Geostorm (2017)
Geostorm (2017)
Directed by Dean Devlin
Written by Dean Devlin and Paul Guyot
Rated PG-13
You know what’s more fun than seeing a silly disaster movie with your little sister late at night? Seeing a silly disaster movie with your little sister and your older brother (who is studying meteorology) late at night. Watching and listening to his reactions while seeing and hearing some of the dumbest “science” put to the screen turned what could have been a fun experience into an amazing experience. Geostorm is more than silly as it is wall to wall stupid but it’s not boring…well, at least myself and my siblings weren’t bored.
In the not too distant future (I’m really not kidding about this either, the bulk of the movie takes place only a few years from now) manmade climate change, global warming or whatever has severely altered the weather patterns and has killed a tons of people. So the world got together to make a giant net of satellites to control the weather. The system, nicknamed “Dutch Boy,” is primarily the brainchild of Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) who is fired for activating it without permission and saving tons of lives and Jake’s little brother Max (Jim Sturgess) is put in charge of it.
Three years later things start to go wrong. A village in Afghanistan is literally frozen solid, Hong Kong is shaken up by heated pipes, temperature spikes and other suspicious stuff. Max then has to send Jake back to space and fix the problem. Jake figures out that there are cyber-terrorists behind Dutch Boy’s malfunction in a dastardly plot to kill the President so the US doesn’t have to hand Dutch Boy over to the international community. Now Max has to work with his secret service agent girlfriend Sarah (Abbie Cornish) to get the President (Andy Garcia) away from the bad guys, get his kill codes and prevent the titular Geostorm from wiping out the majority of the world.
The advertisements for this film make it seem that this is a straightforward disaster flick and while there definitely is that, there is also a surprising number of thriller and political intrigue stuff thrown in. However, none of it is in anyway involving and anyone who has ever seen any movie ever will correctly guess all or nearly all of the events that will happen in this movie. My brother and I were constantly and correctly (more often than not) predicting what would happen, who would die and who the villains ultimately were. This is the perfect film for internet nit pickers to have a heyday and tear this movie apart as there are so many contrivances, lapses in logic, science and common sense, and probably more plot holes than I care to look for. I would list some of them but I won’t for fear of this simply becoming a list. I will just say don’t go to this movie expecting a polished, engaging story.
The actors’ performances here seem to be a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand you have Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess and a few others who seem to be having some fun and giving some performances that appear somewhat earnest. They may not be good performances but it still kind of looked like they tried…even a little bit. While on the other hand you have veterans like Ed Harris and Andy Garcia who are clearly there for a paycheck and just want to be out the movie as fast as possible. Seeing veteran actors clearly not give a crap when they are in this film made me chuckle. The dialogue on the whole is very lame, often clunky and at times delivered in scenes that feels inappropriate for it be at and very often devolves into exposition dumps.
The visual effects are of course CG heavy and very obvious nearly all the time. You have the disaster scenes in which millions of digital people perish from collapsing buildings, freezing environments, tidal waves, huge frequent lightning strikes, and even a satellite laser. Yes...the villains use a satellite laser to torch Moscow. The devastation is nothing you haven’t already seen in other disaster films from the past 2 decades and all feels very routine by this point. The sequences in space are the epitome of the phrase “screw you and your physics” with characters doing things in space suits, space shuttles and other things which I am very certain are impossible. At times it feels they were trying to do the space scenes in a somewhat similar way to the ones in Gravity (2013). Sure the ones in Gravity kind of bordered on the very edge of believability but it was at least immersive when shown on the big screen but in Geostorm? No way.
Yeah, I pretty much bashed the movie a ton but that is something that is very easy to do and it didn’t need the aid of myself or other reviewers to doom it as it released at a time when the US has had two damaging hurricanes and at time when the US box office and just Hollywood in general seems to be going down in flames. This is a project that seems to have been doomed from the start as it was filmed in 2014 but it’s release was pushed back a number of times due to poor test screenings and during mid to late 2016 it underwent about $15 million in reshoots supervised by Jerry Bruckheimer. It wasn’t screened in advance for critics and it is projected to lose between $50-$100 million for its investors (that is unless the international market really picks up the slack). I usually don’t bring up facts like these in my reviews because I just look at the film itself. But I never heard of this film until I saw some previews late into the summer and hearing about a movie getting pushed back for about 2 ½ years is not something you hear about very often at least not with a film this expensive. It appeared to have everything working against it including a public that wasn’t exactly clamoring for a movie like this. Now all I am thinking after watching this film is “Poor Gerard Butler. First Gods of Egypt (2016) and now this.”
And yet I still insist that this movie is fun even if the movie, like the genre it is set in, is a disaster. Even with all the really idiotic stuff that happens, it is all taken very seriously and that is kind of needed to sell a movie this dumb. If it constantly winked and nodded at you and was in on the joke, it wouldn’t work. It does give you what you pay for even if you don’t react to it the way the filmmakers intended. Feel free to laugh at the bad science, bad dialogue, decent to bad CG and even groan at the contrivances that pile up fast and soon. This really is the kind of film that my Dad calls a brain walk. This means that you take out your brain and set it loose for a while, watch the screen, try not to think about what you are watching too much and just have fun...albeit unintentional fun in this case.
