Upon the recommendation of one of my coworkers (you see, for me, “incredibly bad” is a recommendation), I took the time to watch Geostorm. Even the recommendation kicked off a discussion of classic (from the 90s) disaster movies, so I both expected this movie to be bad and to enjoy it immensely. At an atmospherically high level, this movie delivers on the disaster movie promise – cgi action heroics of one guy saving the world…
…For the rest of what I think, and minor spoilers, keep reading…
To kick this off, I must say that there is a specific measuring stick against which I measure all entertainingly bad movies – The Core (2003). The reason is that, either by intentionally not taking themselves too seriously or at least a lack of pretention, The Core is fun. By that measure, Geostorm stacks up quite well. From the get-go, every single one of our heroes are ornery, quip-throwing, the-one-person-that’s-going-to-save-the-world types. This makes it so that even if the pending drama of global disaster is ridiculous (which, in this case, it is), our heroes (and villain, if I’m being honest) know they can only win if they fight disaster with panache.
I don’t want to imply that this gonzo world has perfect verisimilitude, but it was generally pretty good – there were relatively few times where the writers said that something couldn’t be done (technologically) and then did it. The one that sticks in my mind is that they show perfect zero-latency video conversation between the space station and earth, but then say that it will take minutes to upload the president’s biometrics – this seems a bit at odds – either latency is a problem, or not. Another thing that caught me off-guard was when Jake goes to great lengths to encode a message to this brother, Max. Later, as they begin uncovering the conspiracy, they have a more detailed conversation completely straight, as though they are unconcerned about eavesdropping. Both of these are relatively small nit-picks though – I’m actually unconvinced that the movie would have been better if Jake and Max had shared another fishing story.
Where this movie really gets into trouble though, is in its comparison to what the world looks like today. It would be untrue to say that this doesn’t bother me, but it bothers me less than the verisimilitude of the setting – I will put up with a lot in my sci-fi if it’s consistent. There are far too many things to nitpick here though, so I’ll settle for my top two: The space laser that immediately increases the temperature 40 degrees in Hong Kong, and the space shuttle launched for one person to get to the space station. On the topic of space lasers changing local temperatures (actually, this happens more than once), I could almost be on board with this idea, but for the extreme at which they show it. Having a space laser increase the temperature of a city a few degrees I could fathom as part of a science-fiction story, but raising a city’s temperature 40 degrees in minutes and then have that temperature drop back down when the laser is turned off is really far out there – both from a power consumption standpoint (for the laser) and a heat dissipation standpoint (for the resulting cooling). Huge temperature swings can seem really neat, but in this case they were exceptionally immersion breaking. The other big immersion breaking moment for me was when they sent Jake up to the space station in a shuttle by himself. While it certainly reinforces the one-man-hero motif of the genre, it seemed really wasteful of the amount of energy required to get him up there. Generally, I had problems with a lot of their treatment of space (eg, how big the interior of the space station is, how easily they all move around, how easily they go to/from earth as well as change velocity in space, etc).
Overall though, Geostorm was fun. While it left something to be desired in terms of science, it did so in service to character interactions that were entertaining. I would rate Geostorm three and a half space lasers – it’s pretty and interesting, just don’t look too close.