It just opened yesterday, and already Hollywood movie analysts are blasting its plot and performance.
When catastrophic climate change endangers Earth’s very survival, world governments unite and create the Dutch Boy Program: a world wide net of satellites, surrounding the planet, that are armed with geoengineering technologies designed to stave off the natural disasters. After successfully protecting the planet for two years, something is starting to go wrong. Two estranged brothers are tasked with solving the program’s malfunction before a world wide Geostorm can engulf the planet.
From Variety:
“Geostorm,” a weather disaster drama starring Gerard Butler and directed by Dean Devlin, is heading towards a disaster of the fiscal sort for Warner Bros. Though the film is projected to over-perform just barely with a modest $12.5 million at 3,246 venues compared to a projected $10 to 12 million, it’s also carrying an estimated $100 million budget. The film has been released internationally and garnered roughly $7.4 million on Friday, bringing the global cumulative total to $29.8 million in addition to Friday’s domestic $4.3 million.
From The Independent
Geostorm review round-up: Is this the worst film of the year?
‘Uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors’
Which is precisely what Geostorm may be doomed to become, roping in Independence Day‘s producer Dean Devlin for a feature film debut that is predicted to flop hard at the box office.
The film sees Gerard Butler star as the architect behind an elaborate natural disaster defense system, which sees a series of climate-controlling satellites surrounding Earth, centered around the International CIimate Space Station.
Can Hollywood films about climate change make a difference?
But, is Geostorm truly the worst film of the year, especially with the (also) disastrously received The Snowman lurking in the shadows of cinema complexes everywhere?
Here’s what the critics thought. – read the review here
The trailer (the most ridiculous part, in my opinion, is the frozen airliner falling out of the sky):
There is one element of truth in the movie: Humans can’t control the climate.
At least Al Gore isn’t in it.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Bigger explosions, more destruction. It’s been a competition for a long time now. This movie is so over the top it’s ridiculous on a grand scale.
I remember as a kid watching movies from the middle of the 20th century that were in black and white and for which the setting for nearly the entire movie was a single room. No disasters, no special effects, a cast of only a few, but they were entertaining and held my attention because of the plot, writing, and the great acting. I couldn’t imagine Hollywood pulling that off now.
Think “12 Angry Men”.
But to do that you have to have writers that actually understand esoteric things like plot and character development.
Examples: Perry Mason. Pretty much any of the original Twilight Zone.
Hey, all Hollywood movies full of this crap but it seems that this article is just a knee-jerk reaction because it’s about “climate”.
This looks like a salutary warning of the dangers and potential for militarisation of geo-engineering. Any AGW alarmists tempted to see GE as a stop gap or fall back technical solution would to well to take note.
They need to realise that the solutions are far worse than the more or less non-existent “problem”.
Spending money on special effects rather than on plot writing is a BIG problem.
A couple of years ago, my daughter got my wife and me to watch “Dr Who” for awhile. Although the special effects sucked, we found the plots to be quite entertaining- just the opposite of what I suspect “Geostorm” was.
So Sad…
Though I am very glad, Tyler Perry and her co-sponsors deserve their lack of reward and glory!
Warning: shameless personal plug:
I published a novel earlier this year (first in a trilogy) with a far more preposterous premise than the subject movie. It takes place 200 years after a solar system sized ice cloud adds about 1200 meters of water to the planet. Since a good portion still remains in low earth orbit, the cloud blocks most of the sunlight and our characters are living on a Snowball Earth. Since the warmest part is still near the Equator, add 1200 meters of water, get a map, and you can guess where the action takes place.
The fun part is where the main character discovers he’s a key player in a secret plan to bring the sunlight back. It involves him driving an asteroid.
I’ve followed WUWT for many years, and reading the way the science is debated here has helped my layout out of my own science (fiction) for non science readers. I wanted to thank Anthony plus all the other contributors and the many commenters who’ve unknowingly helped me on this.
The book is called ICEFALL
Does it feature James Bond?
Yep 007 Climate change commando. License to kill Ice clouds. Weapon of choice: Asteroid.
Kill ice clouds? Hey, PSC lives matter, boss!
Don’t shoot the nacreous.
