geostorm movie review

There has been some question as to whether now is the proper time to release a film like “Geostorm” and not just because it arrives in theaters bearing all the hallmarks of a cinematic disaster in the making: numerous release date changes, reports of extensive reshoots that eliminated some characters entirely while introducing new ones, and the presence of Gerard Butler in the lead role. No, the question is whether the general public will be in a mood to see a movie in which the entire planet is threatened with attacks of extreme weather in the wake of all the meteorological chaos of the last few weeks. As it turns out, people who were leery of going to see it for that reason can rest easy because, despite the ad campaign to the contrary, the film is actually an utterly idiotic and oftentimes boring amalgamation of “ The Day After Tomorrow ,” “ San Andreas ,” “ Gravity ,” “The Manchurian Candidate” and the lesser Irwin Allen productions. “Geostorm” fails to work either as awe-inspiring spectacle or as campy silliness.

As the film opens, we learn that Earth was hit with a series of catastrophic extreme weather events in 2019 that wiped out entire cities. Finally recognizing the dangers of global warming (which proves that the film is a fantasy), the U.S. joins the other countries of the world to combat it by taking point in the creation of a massive satellite system, nicknamed “Dutch Boy” because why not, that tracks extreme weather systems and eliminates them before the destruction can begin. Dutch Boy is the brainchild of two-fisted, hard-drinking and inexplicably Scottish American scientist Jake Lawson (Butler) who runs the system along with an international crew up in space. However, he is one of those guys who just cares too much and when a Senate hearing goes sideways, he is fired from the project by its new head, his own brother, Max (a burr-free Jim Sturgess ).

Three years later, the U.S. is about to cede its authority over Dutch Boy to all the countries of the world when a mishap occurs involving a malfunctioning satellite and an entire village in the theoretically sweltering Afghanistan desert is flash frozen as a result. Not wanting to turn over a flawed system, the President of the United States ( Andy Garcia ) opts to have Max send someone up to find out what happened and fix it and (spoiler alert) Jake ends up going up to do it. After about six minutes, Jake and the station commander ( Alexandra Maria Lara ) figure out that system has been sabotaged, a conclusion that Max also comes to down on Earth. While other cities are hit with insane weather—Tokyo gets hail the size of canned Okja while a bikini babe in Rio is seen trying to outrun the cold—the two brothers try to get to the bottom of what appears to be a massive conspiracy and stop it before the satellites can create a “geostorm,” an ever-expanding mass of cataclysmic weather that could kill untold millions throughout the world.

You know how when a big-ticket genre film comes out and within a couple of weeks, there will already be a knockoff of it featuring cut-rate special effects, an utterly insane storyline and B-level actors (if we are lucky) traipsing through the silliness in exchange for a quick paycheck? “Geostorm” feels like the first $120 million (according to the studio) version of such a film—the effects may be somewhat better than the stuff you see on the Syfy network but even the producers over there might have blanched at the nonsense offered. To mention all of the major problems here would run the risk of turning this review into a mere list, so I will only highlight a couple of them. For starters, our hero is a loud, obnoxious jerk that few people would want to spend any amount of time with and I fear that Butler embodies that characteristic to a T—you spend the first half of the movie hoping that the film is going to pull an “ Executive Decision ” and knock him out early so that the real and actually likable hero can come in and save the day. And the conspiracy angle doesn’t work because A.) the elaborate plot doesn’t make any sense even by dumb action film standards and B.) the bad guy is so patently obvious that most people will be able to figure it out just by looking at the credits on the poster. And, oh yeah, there are any number of extraneous subplots—Jake’s relationship with his disappointed moppet of a daughter and Max’s supposedly clandestine affair with a Secret Service agent ( Abbie Cornish , who actually can act and whose presence here is all the more disappointing as a result)—that not only do nothing but eat up screen time but linger over the meal at length to boot.

It all sounds absolutely ridiculous but the real disappointment about “Geostorm” is that it doesn’t even work as the camp suggested by the trailer. Yes, there are scenes of weather-related destruction but there are only a couple of points—a sudden temperature spike in Hong Kong causing gas main explosions that level much of the city and wild lighting strikes over Orlando—where we get to see them play out at length. The rest are often reduced to brief bits that offer just enough footage to make the trailer seem a little more spectacular but not enough to help the movie. In either case, they lack the lavish visual pyrotechnics nor the wit or style to make any of the destruction slightly memorable. This is all stuff that you have seen better before—even the aforementioned bit of someone trying to outrun the cold comes directly from “The Day After Tomorrow,” a film that I am fairly certain that director/co-writer Dean Devlin is familiar with since it was directed by Roland Emmerich , the guy he collaborated with on “ Stargate ,” “Godzilla” and the “ Independence Day ” films.

