Disaster movies have been a mostly conservative genre at least since Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis agrees to fly in a NASA-funded mission to save the planet—after Shanghai is completely leveled—on the condition that he never be taxed for any future collective planet-saving efforts. Judging from its teaser trailer, Geostorm is going to hit the same jingoistic sweet spot, promising the pleasant spectacle of millions of people we don’t care about dying in faraway places while most of the A-listers (in this case, Gerard Butler, Abbie Cornish, and Ed Harris) make it to the last reel.
In fact, the Geostorm teaser hits so many themes that are central to the right wing, it could easily be recut for Trump’s 2020 run. It whiplashes between close ups of white women in peril and wide shots of destruction raining down from the sky on thousands of faceless brown people. There’s a United Nations peacekeeping force patrolling a Middle Eastern market filled with snap-frozen corpses to remind us that the U.N. is useless and the Middle East is even weirder than you think. In a probable nod to the paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists that run the world these days, the entire film is premised on a global system of satellites dumping chemicals into the clouds to control the weather. (There’s even a shot of an airliner falling from the sky covered in ice—jet fuel couldn’t melt it.) Finally, there’s the obligatory joyless cover of a beloved song, in this case, “What a Wonderful World.” That last part isn’t really political: It just sucks.
Geostorm will be in theaters on Oct. 20, 2017, right at the end of what promises to be another boffo hurricane season. Will audiences want to kick back and watch the planet destroyed by inclement weather after their first taste of a Republican-run Federal Emergency Management Agency cleaning up the mess caused by Republican climate change policies? Warner Brothers Pictures is betting they will.
