Geostorm is awesomely dumb. The dumb casting can be summed up with 'Gerard Butler - World's Greatest Scientist and Engineer!' As a movie, Geostorm is a slurry of moments from other movies, many of them dumb as well. The science of the movie is gut-bustingly dumb. One wonders if the creators had a science advisor around so that they could do the exact opposite of everything he suggested.
Dean Devlin makes his feature-film directing debut here. You may remember him as the writer of such dumb movies as Independence Day, Independence Day: Resurgence, and the 1997 Godzilla. Truly he's a powerhouse.
In the mind-blowingly near future (as in, it seems like The Day After Tomorrow), humanity has built a giant orbital net of weather-control satellites in order to stave off the effects of global warming. Gerard Butler built it!
But he's a hothead, so he's relieved of his command just prior to the weather-control system being handed over to United Nations control. The weather-control system was dubbed 'Dutch Boy' because everyone in this universe really liked the story of the Dutch Boy and the Dike. OK.
So of course bad things start happening. Dogs and cats start to co-habitate. A town in Afghanistan gets flash-frozen. Hong Kong gets super-heated. Buenos Aires gets flash-frozen. Dubai gets hit with a tsunami. I'm not sure how that last one was managed. Does the weather machine also control plate tectonics? Is the weather machine simply malfunctioning?
Well, of course not. Sinister forces want to start a Geostorm, which is a really big storm that starts if you do wacky things with the weather machine in several specific locations in a specific sequence. Given that the weather-machine is perfectly capable of destroying hundreds of millions of lives without a Geostorm, I'm not entirely why a Geostorm is necessary. Oh well.
The magical weather machine can do pretty much anything instantaneously from blow up a stadium with lightning bolts (I have to assume in this instance the stadium was made of exploding wood) to throw armies of tornadoes at children and their dogs. It even has a giant fricking laser to light Moscow on fire!
Lots of stuff happens, thankfully none of it possible in a world governed by recognizable laws of physics. Gerard Butler and his estranged brother make up. A sassy African-American woman gets to be the go-to computer tech, which is I guess some sort of progress. Abbie Cornish is a complete blank. Richard Schiff, Ed Harris, and Andy Garcia collect paychecks without embarrassing themselves. It's all complete garbage, but it's fun in its stupidity, so I'd say Not Recommended but still better than Alien: Covenant and Tom Cruise's The Mummy.
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