent made up of ridiculous clichés, stupid fantasies, and a complete misunderstanding of the laws of nature and physics.

Geostorm: A Cascade of Absurdities

Listing the blunders and far-fetched assumptions of “Geostorm” can take a long time: here you have impenetrable astronaut suits, and a technical satellite with a small living module on board (what if someone looks in?), and explosions in space that have already become the talk of the town, and a space station blazing with tons of kerosene, and a stadium blown up by lightning as if it had been piled with TNT, and a red-hot gas pipeline protruding from the ground, and there is nothing to say about Afghanistan and Rio freezing in a split second. Roland Emmerich, a well-known master of depicting cataclysms on the screen, is not nervously smoking on the sidelines, but relaxed laughs at what is shown – against the background of “Geostorm,” any “2012” looks like a solid report at a scientific symposium.

The Human Element: Lost in the Chaos

Well, yes, should we scold for this? After all, we knew that we were going to watch a light delirium on the topic of unsuccessful weather management. Okay, let’s put aside everything related to the “Dutch Boy” project and see what the actors are doing in the frame and what the screenwriters have prepared for them. Here, too, there is no need to count on revelation. In essence, “Geostorm” is a conspiracy detective story about the fact that someone in the US government wants to sabotage not so much the work of the weather station as its transfer to “foreign hands,” although it was created by joint efforts. The legend is old and just as dreary, since the motives for this sound more than absurd: the performer complains – attention! – about a small salary, and the customer raves about America’s lost world domination. With such a baggage of allies, you need to look for yourself in the mid-1980s.

During the filming stage, members of the “Geostorm” film crew, on the rights of anonymity, told journalists that Gerard Butler was completely unprepared for filming and did not know a single line of his character.

But what is even more terrible, the actors in this entourage of conspiracies, computer viruses, lightning and explosions on the ISS look like lost children who have come to an adult party. Andy Garcia and Ed Harris do not seem to understand where they are at all, Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess play out such a dreary conflict of brothers, which belongs in a kindergarten production about two greedy bears, and with Abbie Cornish, the same Sturgess solves personal problems with the grace of an elephant and a hippopotamus – their line “work is more important than feelings” is nauseating. Alas, there is nothing to catch the eye in the background either, only Zazie Beetz, who plays the role of a hacker, brings a small fraction of diversity, she got both working jokes.

Embracing the Absurdity

But what the authors can be praised for is their completely selfless immersion in their own sideshow – “Geostorm” simply enjoys its own stupidity and exudes it to the fullest. There is no doubt here, no study of the subject, no slightest appeal to logic, only pure drive and dashing throwing of money into the furnace. “Cut the last cucumber,” it turns out, applies not only to Russians. But it’s a little embarrassing and awkward to watch this, you can only sigh and call out to Emmerich: “Come back, we forgave you ‘Independence Day 2’!”