The Big Picture

Geostorm

Aside from the fact that there was no worse period for Dean Devlin’s disaster movie to come out in theatre (after already being delayed by a whole year), Geostorm seems to have a lot more working against its favor than just timing.

The film’s story is nothing we haven’t heard before. Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is an engineer who used to work for the US government to built a network of satellites designed to control the global climate, but has been fired because he’s kind of a hothead. When the weather-controlling system breaks down (which everyone should have seen coming) and millions of people die in atmospheric catastrophes, Lawson is the only person who can fix it. Promising his daughter he will come back from space after having saved the world, he then goes on a mission to prevent Earth destruction alongside his estranged brother Max (Jim Sturgess), who works for the president of a potentially ultra corrupted United States (Andy Garcia).

Déjà vu with a hint of stupidity

“Hackneyed dialogue,” “unbelievable actions” and “logic-deprived plotlines a-plenty” are at the center of Geostorm’s dysfunctional story. “Bad, but […] not a stinker for the ages,” the movie “essentially boils down to ‘Gerry Butler versus weather’.” 

With a “discordant medley of mistakes,” Dean Devlin (behind the more successful action productions Independence Day and Godzilla) and Paul Guyot’s script feels like it sprung from an “uninspired” desire to copy (even one of the film’s posters is a bad replica of that of Inception), but obviously, “all of this has been done before and with less of the nonsensical verbosity that makes this film such a slog to watch.”

“Magnifying the glaring faults and excesses of the genre rather than enriching it with current world relevance,” Devlin and Guyot have taken “a passable action film and buried it under a tsunami of political muck,” making it “plodding and formulaic, joylessly ticking off boxes from the Disaster Movie Playbook.”

Verdict: “A bland copycat.”

 

Best quotes from the review:

“A tempest only Gerard Butler can tame.” – Rick Bentley, Chicago Tribune

“To appreciate this film, which I suppose can be rationalised in the context of a guilty pleasure, one needs to be on the same page as it – which is to say, somewhere semi-illiterate.” – Luke Buckmaster, Daily Review

“A plot so ludicrous the entire cast deserve honorary Oscars for being able to resist the urge to look at the camera and mouth, “Help me.”” – Chris Hewitt, Empire

“A drab disaster.” – Oggs Cruz, Rappler