Geostorm is an awful movie. It is certainly in the running for worst film of 2017 (although American Assassin is an equally strong contender). Even the studio knew they had a gigantic piece of shit on their hands. Principal photography wrapped in 2014 but everyone involved has spent the last 3 years trying to figure out how to lessen its badness and release it in the least embarrassing way possible. They failed.

This movie is the directorial debut of Dean Devlin, a disaster porn specialist who has been a long-time collaborator of Roland Emmerich's. But even by their typically brainless standards this movie is a flop. Hopefully Devlin will never direct another movie for the rest of his life. When the studio realized the first cut was a bomb, Devlin was suspiciously unavailable to return for re-shoots. So he basically created a fetid swamp creature and then ran and hid from it like a kid who runs away after accidentally pooping in his parent's closet while playing hide and seek, only to be found six hours later by the local sheriff down by the creek sobbing into an old baseball mitt.

The movie is too idiotic to talk about in detail, but I will briefly highlight some of the major points, such as the plot, which I am not making up: Satellites that regulate the weather on Earth are going bonkers and Gerard Butler, along with a random German space-woman, are the only ones that can stop it (which they achieve [spoiler] by throwing good satellites at the bad ones; meanwhile, back on Earth, the Secretary of State is trying to kill President Andy Garcia using lightning.

The only way to stop these weather satellites from killing the Earth is to hurl around nonsensical techno-babble that would make even the most die-hard Star Trek tachyon lover eat his tricorder. At one point, a self-driving car plays a pivotal role. The film is peppered with bizarre jargon which one really must experience in order to understand how bad it is. Watching Gerald Butler stumble through the movie repeating the words "Dutch Boy", "geostorm" and "kill codes" over and over, I believe I was actually able to witness the moment when the light in his eyes died and his soul left his body.

So, this movie is terrible. The characters are terrible. The dialogue is terrible. The plot is terrible. The effects are terrible. That a human being with a functioning brain not only thought this was a good idea but that it deserved an $80 million budget is terrible. The one redeeming quality about this film was that while I was waiting in line to get popcorn an evil-looking man jumped the queue and went straight to the counter and demanded his popcorn. At this point I was not feeling like my normal self due to the fact that I was watching Geostorm and I had specifically moved to this line because there was a group of 10 kids in the other line who were taking fifteen minutes to order even though there are only three possible choices on the motherfucking menu! My patience was already running thin due to the existence of Geostorm, and I was not not going to be unfairly delayed in acquiring popcorn. "HEY!" I shouted. "There's a line man!!!" This resulted in a bit of an angry stand-off while I glared at this man and angrily muttered the f-word in English in a movie theatre lobby in Bali while a geostorm raged inside of my heart.

Eventually, I got my popcorn and went back into the theatre. The best part about all this? The man I had just engaged in a tense popcorn stand-off with was sitting right next to me. Fuck you, Geostorm.