God knows how many millions of dollars and hours of manpower went into making and remaking “Geostorm” but it turns out to have been all for naught. You would think that with a premise so goofy and with so much money thrown at it, a movie like this would at least be somewhat memorable, but “Geostorm” is so completely forgettable that it will begin to slip from your memory before you get to the parking lot and will have completely faded away by the time you get home. I never dreamed that the day would come when I would say these words, but “Geostorm” is a film that really could have used a Sharknado or two to liven things up.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

Jim Sturgess as Max
Katheryn Winnick as Olivia
Gerard Butler as Jake
Jodi Lyn Brockton as Melach
Abbie Cornish as Sarah
Alexandra Maria Lara as Ute Fassbinder
Jeremy Ray Taylor as Emmett
Amr Waked as Dussette
Mare Winningham as Dr. Jennings
Ed Harris as Dekkom
Andy García as President Palma
Talitha Bateman as Hannah
Robert Sheehan as Duncan
Chris Lebenzon
John Refoua
Dean Devlin
Lorne Balfe

Cinematographer

Roberto Schaefer

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Review: In ‘Geostorm,’ Gerard Butler (and His Stubble) Save the Planet

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By A.O. Scott

Oct. 20, 2017

If I had to spend a global meteorological catastrophe with anyone, I don’t think Gerard Butler would be my first choice. But of course I don’t have a choice. Mr. Butler’s character, Jake Lawson, has a job to do, and so do I. Jake’s is to fix the space-based weather-control system he designed and built, racing against a digital clock that counts down the minutes until “geostorm.” Mine involves counting the minutes until “Geostorm” is over and then offering a comprehensive damage assessment. To quote something Jake says to a grandstanding senator (Richard Schiff) who dares to question his expertise: you’re welcome.

Directed by Dean Devlin from a script he wrote with Paul Guyot and discreetly installed in theaters without advance screenings, “Geostorm” uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors. Andy Garcia and Ed Harris are the president and secretary of state, while Abbie Cornish is a Secret Service agent secretly keeping company with a deputy secretary named Max Lawson (Jim Sturgess) who happens to be Jake’s younger brother. The siblings have their differences, but they share an unplaceable American accent, an aversion to regular shaving and a desire not to see the world destroyed by ice, fire, hail or heavy rain.

The movie does what it can to replicate those elemental forces. I happened to see it in the 4DX format — a first for me — which combines the thrill of a Mad Tea Party ride with the sensory challenges of a cab ride across the Manhattan Bridge on a rainy night. Your seat rocks and rumbles during chase scenes, lists gently from side to side during zero-gravity interludes and abuses your lumbar spine when space junk starts flying. You sometimes catch a whiff of burning skyscraper, a spray of monsoon mist, a whoosh of gale-force wind and the gentle caress of Mr. Butler’s stubble on your cheek.

Not that last thing, actually, but I’m sure they’re working on it. And I look forward to future 4DX adventures, or at least to installing one of those chairs in my office. I wouldn’t say the experience improved “Geostorm,” but it certainly didn’t make it any worse. As for Mr. Butler, he is no more or less credible as a renegade scientific genius than in any other role he’s attempted; consistency is his chief and perhaps his only virtue as an actor. He does his job. I do mine. The world is safe. The weather is fine.

Geostorm Rated PG-13. Really, really, really intense weather. Really intense. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.

