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Bob Hoose

Movie Review

In 2019, humankind finally realized the price of decades of environmental listlessness. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, droughts and every other form of batter-the-Earth devastation gave the world a major wake-up call. And the world’s scientists came together to do something about it.

That solution is something called the “Dutch Boy”: an interlocking net of thousands of satellites that surround the planet and keep a figurative finger plugged into any possible problems.

American Jake Lawson was the wunderkind behind the design of that intricately linked weather system. But the truth is, he’s not the easiest guy to get along with. In fact, the American bigwigs and people in power consider him to be a big pain in the, uh, Senate. And so they bounce him out of control and put his more politic brother, Max, in charge.

Everything goes just dandy for three years.

But then a strange freeze hits a small village in Afghanistan. And when I say freeze, I mean the frozen solid kind—where if you touch one of that unfortunate community’s icy residents, their limbs snap clean off.

President Andrew Palma demands action before the world starts to panic … and, uh, his poll numbers take a hit, too. Max has only one recourse: He’s got to call Jake back in for help. He’s the only one who really knows all the ins and outs of this orbital computer system. If anybody can fix this glitch, it’ll be him.

Of course, Max secretly frets that this murderous weather mix-up might just be more than an unfortunate glitch. What if it was something purposefully designed to look like a malfunction? What if someone is planning to systematically cause other weather disasters?

Because if handled with the right finesse, that powerful weather-shaping technology could become an equally powerful and deadly … weapon.

Positive Elements

It may be hidden beneath layers of outlandish sci-fi devastation, but the film definitely wants to urge viewers to consider climate change and what should be done about it.

There are also moments of heroic, selfless action taken here to save the lives of many. Jake stays behind on a crumbling space station, for instance, risking his life in the hope of coming up with something that can save the world. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Max and his secret service fiancée, Sarah, risk everything to save the planet, too.

On a more intimate and personal level, Jake also opens his eyes to his family and takes steps to be a better dad to his daughter.

Spiritual Elements

Someone suggests that using the weather system as a weapon would be the equivalent of “playing God.” Another character replies, “Sometimes God doesn’t play so nice.” During one daring escape Jake asks someone, “Do you believe in a Hail Mary?”

Sexual Content

Max and Sarah live together. We see her in bed in a low-cut negligee. In two different weather attacks, we see crowds of people in swimsuits running for their lives—including some very skimpily clad young women in bikinis.

Violent Content

Where some disaster pics are satisfied with destroying Washington, D.C., or New York City, this one swings the destructive floodgates wide (sometimes quite literally).

We witness diverse types of massive death-dealing worldwide. People are frozen solid in Afghanistan and on the beaches of Brazil. Tokyo gets hit with a gigantic ice storm that crushes vehicles and buildings with hailstones the size of cars. A huge chunk of Hong Kong is turned into a hellish landscape filled with erupting gas pipes and swirling fire tornadoes. A laser beam heat ray tears up Moscow and sets streets and ancient buildings ablaze. An enormous tsunami floods through the sandy streets of the United Arab Emirates. And on and on it goes. In each case, we watch buildings collapse, vehicles fly into the air and explosions tear up the surrounding area.

But we also are shown much more intimate deadliness as screaming people are pounded, burned, frozen, drowned and swept up in street-crumbling earthquakes and ocean-freezing ice storms. Above the earth, the International Space Station erupts, section by section, in a catastrophic string of explosions.

In other up-close violence, people are punched, thrown and bloodied. Someone gets pistol whipped. A guy is shot in the chest and head several times. Two different people are exposed to the deep freeze of space and sucked out into the void. A man is pushed into traffic and hit by a speeding car. We then see his crumpled, bleeding and broken form in the street.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word and half a dozen s-words are joined by a couple uses each of “d–n,” “h—” and “b–ch.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused about six times combined (with God being combined with “d–n” twice).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Jake drinks beer.

Other Negative Elements

A politician creates chaos and murders millions for the purpose of reshaping the geopolitical world and assuming a position of great power.

Early on, it’s pretty plain that Jake isn’t much of a dad. “You never really did much parenting,” his daughter Hanna tells him, along with flatly stating: “You’re not exactly the reliable type.”

Conclusion

Hollywood has been creating disaster films that blame mankind for our environmental misdeeds and threaten us with some sort of global climate calamity for a good long while now. And here we have another one.

It begins with a stern “everyone was warned, but no one listened” intro. It then leaps pell-mell into a logic-free action tale involving a network of outer space weather satellites and the spectacular, if nonsensical, worldwide murder of millions of people.

Geostorm marks the directorial debut of Dean Devlin, who’s worked with writing-and-directing buddy Roland Emmerich on quite a number of disaster pics in the past. Accordingly, this film pulls out all the CGI stops here to prove his moviemaking chops. There’s self-sacrifice and heroism in the mix, to be sure. But frankly, this tale would probably make more sense if you could just turn off the dialogue and watch the splashy images roll by.

At least, in that case, we could avoid the foul language.

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Bob Hoose

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.