Apparently it is all explained in your book then.
Sounds familiar.
crustal loading and rotational inertia effects of such an added mass would release massive vulcanism and tectonic displacements. It would take a billion or so years to sort out, just like the original cometary delivery of water from the outer solar system about 4 billion years ago.
How much longer is a day?
Your book is not that preposterous- the universe is a place with big things. The Solar System has been lucky (the chance is small) to miss all the super-solar system effects such as supernova gamma radiation bursts – kill us all.
Is it a good red neck movie where all the bad guys get shot and all the bad girls get necked? Can I say that any more?
I’ve actually read Walt Stone’s ICEFALL novel and I have to say I couldn’t put it down! It’s got very good reviews on Amazon. Absolutely brilliant! The author’s summary here doesn’t do it justice and it’s nothing like the crap alarmist movie above. I didn’t realise the author was a frequent visitor to this site, but that may explain a few things.
Anyone keen in Science Fiction I can recommend it.
Thank you kind reader! I grew up on Asimov, and there’s a things in the series that harken back to his most famous trilogy. One is the use of epigraphs, or interstitials as I first started calling them. This is where the “science” and world building gets mentioned, saving room in the story for character interaction.
Regarding nekkid flesh [spoiler], there will be a Jubilee in Book 2
The series publishing timeline has taken a setback due to my house losing its first floor to Hurricane Harvey. But I promise to get back on things ASAP!
How much would dumping all that kinetic energy into the biosphere warm up the planet.
Enough water to increase sea levels by 1200 meters is a huge weight. All that weight dropping from orbit or higher is going to have a huge amount of kinetic energy. Every last erg of that kinetic energy is going to be converted to heat.
I suspect that rising water levels would be the least of the survivors worries.
That is discussed briefly. Pressures and temperatures fluxes mentioned aren’t realistic. To make them manageable, I invented an “effect” whereby some of the heat is held in the water in orbit and whisked away by the mass of ice not captured in Earth’s gravity well.. Not really possible, but it arm waves us past the obvious science error, because the story, like life, uh, has to find a way.
Not IMDB but IMDb. Mind you I did start with Ashton-Tate in 1985 so maybe you will excuse me!
I left IMDb after they removed all the comment forums.
Too many Griffs?
i wondered where they’d gone!
I don’t think planet Earth gives a hoot about its climate.
Now, a bolide collision? That’ll leave a mark…
“That’ll leave a mark…”
A small one, that is soon erased by erosion.
Day After Tomorrow II: Braindead Bugaloo.
Right down to the “frozen aircraft.”
The larger problem isn’t that millions of people are in a panic largely due to their innumeracy, but that they band together to demand that *others* panic with them.
“I insist that you be as concerned/frightened of this as I am otherwise I look like a coward.”
I guess the zombie apocalypse crowd isn’t into weather-related flicks. There seems to be an undeveloped market for this kind of doom. Maybe if they give it a ‘Final Destination’ spin?
You can’t headshot or chainsaw-mangle bad weather.
Pop Piasa
Make a movie about zombie Armageddon and the audience giggle at the prospect. Make a movie about apocalyptic climate change and the audience run from the cinema screaming.
Both movies made in the same studios, with the same actors, cameramen, writers, producers, directors etc. But climate change is real and zombies aren’t.
WTF? A zombie Armageddon is probably more likely than apocalyptic climate change.
You just know a zombie movie is going to be a blast of pure fun, whereas a climate related movie these days is almost guaranteed to be sanctimonious and preachy and take itself too seriously. Of course I haven’t seen the movie. But if you are trying to figure out why a movie is tanking then the opinion of people who have no intentions of ever seeing the movie and indeed probably wouldn’t go if you gave them a free ticket are the determining factor.
The zombie apocalypse offers up tangible demons that can be fought and even vanquished unless they are Legion and even then our heroes can outfox the zombie horde and escape to live and fight another day. Further, the zombies as demons can often become ancillary to the real monsters, we (or other) humans. This type of story telling offers up the type of tension and release that audiences love. The zombie apocalypse can also easily cater to the mythic reluctant hero structure, a story technique that is universal in its appeal.