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Geostorm Reviews

It plods along failing to muster even the slightest bit of energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

For when the brain begs to watch the exact opposite of a brainy film: it's a fun popcorn movie that's also absurd and forgettable. Sometimes, we all need a Geostorm in our lives. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 27, 2022

I'm generally okay with disaster movies being dumb, so long as they can construct entertaining action sequences with charismatic characters. Geostorm has none of those things.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/10 | May 19, 2022

Geostorm offers a few unexpected, if ironic delights. If you've ever wanted to see Ed Harris lift an RPG launcher from the trunk of a car, this is your chance.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 17, 2022

That it was finally unleashed without fanfare in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria isn't Devlin's fault, though with Puerto Rico begging for electricity his fetish for global chaos and destruction has never seemed a more shameful kink.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/4 | Mar 3, 2022

iGeostorm/i is simply bad filmmaking: bad plot, bad pace, bad effects, and bad acting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Feb 19, 2022

A popcorn flick through and through. It might not be filling but it tastes good enough to munch on for a short while.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 29, 2021

Give Devlin credit for trying to mate a government paranoia thriller with a disaster flick, but take away points for making a movie as alternately dull and daft as this one.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 18, 2021

Whether or not the geostorm actually occurs (and to what degree), it still wins, considering that the pre-geostorm anomalies cause trillions of dollars worth of damage.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 5, 2020

A disaster movie so cheesy it should come with pepperoni on top.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 16, 2020

The earnestness with which Geostorm want to use effects-driven spectacle to get me to root for human unity won me over.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 1, 2020

This "unconcerned" tone that surrounds the whole set makes 'Geostorm' a first order diversion as brainless as recommended. Bad? No doubt. Entertaining? Even more. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 8, 2019

A gleefully over-the-top piece of pop trash that has but one thing on its mind, and delivers it with such conviction that manages to succeed on its own terms.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 4, 2019

It's watchable, it's not like awful but... it's not something I can recommend.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | May 15, 2019

At least they tried to go weird with it, which I will always appreciate.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 21, 2019

Geostorm is Emmerich-lite, less disaster porn and more disaster late-night Cinemax.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 11, 2019

Stay home and watch The Weather Channel instead.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 30, 2019

As delightfully dumb as you'd expect it to be.

Full Review | Jan 19, 2019

It's like Sharknado if it had been directed by Al Gore.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 21, 2018

You can always tell who saw this as when we're late we say "I literally had to fly in from outer space!" like a secret code. An entertaining romp with Butler only lurching into Scottish once, this just needed more spectacular deaths from mad weather.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 18, 2018

Geostorm Review

20 Oct 2017

109 minutes

So, here it is, finally sneaking into cinemas after more delays than Southern trains. Almost exactly a year to the day after originally scheduled; almost three years after shooting began, thanks to reports of extensive reshoots; and accompanied by bad buzz and thousands of tweets of that gif where Michael Jackson is chomping expectantly on popcorn. Oh, and this movie about the worst storm in recorded history is arriving on the back of the worst storms in recorded history. That’s the sort of bad timing that would win you a place in the middle order of the England cricket team.

However, sorry to disappoint those looking a gif horse in the mouth — yes, Geostorm is bad, but it’s not a stinker for the ages. In fact, given its torturous production history, it’s often strangely competent and even, in its geostorming final third, moves somewhere towards being entertaining for a movie that essentially boils down to ‘Gerry Butler versus weather’.

Yes, Geostorm is bad, but it’s not a stinker for the ages.

With the contribution of Danny Cannon (who came in to direct extensive reshoots last year) and Jerry Bruckheimer (hired, it seems, as a production consultant) uncredited, Geostorm is still very much a Dean Devlin joint. The directorial debut of the man who, with Roland Emmerich, pretty much pioneered modern cinema’s appetite for destruction on a global scale with Independence Day and Godzilla , you’d imagine we’d be in safe hands, and that Devlin might even be able to bring a few new wrinkles. Instead, it’s all so plodding and formulaic, joylessly ticking off boxes from the Disaster Movie Playbook (does the hero have a teenage daughter who thinks he’s a disappointment until he saves the world? Check) — while being too po-faced to even count as parody of the genre he helped to create. The scenes of devastation, as Hong Kong is hit by devastating, skyscraper-toppling gas-main explosions, or Brazil faces a sudden nip of wintry weather that freezes people, and a 747, instantly, are decently rendered, but we’ve seen it all before. Yes, there’s a dog in peril. Yes, it lives. Yes, millions of people die, but who cares when the dog lives?

Signs of surgery are there — it’s bookended by narration from a minor character that sounds like it was written in the recording booth on the morning of; nobody seems quite sure when the movie’s set; and one day there may be a drinking game devoted to Jim Sturgess’ changing hairstyle (has he got sideburns? Shot!). Of course, none of it makes a lick of sense, but that might have been inevitable anyway, given the grade-A gobbledegook being thrown around to justify 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.” Yet it all hangs together. Ish. And it even kicks up a gear after about an hour of geotedium, signalled by the year’s most unintentionally hilarious scene, where Butler and Jim Sturgess, as his estranged brother who’s working in the White House (yes, it’s that sort of movie), communicate in code.

