![]() Hollywood’s willingness to include climate change as a plot pretext dates to the 1973 Charlton Heston vehicle Soylent Green. Then there are movies in which aliens change our weather, much to humankind’s chagrin – a sub-sub-genre that includes The Kraken Wakes and The Arrival, in which Charlie Sheen plays a literal rocket scientist. The “accident” camp features the classic The Day the Earth Caught Fire, based on real fears that nuclear explosions might knock Earth off its orbit(!), while the “deliberate” end of the spectrum includes Doctor Who and the Moonbase. There are movies that are explicitly about men changing the weather (it’s usually, but not always, men), either by accident or design. There are “nature bites back” films such as The Birds, the unjustly overlooked Long Weekend, and the eerie Peter Weir vehicle The Last Wave (“hasn’t the weather been strange?”). Nature and the apocalypse have provided many a movie plot. I’ve watched it, so you don’t have to.īut that’s not to say it’s not worth writing about, as part of the growing canon of climate-in-chaos depictions that have now crossed our screens. So we’ve established that Geostorm is chock-full of planet-sized plot holes, and makes the aforementioned Moonraker look like it was directed by Ingmar Bergman. Not even the reassuring presence of Ed Harris, who has some impressive eco sci-fi on his CV, is enough to save it. As another reviewer noted, too much reel space is taken up with other stuff besides what you came to see: that is, entire cities being sent to their CGI-induced doom. Meanwhile, those hoping for full on disaster-porn will be left frustrated. ![]() This film is basically a cobbling-together of all the worst bits of Armageddon, In The Line of Fire, at least two Bond films ( Moonraker and Die Another Day), and Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, with a few offcuts from Michael Crichton’s unreadable novel State of Fear thrown in for good measure. So Jake is called back from exile, amid treason in the White House, and the fight against the eponymous “geostorm” (a spate of simultaneous worldwide weather disasters) ensues. The opening scene then shows our hero Jake (Gerard Butler, at the peak of his acting prowess), the scientist who built Dutch Boy, falling foul of the obligatory Evil Republican Senator (sadly never seen again).Ĭut to three years later, when things start to go wrong: an Afghan village is flash-frozen Hong Kong goes up in flames. Against an introductory montage of horror heatwaves and storms, a young girl explains how “weird weather” (the words “climate change” and “carbon dioxide” never pass anyone’s lips) in the year 2019 served as a wake-up call that prompted the world’s governments to build a space-based weather control system known as “Dutch boy” (after the fabled juvenile dike engineer). But as the weather is now political, I braved the terrors for you, gentle reader. If it were, I’d have asked for danger money before seeing the mesmerisingly bad movie Geostorm. Writing for The Conversation is not, sadly, a paid gig.
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