Weather related films do not offer audiences tangible monsters and demons and does not easily fit into the reluctant hero structure. Not all disaster films are like this, but weather related disaster films are difficult to make work in the traditional mythic hero sense. In terms of tension and release, disaster films generally take a long time building up the slow burn tension that is finally released when the disaster happens. Not as varied and nuanced as a zombie film.
The disaster films like Earthquake and Towering Inferno did well at the box offices but they had multiple actors in multiple story lines and featuring big name actors. This was in the early ’70’s but by the end of the decade and the beginning of the ’80’s disaster films were doing poorly at the box office and few, (the notable exception would be Titanic – not a weather type related disaster film) disaster films since have done well.
Zombie movies are a euphemism for social collapse. They’re what happens when the power goes out in the cities and the food stops coming.
Hence why they’re so popular right now.
the reality is Millenials were raised on FP shooter games . They can imagine where they can give video zombies satifying head shots, but a tornado? or ice strom? Not so much.
at least “the day after tomorrow” had a épausible storyplot. wasn’t that bad but yea it’s a movie… i did enjoy watching everything freeze 🙂
Am I the only person deeply worried that the actor who plays the President has a more than passing resemblance to Al Gore? This is definitely one case in which I sincerely hope life doesn’t follow fiction. Come to think of it they could have got Gore to play the part and made sure everyone understood it was meant to be comedy.
At least it might make any of the people who pay to watch the film pause at ideas of ego-engineering from space.
Thanks for a chuckle and enlightenment that their egos are indeed similar. But then again, isn’t that how they ended up in the same arena?
To achieve the Worst Movie of the Year award in a year of real stinkers is an accomplishment in itself.
The perfect movie to revive MST3K.
MST3K has already been revived. Season 11 is a Netflix exclusive. The new SoL crew is raw but full of potential. I expect season 12 to be much better.
Cracked has already given this a MST3K-like (sort of) panned review from their panel of three reviewers.
They mentioned the film was shot in 2014, then after test audiences panned it, they spent $15,000,000 reshooting some of the problematic scenes. Perhaps theyshould have just shot it. 🙂
alexwade October 21, 2017 at 4:23 pm
I loved the original MST3K and thought the remake was very good. They did a very good job of not trying to be the original.
That was meant to be geo, but spellcheck seems to have score a winner with ego!
+1…LOL
Fancy new space shuttles? When was this written? 1985?
Wow !! That was pathetic ..!
Make Sharknado look like a documentary.
With social justice warriors every where, Russia and uranium, Hillary blaming everyone including Devine, ISIS, NOKO, Iran, hurricanes, wild fires, and Maddow and the NYT’s…
..who in their right mind would go see a disaster movie
Lol. Indeed. Somehow saying CAGW causes mental illness is almost believable.
I have a dear step daughter who has/had a brilliant mind. Oxford educated, pure “academic” absolutely convinced of coming climate Armageddon, recently in hysterical tears ( not hyperbole) trying to convince my wife of all this insanity ( I am the bad guy in this scenario) lamenting in tears how the deep oceans are warming… Had I been there and explained the adjustments to the ocean T, the actual adjusted miniscule warming, the fact that fractionally warmer oceans cannot raise atmospheric T more then that miniscule warming and in fact they are a huge buffer to atmospheric T increase, and that the Argo buoys do not measure the deep oceans anyway, but at best the upper 25%. ( 6,000′ max verses 12,000′ mean ocean depth) she would have been sent into deeper hysterics ( if possible) with every fact, and left muttering about fossil fuel funded propaganda.
Higher education is now a cult so deep that intervention is simply not possible.
The most effective way to indoctrinate others is to convince them that they’re independant, critical thinkers–it’s the stupid people over there who’re the ones deluded by propaganda! The college-aged are especially vulnerable to this ploy, since it taps into that residual adolescent rebelliousness that wants to hear that everything the older generations know is wrong. After that, you can fill their heads with your agenda, confident that most will lap it up and regurgitate it.
Oxford must be as good as Harvard.