After that, Devlin and co finally give in to the ludicrousness of a premise that asks you to believe Gerry Butler could play a scientist, delivering a third act where it goes full geostupid. There are lightning bolts that can blow up large buildings, a ‘surprise’ villain reveal that is only a surprise to the characters, none of whom have apparently ever seen a film before, and Andy Garcia bellowing a line that should see him get a second honorary Oscar. Oh, and the word “geostorm” is repeated more times than it really needs to be. This stuff is all hugely enjoyable; maybe even intentionally so. It’s hard to tell.

But what Geostorm doesn’t do, perhaps criminally, is deliver on the promise of that original pitch: Gerry Butler, perhaps the greatest angry shout-puncher we have, versus weather. Instead, it’s a movie that strands its most charismatic chess piece on the side of the board, faffing around in zero-G while all the really cool stuff happens down below on Earth, with Jim Sturgess And His Incredible Changing Haircut teaming up with Abbie Cornish to battle the forces of darkness in the White House. It’s perhaps the ultimate testament to what an incredible missed opportunity this is that there’s not a single moment where Gerry Butler barks, “THIS! IS! GEOSTORM!” and then punches a hurricane. There still may be time to do a quick reshoot, guys.

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'Geostorm' review: Global-warming flick whips up a disaster of a disaster movie

When it comes to the issue of global warming, the world divides into two camps: those who believe in science, and those who adopt an actively skeptical position toward other human beings’ ability to interpret and in any way impact what nature has in store. An inanely spectacular disaster movie — though perhaps “spectacularly inane” would be more apt — from the producer of Godzilla and Independence Day , Dean Devlin ’s Geostorm attempts to have it both ways, treating a gang of scientists who’ve “solved” the problem of global warming as its heroes while exploiting how little its target audience knows about the subject to supply an extreme-weather clip reel with contributions of variable quality from a dozen different visual effects houses.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a tidal wave sweep over the horizon of a waterless desert or eggs frying on a superheated city street, Geostorm is the movie for you! And if you’re one of the millions of human beings on this planet who was recently impacted by hurricanes and tropical storms, well, Devlin’s ill-timed destruct-a-thon (already delayed more than a year from its intended March 2016 release) succeeds in being even more callously insensitive/offensive than our president’s response to your plight. Then again, the only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.

Thanks to the immersive “environmental effects” of 4DX cinema technology, audiences in participating theaters who pay the upcharge can experience Geostorm ’s freak weather phenomena for themselves, sitting in seats that jostle and shake along with the action, while lightning flashes, wind blows and a fine watery mist is blasted into their faces as they watch the movie. Introduced in South Korea around the time of Avatar and now available around the world, 4DX is an elaborate and thoroughly obnoxious add-on to the moviegoing experience worth trying once, and Geostorm may as well have been conceived for the occasion.

For the century prior, a filmmaker’s toolset was limited primarily to sight and sound, but 4DX assaults audiences with touch and smell as well, improving on such short-lived 1959/’60 gimmicks as The Tingler (an in-seat joy buzzer rigged to vibrate on cue) and Smell-O-Vision (which spritzed nauseating perfumes at pre-programmed intervals). During Geostorm , puffs of air hit your neck as bullets whizz by a character’s head, and hydraulically mounted four-seat segments shake fast enough to simulate whiplash during car crashes and other traumatic on-screen moments. Thankfully, we’re spared the sensory equivalent of Gerard Butler ’s breath, although a soothing summer-breeze aroma does accompany the denouement, and they haven’t figured out a way to recreate the movie’s many exploding fireballs indoors.

By comparison, one can only imagine how frustrating Geostorm must be for audiences seeing it on a normal megaplex screen, where, without the added distraction of trying not to puke up one’s popcorn, they are directly confronted by the ghastly preposterousness of it all — as in a scene when a random Asian (later revealed to be an important character) tries to outrace a sudden Hong Kong heat surge, dodging toppling skyscrapers and cracks in the road from behind the wheel of his tiny Smartcar. Why are these things happening, you ask? Well, Devlin has engineered an elaborate plot under the pretext of cautionary entertainment, when in fact, his true motive is to show as much devastation as possible. (Sure, his characters are racing to prevent a massive Geostorm , but audiences want a taste of what that might look like.)

