Once again, a Hollywood movie has been released that correlates to recent real life events. This movie is similar to Geostorm that is about curing extreme weather events that we have seen in this country during the last few months and “Only the Brave” is about wildfires and there have been huge deadly wildfires in Northern California in recent weeks. As I watched this movie, I wondered like most people, why anyone would ever want to risk their life doing this job to make a living. As was made very clear within this story many times, putting out forest fires is one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire world. Wild fires that occur in so many areas of this country move extremely quickly, change direction instantly and can kill someone is several different ways including burns, carbon dioxide poisoning, smoke inhalation and even suffocation.

“Only the Brave” is a real life story about the “Granite Mountain Hotshots” where 19 firefighters were killed when they were surrounded by a wildfire. Josh Brolin plays the administrator of the group and Jennifer Connely plays his wife. There are also very good side stories in this movie including a drug addict played by Miles Teller, who is invited to join the group, despite his addiction. I thought the acting and screenplay for this movie were outstanding.

I highly recommend Only the Brave.

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House is the story of Mark Felt, one of the leaders of the FBI in the 1960’s and 70’s, who was passed over to be director of the FBI and turned out to be the legendary “deep throat”, who along with the Washington Post and Woodward and Bernstein brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

What was very good about this movie was showing what Mark Felt went through, including some threats against his only daughter, the effect of being the main informant for the Watergate scandal and what that meant to his career in the FBI. Unfortunately this film was mostly too boring and too long to recommend. The cast, starring Liam Neeson and several other recognizable actors including Diane Lane who plays Felt’s wife was good, but not very memorable. Unfortunately I cannot recommend this film because of these reasons.

The only remarkable thing about the new film Geostorm is the timing of its release, right after by far the worst Hurricane season this country has ever seen. Real life events and movies like this have correlated in the past but I thought the timing of this movie being made and released was rather amazing and its too bad this movie was not up to its level of coincidental release.

Unfortunately, the problem with this film was taking a great idea that would result in great special effects and having a number of producers and directors trying to add “Hollywood drama” to the story and the end result is an overly complicated and in the end, rather stupid story that involves politics, assassination and a series of events that really have no connection with end of the story. This movie could have been made so much better by just following the simple idea of less is more. How about a computer glitch or something that created a problem with the space station and the surrounding satellites that were built to fix extreme weather conditions? It would have been interesting enough to watch how the scientists were able to debug and fix the software and hardware problems. But some producer or director, who thought it was too risky to create an intelligent story to go with the special effects slapped together a formula story that follows the typical Hollywood paradigm and actually ruined what could have been a very good action movie. This is highly unfortunate considering the budget for this film and the low ratings on Rotten-tomatoes of only 11% backs up my opinion on where the mistakes were made.

Gerard Butler is the main actor of this movie, playing the lead scientist who created a space station and sattelites that control the weather along with Ed Harris and some other actors we have all seen before, but their appearance was not enough to make this any more than a very average movie. See this film for the special effects and for no other reason.