Geostorm. Well, I liked it.

I finally sat down and watched the latest Gerard Butler vehicle, Geostorm, a film nobody seemed to love. It was written and directed by Dean Devlin, known mostly for Stargate, Universal Soldier, and Independence Day, as well as the less-popular Indpendence Day 2: Resurgence and a lot of the Stargate TV show, so this is a guy with a better-than-average track record, although his more recent work hasn't been stellar.

Geostorm has a very silly plot. The United States has taken the lead, and gotten the world on board, with a world-encompassing grid of satellites that control the weather, moderating it so that most places where humans live never suffers from excessive heat waves, floods, or killer ice storms. The International Space Station Mark IV floats above it all, a maintenance and management hub. Suddenly things start to go haywire, satellites triggering killer heat waves and killer ice storms, and our hero, the very heroic-looking but politically disgraced Jake Lawson is called out of forced retirement to go back to the space station and figure out what's going wrong. The US is days away from turning their control of the whole system over to an internationally sanction multilateral body. From there, it turns into an even sillier geopolitical thriller.

Here's the deal: Geostorm is a wildly entertaining movie because it knows exactly what it is. It's a space-based CGI B-movie thriller with a straightforward plot designed to keep the audience entertained for its 109-minute running time. It doesn't push the state of the art and it doesn't want to; instead, the cinematographer knows exactly how to get what he wants out of every shot, and all of the various wire-work, green-room, and so forth work because everyone involved kept the CGI well within the boundaries of current techonology. It's a pretty good lesson in how to do CGI when you have a middling budget. (It's alarming that $120 million is a "middling budget" these days; remember when True Lies cost over $100 million and everyone sucked in a deep breath?)

It's twin plotlines, one ground-based concerning the President of the United States, one on the space station concerning shutting down the coming apocalypse and surviving the destruction of the station, mesh well once you're willing to buy the absurd premise. There's the usual "physics, do you speak it?" moments in a B-movie, but they're tolerable. There's no burgeoning romance in the film; the biggest relationship is between the hero and his brother, the latter a "good weasel" caught in the Washington machinery, and it's actually handled pretty well.

Geostorm is also an apology, and apparently a very sincere one, for the utter garbage of London Has Fallen, a film with eight (!) writers ("Passed from writer to writer in a desperate effort to save it!") that nonetheless ended up both complete narrative failure as well as utter racist garbage. The crew on board ISS IV is fully internationalized and even makes fun of the "American cowboy sent to save us"– even if that's exactly what ends up happening, with moments of critical help from everyone else. Saving the world here is a team effort.

As always, it's one of those "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like" films. It's not a "Die Hard on the International Space Station," and that's kinda what saves it from being completely ridiculous. I liked it a lot. It had my favorite tropes, it had lots of space porn, and it has a classic celebratory ending.