Up front, a reasonably eloquent opening narration from Hannah Lawson (child actress Talitha Bateman, whose earnest line readings and ability to cry on cue puts her adult co-stars to shame) establishes a near-future scenario in which all those inconvenient truths Al Gore has been urgently warning might happen to the environment have come to pass, but skips forward to a world already stabilized by the solution: Hannah’s dad, Jake (Butler), invented an elaborate satellite net, known as “Dutch Boy,” in which powerful weather-managing equipment allows scientists to control the weather by raising and lowering the temperature of virtually any location on earth at will.

In the alarmist tradition of virtually everything Michael Crichton ever wrote, Devlin (who collaborated with Paul Guyot on the script) has no sooner introduced a really terrible idea than he’s deconstructing all the ways it could go wrong. Someday, screenwriters will actually tell a story about how science makes the world a better place, but this is not that movie. Devlin can already imagine how a system like Dutch Boy could be weaponized to strike America’s enemies (for the moment, the U.S. is in charge of the controls, which makes it more than a little suspicious that a remote outpost in Afghanistan, communist China and downtown Moscow are among the first places for deadly weather malfunctions to occur).

To address the problem, the president (Andy Garcia) asks Jake to return to the space station he built and reboot the system, which is being sabotaged by a virus planted by someone on board (hint: the more suspicious and flop-sweatier a supporting actor looks, the less likely they are to be the culprit). Jake’s a colossal hothead with a bad habit of jumping to conclusions, and the only way he’ll succeed is with the help of an international team (led by Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara) up there, and his bureaucrat brother Max (Jim Sturgess, weak) back in Washington — where he’s joined by Abbie Cornish (bland), Ed Harris (brusque) and lesser-known Atlanta star Zazie Beetz (literally the only one in this ensemble you don’t want to see crushed by a taco-truck-sized piece of hail).

Devlin, whose first four feature producing credits were Roland Emmerich movies, seems to have learned most of what he knows from the German director, although Emmerich was never all that good at writing characters we care about (mostly, he relied on the actors’ natural charisma to compensate for the obvious deficits in his scripts). In addition to adopting Emmerich’s screw-the-humans, save-the-dog philosophy, Devlin understands that you need a few attractive extras to convey the ground-level destruction (which explains why he follows a random bikini-clad Brazilian through the Rio de Janeiro insta-freeze sequence, however ridiculous it seems to have her outrun the fast-spreading cold front).

But where in tarnation did he get the idea that once two dozen such natural disasters had been unleashed, it could all be reversed if Jake just flushed the virus from the system? Better not to ask questions. Up on the space station, Geostorm plays so fast and loose with physics that James Bond’s Moonraker (or Godzilla , for that matter) suddenly looks plausible by comparison — although, in its defense, the movie seems to know no one came here for a science lesson. If audiences really, truly cared about science, they’d be out trying to stop global warming in the first place, rather than reveling to a worst-case clip reel of where it all could get us.

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 13 Reviews
Kids Say 17 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Tons of CGI disaster/sci-fi mayhem; eye-rolling story.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

Rampant large-scale, sci-fi/action destruction, with tons of (bloodless) casualt

Scattered strong language includes "s--t," "bulls--t," "goddamn," and "son of a

One bedroom scene that comes to nothing, but it's clearly a lead-up to a sexual

Some brands are visible (Chevy, etc.) but aren't pushed hard.

Any Positive Content?

The character who comes across most positively is the female Secret Service agen

Tries for a message of global unity, but what comes across more strongly is "kil

Violence & Scariness

Rampant large-scale, sci-fi/action destruction, with tons of (bloodless) casualties: An entire Afghan village is frozen to death in an instant (same for a beach in Brazil), Hong Kong essentially experiences a giant sinkhole due to heat, the UAE is hit by a tsunami, etc. Also a fistfight, a shootout, and a car chase. A character gets hit by a car, and viewers see him die. Many explosions.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Scattered strong language includes "s--t," "bulls--t," "goddamn," and "son of a bitch."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

One bedroom scene that comes to nothing, but it's clearly a lead-up to a sexual situation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive role models.

