Analysis of Geostorm by Carter Messner.
This weekend when I went back to my home in Blue Springs, I watched a movie that came out last summer called Geostorm. This movie is about how humanity built a system of satellites the call "Dutch Boy" to protect the planet from catastrophic weather events like Hurricanes and Tornados. Dutch Boy starts to malfunction, we later find that the malfunctions are actually planned by a group revealed later in the movie. Dutch Boy was designed the movies lead character played by Gerald Bulter, and he is tasked with finding out what is happening to Dutch Boy before is malfunctions again killing more people.
The thing I want to talk about, are the scenes that show people running away from the weather events that Dutch Boy creates around the world. These scenes are relatively short, and the people in the scenes narrowly escape death multiple times and are surrounded by chaos. Scenes like this are found in many films and they can add suspense, or comedy, but I believe they could hold deeper meaning. I believe they are aimed at our fear of the weather and what we are doing to the global climate, and seeing weather disasters of biblical proportions might be to make the viewer ask "What would I do in a situation like this?".
The first scene starts in Hong Kong in a store, a man is shown opening a door to the milk when a random cat jumps in the fridge because it is warm outside (this is foreshadowing the future events in the scene). The scene then follows the man to his car, and as he starts driving the ground under him starts the heat up and melt. He then is racing the heat wave for a few minutes while buildings are crumbling around him and destruction is ensuing all around him, but against the odds this man makes it out of the city before it is destroyed.
What I found interesting about this scene, and this is why I decided to do this topic, is that this man is later introduced as Cheong Long who works on Dutch Boys team in Hong Kong. This is the first time in an action film I have seen that they introduced a character with some importance in a scene where he nearly dies 20 plus times. The rest of the scenes don’t introduce any main characters but I thought that this was something I haven’t experienced before.
Another one of these scenes happens in Brazil on the beach, where instead of a heat wave happening it is an ice wave. The scene has the same type of feel as the last one, but it focuses on a woman who starts running from this wave at the beach with some friends. She also escapes death on a multiple time's while the scene goes on, the ice is chasing her down while everything around her is freezing. When the scene is about to end and she thinks she is out of the way, a plane starts to fall from the sky towards her, but luckily the plane falls right in front of her feet and she is completely unharmed. This scene I believe was drawn out more than the rest to add comedy in this movie where there isn't much room for comedy.
These scenes that seem to have no real context to the story because most of the time the lead characters were never involved, but they give us a look at a pretty horrific scene that can be scary to think about. Another movie like this was 2012, where the whole world was coming to an end like the 'Mayan Prophecy' said, which at the time many people were afraid something might actually happen. Likewise, Geostorm was made because of the fear of what we are doing to our planet, and if we are going to destroy ourselves with the changes we are causing.