I totally don’t get this deep ocean warming scare tactic, other than it is so foreign of a location to most that people have no choice but to believe what a so called expert says. If the deep oceans were warming then surely the deep parts of the Great Lakes would be warming even more, seeing that the lakes are so much smaller they would be a canary in a coal mine so to speak, but every year the lakes warm and cool about the same, some years colder than others, others warmer than others but no real trend, we even drop temperature probes down to about 100′ ( its almost always frigid cold that deep) and haven’t detected any deep water warming.
I like the trailer!
Me, too. It was hilarious. Definitely ripe for MST3K!
“Seriously? We’re kidnapping the President in a driverless cab?” Love It :>)))
Oh dear!
It’s a cold climate for B movies with A movie budgets. Like all things AGW related, hugely expensive and a major fail.
When, oh, when, will the SpecFX people EVER learn how to make hail look like hail? Must i send them pictures? Or leave them out in a hailstorm?
And will someone please tell me why, why, why it ALWAYS has to be poor old Earth that gets whacked with these disasters? Could they just pick another planet some place else, such as the Trappist system? There are SEVEN cotton-pickin’ Earht-sized planets there, for Pete’s sake! SEVEN. Count ’em, and ALL in the Goldilocks zone.
Seriously, people, why not make up a planet that for some reason is starting to undergo slower rotation: noticeably slower, so the days are slowly lengthening for no known reason. Or maybe it’s faster rotation, and the days are getting shorter, for no known reason. Something that is plausible would at least be worth watching.
Seriously, if I have to pay to watch this drivel, I’ll take a pass. “Day After’ was bad enough, but it cost me nothing except an hour and a half out of my life that I will never get back.
This one? I’d rather be stepped on by a rhino than watch it.
Maybe you didn’t watch Pitch Black…
Not to nit pick, but how do you spend a $120 mill, and end up with cartoon like CGI?…. Must be a leftest thing…
The wacko leftist minority pressure groups tried to ban Tom and Jerry.
They take their cartoons really seriously.
They succeeded in banning Speedy Gonzalez.
All of my Hispanic friends loved Speedy.
… Do not forget “Little Black Sambo”
the story of a boy named Sambo who outwitted a group of hungry tigers.
A positive story and inspiration for a well received restaurant chain decimated by the P.C.
When was the last time you saw Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey?
“They succeeded in banning Speedy Gonzalez.”
No, “they” did not.
Cartoon Network tried to ban Speedy in 2002, but due to fan campaigns from Hispanic-Americans, he was back on that same year.
He was a recurring character in the 2011-2014 series “The Looney Tunes Show,” and played Lola Bunny’s landlord in the 2015 direct-to-video release, “Looney Tunes: Rabbits Run”.
Considering just how much of climate science reads like bad science fiction, what should be expected? Hollywood has usually done science fiction very badly.
Put Mikie Mann on a space station to save the world
Nahh, he would run out of climate toothpaste, then what would he do?
Yeah. Just like they put Tubal-Cain on Noah’s Ark.
Oh come on, it looks hilarious! Yeah, it’s a recycling of many, many old scripts and old ideas that have been done to death but hey it looks like fun! (Of course I’ll wait for it to be on TV, no point in shelling out for overpriced theatre tickets – I’m not made of money. At least not until the check from Big Oil/Coal arrives, which should be any day now… Zzzzz.)
I will have to watch Geostorm, just to see how much stupid non scientific crap they peddle. Hopefully the movie was at least technically well done with good acting and special effects.
Unfortunately, many of the average viewers are going to believe much of whatever their theme is regarding climate science, and I doubt that there is much actual science reality to it. It seems none of the sci-fi movies now have any resemblance of scientific fact to them. Remember Gravity, that movie with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, where they change orbits from the Hubble telescope to the Chinese/ISS in a space suit jet pack? No regard for facts or common sense is a huge drag on movie watchability.
I was going to watch Gravity because Sandra Bullock was in it, but then changed my mind because George Clooney was also in it.
Gravity was good.
It was a heavy movie.
Despite antiAmerican Clooney, I still might have watched it, except that Bullock wasn’t naked.
An understandable position.
… yes Anthony, a real downer.
One problem with Gravity was fires don’t do well in weightlessness (or in this case, free fall). They tend to suffocate themselves. Without gravity, convection doesn’t happen–there’s nothing to feed the fire new oxygen and remove the combustion products.