The character who comes across most positively is the female Secret Service agent who stays cool under fire and knows when to abandon protocol. And there are women in multiple positions of skill and power, and a young girl who's scientifically adept. But no character is well-developed enough to earn a ringing endorsement.

Positive Messages

Tries for a message of global unity, but what comes across more strongly is "killing lots of people to seize power is bad." There's no understanding of climate change or anything like that to convey.

Parents need to know that Geostorm is an action/disaster movie starring Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess about a global superstorm that threatens to wipe out the planet. So you can expect tons of large-scale death and destruction (whole cities wiped out abruptly, etc.) -- as well as a fight, a shootout, a car chase, and a character dying after getting hit by a car -- but nothing particularly bloody/graphic. There's also occasional mild language ("s--t," "goddamn," etc.). Younger kids could be scared by images of people instantly freezing to death, but no suffering is conveyed. While the messages and characters are both pretty thin, the movie does portray women in multiple positions of skill and power and a young girl who's scientifically adept. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (13)
Kids say (17)

Based on 13 parent reviews

Is It Any Good?

The forecast calls for a CGI haze that can't obscure increasing clouds of laughability, resulting in a Category 4 eye-rolling storm. When you buy a ticket for a sci-fi/disaster movie, you know you're signing a suspension-of-disbelief contract. No worries! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the CGI. But Geostorm strains that contract to its breaking point. We start with the notion that in 2019 (so soon!), a global network of satellites will shoot stuff into the air to control the weather . (Apparently, this will be necessary because climate change will kill two million people in one day in a major city.) OK. But within a film's world, people should still have to behave as if there are rules. Here, it seems to come as a total shock to everyone that anyone would think of weaponizing such godlike power ... even though it's in the hands of the country that created the atomic bomb.

Geostorm lives and dies by its visual effects; disaster junkies will get their fix of Hong Kong, Moscow, and other major cities getting destroyed by magic weather powers. But its true inspiration comes from whodunits and '70s paranoia thrillers, as the good guys try to unravel a conspiracy before the manipulated system creates the geostorm that will end us all. Bad boy Butler, who's becoming a bit of a warning sign for ticket buyers, battles/teams up with by-the-rules Sturgess (in a non-administration-approved haircut) to solve the mystery. Helping out are two criminally underused actresses, Alexandra Maria Lara as a space station commander and Abbie Cornish as a powerful Secret Service agent, plus rising star/scene stealer Zazie Beetz as a highly skilled IT tech. Beetz gets the laughs, Cornish provides the action, and the wonderful Lara deserves more screen time. But that's it for the highlights, as Geostorm clearly wasn't thought through too carefully. When things go wrong, instead of sending up 100 scientists to analyze it, the president sends one man (guess who?); the most basic questions of the investigation come as a surprise to all; there are one-passenger shuttle flights (think of the cost, even in coach); clumsy exposition hobbles many scenes; and an attempt at brotherly drama goes nowhere. Even the CGI destruction doesn't satisfy. The only interesting dialogue comes in one scene near the end, when the mystery is solved. The real mystery, though, is whether disaster movies have run their course for now, as we've all become inured to VFX. That's a question for another day, and Geostorm isn't the answer.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Geostorm 's violence . What's the appeal of disaster movies? The enormity and frequency of massive-scale destruction can be overwhelming. Is this kind of violence more or less upsetting than gory horror movies? Why?

How are real-world issues like climate change typically handled in movies? Is this film an effective way to examine that particular issue (i.e., does it make you think, does it seem like a realistic extension of that idea)?

Did the villain have a point at the end, in terms of what the "positive" result of these actions could be? What would you have done, if presented with the same choice?

How does this movie compare to other "disaster movies" you may have seen? Why has this genre always been so popular? Do you think a disaster like this could actually occur?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 20, 2017
On DVD or streaming : January 23, 2018
Cast : Gerard Butler , Jim Sturgess , Talitha Bateman
Director : Dean Devlin
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Science and Nature
Run time : 109 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : destruction, action and violence
Last updated : May 12, 2024

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Den of Geek

Geostorm review

Gerard Butler. Weather satellites. Reshoots. A camel. We take a look at Geostorm...

