Geostorm
(Warner Bros. Pictures/Skydance Productions)
By Lucas Allen
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the disaster genre had a resurgence after its popularity in the 1970s. Whether it’s global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow:), asteroids (“Armageddon”), or volcanoes (“Dante’s Peak”), audiences have eaten up all the crazy filmmaking and spectacular visual effects that help them achieve box office popularity. Nowadays, though, disaster movies have become a thing of the past. However, mega-producer Dean Devlin follows in the footsteps of his buddy Roland Emmerich of “Independence Day” and “2012” fame in his directorial debut “Geostorm,” in an attempt to revive the genre.
With the world engulfed in one natural disaster after another, many of the world governments agree on a weather satellite system designed to control the weather, thus saving countless lives. The machine, code-named Dutch Boy, manages to succeed in preventing further disasters, until the U.S. government decides to take it out of the hands of its main designer, Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler). Three years later, a village in Afghanistan turns to ice right before Hong Kong goes up in flames. When it’s revealed that Dutch Boy has a malfunction, President Palma (Andy Garcia) and Secretary of State Dekkom (Ed Harris) agree to have cabinet member Max Lawson (Jim Sturgess) hire his brother Jake and send him on a mission to fix the problem.
Reluctant at first, Jake agrees to leave behind his daughter, Hannah (Talitha Bateman,) and head up to the space station to deal with any issue concerning his old project. It’s there he meets Commander Ute Fassbinder, who leads an international team of astronauts to monitor everything the program does. Meanwhile, Max and his Secret Service girlfriend, Sarah (Abbie Cornish), discover that the system was intentionally tampered with by somebody on the inside making it into a weapon. Even worse, a series of storms are soon converging into a large storm called a Geostorm. So not only do our heroes have to save the world, but also uncover a political cover-up that caused it.
From the opening narration, a viewer’s suspension of disbelief is tested, as the movie offers nothing but pure fantasy at the lowest level. But no matter how you feel about it, this is one of the dumbest and most overly plotted disaster movies to ever define the term “disaster.” It tries to stand out from the rest by combining a simple adventurous plot with a modern political thriller, but only comes off as a mind-numbing exercise in patience and perseverance.
Even worse, it’s also very predictable, following every plot device in the action movie handbook. You can tell who’s behind the villainous plot, who lives and dies, and how the whole thing ends way before the movie does. This is not a movie for an intelligent casual viewer, but one designed for the lowest demographic possible.
Viewers may like it for the action scenes, but even those scenes cannot escape their own flaws. While the weather scenes look good, the effects in the space scenes leave a lot to be desired. Watching the actors float around and banging around the space station make it look more like “Gravity: The Video Game.” It’s bad enough the script is re-purposed from Michael Bay’s “Armageddon,” but the silly effect scenes, including these, are a whole other form of laziness.
As for the actors, it’s a paycheck movie through and through. They’re just there bringing much of their talent to such lousy material for some extra cash. But much like last year’s even worse “Gods of Egypt,” Butler carries this film in another charismatic performance. If you take out the political thriller plot line and make it about Butler’s character going into space to fix the entire weather machine himself, then it could’ve been a more exciting film.
2017 is almost over and “Geostorm” could be this year’s biggest Hollywood disaster. Other titles, like “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” and “The Emoji Movie” flopped out of their own incompetence, but this one stumbled the moment the idea was born.
THE MOVIE’S RATING: PG-13 (for destruction, action, and violence)
THE CRITIC’S RATING: 1.75 Stars (Out of Four)