And that debris field which was orbiting at the same altitude but traveling faster–how does that work? Some writer heard that things in orbit go around the Earth in about 90 minutes. Apparently, the writer thought Hubble (95 minute orbit), ISS (92 minute orbit), and that Chinese station are in geosynchronous orbit. That debris field would take weeks if not months to catch up–assuming it could. (Communications satellites are usually in geosynchronous orbit which is around 22,000 miles–not near Earth orbit.)
Forget about changing major orbits using just a jet pack.
Jim
Sandra can defy gravity, (she did it in Speed.) George forgot he was weightless and let go of the tether.
Gravity was a terrible movie.
Actually Clooney did a bloody good job in that movie.
@ur momisugly Jim Masterson
If the debris was in the same orbit traveling in the opposite direction it would get ugly pretty fast. Every 45 minutes.
>>
D.J. Hawkins
October 22, 2017 at 6:54 pm
If the debris was in the same orbit traveling in the opposite direction it would get ugly pretty fast. Every 45 minutes.
<<
You do know that changing an orbit from prograde to retrograde requires an incredible amount of energy and utterly perfect orbital alignment to be dangerous. An exploding satellite isn’t going to cut it. The whole premise/plot/execution of the movie is nonsense.
Jim
You asked “How does that work?” I told you. Sorry to have illustrated your ignorance.
Israel and the US have both launched satellites in retrograde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_satellites_in_retrograde_orbit
>>
Israel and the US have both launched satellites in retrograde.
<<
and
>>
If the debris was in the same orbit traveling in the opposite direction it would get ugly pretty fast.
<<
So why didn’t those retrograde satellites become ugly–pretty fast?
Jim
@jim Masterson
Missed the word “if”, didn’t you? It was a pretty important word in that clause. You are beyond tedious.
If the wings ice faster than the de-icer can handle, then a frozen plane can fall from the sky.
Of course it wouldn’t fall straight down like that one did.
Actually, if you watch that part of the clip carefully it isn’t quite falling straight down, it just doesn’t have much forward momentum left.
Given the general premise of the movie, the plane could have been forced to circle at altitude because there was nowhere safe to land and if it out or nearly out of fuel when the wings iced up, I could see it exhausting it’s forward momentum before reaching the ground.
Planes are pretty aerodynamic. The plane isn’t going to lose much forward momentum in the minute or two it would take it to fall from cruising altitude to the ground.
An iced up plane is not so aerodynamic.
The only way an aircraft can fall more or less vertically like that is if it gets into a deep stall and fails to take corrective action for a long time (and yes, this applies to a heavily iced plane too). This requires outstanding flightcrew incompetence and I can only think of one case when it has actually happened (AF 447)
Let’s see–the engines could ice up and flame out. That would reduce the forward thrust. The controls could ice up and place the plane in an unusual attitude leading to a stall. If the airplane entered into a flat spin, then the only way to get out is to eject–but airliners don’t have that option. I’m not sure that today’s deicers/anti-icers could be overpowered, but it’s possible.
Jim
It’s just a movie. B- sci-fi are always watchable. It’s when they pretend climate-fiction (cli-fi) movies and documentaries are real, that is when I take offence. Otherwise, crappy movie with crappy script but sci-fi theme – usually worth taking in anyway (when they are free on TV/Netflix etc. that is Not for $15).
What was going wrong was that they were finding out the technology didn’t work or work well enough.
Something like, well, like TODAY!
We’re tired of being lectured by letchers and pedophiles and jet setting rock stars about how we need to reduce our “footprint” and save the Earth.
The Earth will be just fine no matter what happens. What will happen to the thin layer of scum that’s taken up residence on it’s surface is another thing.
And if they really are worried about Global Warming and Catastrophes and such then they ought to get on the Space Exploration band wagon and get the species off this lone planet before something we can’t do anything about (Shoemaker-Levy 9 ring any bells?) happens and the entire ecosphere gets blown into space. Along with various and sundry ecowarriors who will have failed in their duty.
Why would anyone pay to clutter their brain with this rubbish when all they have to do is watch neighbours.?