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Your relationship with Geostorm may be best measured by where you stand on 1994’s Charlie Sheen skydiving movie, Terminal Velocity . Terminal Velocity , by many, was dismissed as a trashy, throwaway action movie. But I always thought it was an absolute hoot. It was never going to challenge the awards season, but as a piece of filmed entertainment, it’s become the kind of film that Hollywood’s all-but-forgotten how to make. The joyously daft action and/or effects movie that the 90s at one stage thrived on.

What a pleasure, then, to report that Geostorm captures that spirit. I’m not sure if that’s by luck or design, either. Still, I happily confess it had me early on, with the idea that a raging weather movie was being crossed with a presidential assassination thriller. As it turns out – and this ain’t spoiling anything – the film also throws in an estranged father/daughter tale, a brotherly rivalry, and Gerard Butler pressing keys on a computer with the swagger of a man who’s never seen a keyboard in his life. At one stage, on a futuristic space station, he gingerly prods a touch screen interface, and nearly sends it flying. It’s that kind of movie.

But I’m convinced that writer-director Dean Devlin is in on it. That, or Danny Cannon, who came in to handle reshoots last year. One of them must be. Devlin has been mulling a directorial debut for some time I gather, and when his time has come, he’s gamely mashed together as many films as he can, and still kept the running time to only just north of 100 minutes. And yeah, it’s got a ridiculous plot. And yeah, there’s a sense of a man throwing darts at 15 boards at once.

But it’s so, so, so much fun.

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The plot, then. We’re in the future, where the weather of the world has gone bananas. As such, a network of satellites, controlled via an enhanced International Space Station, regulate said weather via some method explained at the start of the film that I wasn’t paying much attention to. But then things start going wrong, and the perfect weather station doesn’t look so perfect anymore, as some people freeze in the middle of the desert.

Meanwhile, there’s our hero, manly Gerard Butler, the manly man man who built the weather station that goes by the name of Dutch Boy. Don’t ask. Anyway, Butler is his own man, and won’t take jibber jabber from a congressional hearing headed up by Toby from The West Wing . As such, his brother – Jim Sturgess – fires him from the Dutch Boy project, only to have to grovel when people start dying. And – oh shit, forgot something! – Sturgess is having a relationship with another government official played by Abbie Cornish that nobody is supposed to know about, because it could get them fired.

I mean this in the nicest sense, but there’s a lot of plot behind the setup of Geostorm, yet at few points did I get the feeling that there was a lot of plot. It’s no secret that there’s been some talk of reshoots and bad test screenings for this one – which may explain why the weather stuff makes for a surprisingly small segment of the film – but I made a conscious decision to buy its premise very early on, and realised half way through I was having so much fun watching the film. Not ironically: I had a massive grin on my face. A watching Fortress for the first time grin. I mean, everyone seems in a bad mood here, or panicked, or making obviously bad decisions, and the film breezily lets them do it, pulling in another sequence of bad weather when required. It zips along, wisely not letting you zero in on many of the details.

There are some pearlers in here on the dialogue front, too. Butler at one stage declares “I’d rather not catch fish with my family than catch 20 fish alone”, which is surely destined to be one of those motivational signs that offices tend to stick on the walls. You also get, for your money, the most bizarrely cryptic hiding of a message in a transmission I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. Yet Butler and Sturgess are so straight-faced, they somehow pull it off.

I know that there are going to be many people in the world who hate Geostorm . But I am firmly not one of them. It’s got so many things I like in a Friday night movie: it’s cheesy, it’s implausible, it’s funny, it’s fast, it’s utterly entertaining. It loses footing only when it tries to take itself too seriously with its effects, that look completely digital. But even in the midst of that, there’s cinema’s first shot of a camel running away from a tidal wave.

But give me this over a po-faced, dark, deathly serious weather film like 2012 anyday. In fact, imagine San Andreas with an upgrade patch, less desire to take itself seriously, and about 15 extra plots smashed in. Heck, you don’t get someone snarling “this isn’t a Chromebook” in San Andreas , do you?

Destroy me all you like in the comments, chums, but I left the screening with a massive grin on my face. I know Geostorm has all sorts of problems, and I ain’t blind to them. But also, for me, Geostorm is a blast of a night out. If some enterprising cinema wants to schedule it as a double bill with Terminal Velocity you can sign me up right now. The way I figure it with films like this: I can be a grown-up, perhaps a bit snobby, and sneer at it. Or I can admit I’ve already looked for the disc pre-order so I can watch it again.

