Defying the wishes of smart people who told me I should still be in bed recovering from the flu, I ventured out on a Friday morning to see the movie Geostorm at a local movie theater on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Geostorm stars Gerard Butler and was not screened for critics, which is usually a sign that a movie will win an Oscar for Best Picture. (That is a lie.) I’d offer a short synopsis of Geostorm right now, but I’m not going to pretend I even know what Geostorm is about. But while watching Geostorm, I kept a running diary. Here’s how that all went.
12:12 p.m.: Why am I here? This is a bad decision.
12:14 p.m.: There are six other people here to see Geostorm with me.
12:30 p.m.: Geostorm is starting. Something is telling me I have made a mistake coming to this.
12:31 p.m.: Geostorm begins with a child narrating that in 2019 storms were going to kill a lot of people and Gerard Butler singlehandedly saved the world.
12:32 p.m.: “The world came together as one.” I wonder if Trump is president in the universe where Geostorm takes place.
12:34 p.m.: I’m having a hard time believing Gerard Butler saves the world by inventing a weather machine.
12:34 p.m.: The weather machine Gerard Butler built is named “Dutch Boy.”
12:35 p.m.: Gerard Butler’s character brags a lot about saving the world. He seems smug.
12:41 p.m.: No one in the movie acts like a normal human being.
12:42 p.m.: Andy Garcia is in this movie.
12:42 p.m.: Ed Harris is in this movie.
12:44 p.m.: I’d have loved to have been in the room the first time Andy Garcia told someone about this movie. “I just read a wonderful script for a new picture. I’m playing the president!”
12:46 p.m.: The term “Dutch Boy” is used a lot. It might be the medication I’m on, but it’s making me giggle.
12:50 p.m.: “There’s something wrong with Dutch Boy!”
12:51 p.m.: This movie should be called Dutch Boy.
12:53 p.m.: We are all Dutch Boy.
12:55 p.m.: Okay, the way Dutch Boy is described, I thought it was just like a special satellite that could control the weather. Dutch Boy is a “net” of thousands of satellites that cover the entire world that would take a century to build.
12:55 p.m.: This movie is ridiculous.
12:56 p.m.: Someone just said “Geostorm” for the first time.
12:58 p.m.: Hong Kong just exploded, causing multiple skyscrapers to topple. It’s being blamed on a “gas leak.”
1:00 p.m.: If the weather isn’t enough, there’s a “bad guy” in this movie who is using Dutch Boy to destroy the world.
1:07 p.m.: Geostorm is strangely boring so far.
1:09 p.m.: This movie is set just a few years from now, yet the technology is something that would seem unreasonable in a Star Trek movie.
1:15 p.m.: Gerard Butler should have just died 50 times, but he’s “fine.”
1:22 p.m.: I’ll never do this scene justice, but in my life, I’ve never watched a scene in which it was so obvious a character was about to get run over by a car. This character had the key to why the bad storms were happening, and all he had to do was cross a street to tell our team of good guys. He even waved like, “Here I am! Nothing can stop us from talking now!” [Splat.]
1:25 p.m.: Most of this movie takes place on a space station. Gerard Butler is just on a space station hitting buttons and typing into a computer.
1:30 p.m.: Gerard Butler just found something he was looking for and shouted, “Bingo!” I swear I can’t not think of The Naked Gun when something like this happens.
1:31 p.m.: The Geostorm is happening!
1:33 p.m.: Wait, it’s not happening yet.
1:33 p.m.: This is confusing.
1:34 p.m.: I should be in bed.
1:35 p.m.: This feels like a fake Seinfeld movie.
1:35 p.m.: Death Blow!
1:45 p.m.: This movie is stupid.
1:45 p.m.: If I die because I went out to watch this movie I will be so mad.
1:46 p.m.: “And the Oscar goes to … Geostorm.”
1:49 p.m.: There is a car chase during a lightning attack.
1:51 p.m.: Is this a fever dream?
1:51 p.m.: It’s possible Geostorm is the greatest movie ever made. Who’s to say?
1:52 p.m.: That’s the flu talking.
1:53 p.m.: Ed Harris just fired a bazooka.
1:55 p.m.: I have no idea what’s happening.
1:56 p.m.: So the world is being destroyed by storms, but there’s a countdown clock to when the Geostorm starts. So it hasn’t started yet? How is this possible?
2:01p.m.: So the solution to the whole movie is, I swear, “just turn off the computer and restart it.”
2:03 p.m.: The Geostorm in Geostorm never even happens.
2:05 p.m.: I hope Neil Degrasse Tyson sees this movie, then does a 100,000-part tweet storm that breaks Twitter forever.
2:06 p.m.: That can be the positive legacy of this movie.
2:06 p.m.: Long live Geostorm.
2:10 p.m.: Geostorm has ended. Stay golden, Dutch Boy.
2:11 p.m.: On the way out, there’s a man in the back row who has fallen asleep and is still asleep. Should I wake him up?
12:11 p.m.: I decided not to wake him up. He’s in a better place. Sleep well, fellow Geostorm companion. Sleep well.
You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