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I think you can guess which path I’ve taken.

Simon Brew | @SimonBrew

Editor, author, writer, broadcaster, Costner fanatic. Now runs Film Stories Magazine.

Entertainment /

For those who want to watch the world burn, there’s Geostorm

It’s almost too obvious to say this disaster movie is dumb, scattershot, and borderline incoherent, but at least it has some large ambitions.

By Tasha Robinson

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This is probably how Geostorm came about: at some point a year or two ago, a bunch of Warner Bros. executives were sitting in front of a dartboard marked “big American concerns,” trying to decide what their next disaster film should be about besides digital tsunamis and improbably exploding buildings. On the dartboard: terrorism, climate change, natural disasters, worldwide political conflict, the Democrats, the Republicans, Donald Trump, isolationism, globalism, hackers and identity theft, technological changes, scientific overreach, family tensions, and adorable kids getting separated from their beloved doggos. “How many darts do we throw?” asked one exec. “Eh, this seems like a lot of work,” said another, to cover up the fact that he was terrible at darts. “Let’s just cram the whole board in there and call it a day.”

Hence Geostorm , an overstuffed, comically lousy thriller that tries to worry about all these things at once, and doesn’t do a particularly convincing job of worrying about any of them. The directorial debut of Dean Devlin (co-writer of Independence Day , its incoherent sequel , and the original Stargate movie) emerges from the kind of cheerfully sloppy aesthetic that produced disaster films like 2012 , Into The Storm , and San Andreas . The actual point of the film is watching CGI cities around the world get destroyed by firestorms and tornados, as the foreshadowing sets up a technologically induced worldwide storm that will devastate the entire planet. Everything else is just set dressing, a way of trying to make the stakes personal for the audience. But just as trying to keep up with every geopolitical crisis on the planet all at once can be overwhelming, trying to track Geostorm ’s name-checked concerns and its barely present characters is likely to tax viewers’ attention spans. Horror movies help people process some of our worst fears, but there’s a reason most movies don’t try to address every human fear at the same time.

Gerard Butler stars as Jake Lawson, the snappish, arrogant engineer who designed and built a weather-control system in response to the rising number of natural disasters around the world. The system is commonly referred to as Dutchboy, after the fairy-tale story of a little boy who saved a Holland town by plugging a leak in a dike with his finger. Dutchboy consists of a global network of satellites surrounding the world, ready to disrupt storm systems with bombs, or employ high-energy lasers to… well, that part isn’t exactly clear. Something-something altering the conditions that let high-pressure systems form, or whatever. Point is, an international coalition of concerned countries built a giant space system that can incinerate anything on earth through a variety of means.

And yet somehow, no one ever even conceived of the idea that it might be used as a weapon. When the system somehow drops a polar vortex on a tiny town in Afghanistan and turns all the residents into dramatically fragile icicles, America attributes the problem to a system error and hides it from the world. (Which is odd, since UN soldiers discover the problem in the first place.) Then Hong Kong goes up in flames, and the US somehow covers that up as well. Turns out Dutchboy is due to be handed off from sole American control (somehow affected through a multi-country coalition on the International Space Station, one of the many plot points that makes not the faintest whiff of sense) in two weeks, and America’s president (Andy Garcia) refuses to turn over a damaged product. It’s pretty clear from the president’s first briefing exactly who’s behind the sabotage and what they want, but all the characters are ridiculously far behind the audience. It takes them a full hour into the film to even conceive that someone’s hacked and weaponized Dutchboy, and that those obliterated cities aren’t just software glitches.

Devlin and his co-writer Paul Guyot cram that first hour with characters and complications. Jake’s estranged brother Max (Jim Sturgess), a State Department official with a longstanding grudge against his cocky older brother, is put in charge of Dutchboy for political reasons. He’s dating Secret Service agent Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish), which they both have to keep quiet because of some kind of departmental fraternization rule. His old college buddy Cheng (Daniel Wu, now some form of climatologist in Hong Kong) gets an early whiff of the Dutchboy conspiracy, mostly so the cameras can accompany him on a frantic tear around Hong Kong, in the kind of calculated international action sequence that makes a blockbuster look friendlier to overseas audiences. Jake has a moppety daughter (Talitha Eliana Bateman), who’s mostly in the story to precociously analyze his character, then weep beautifully for the camera when he’s in danger. And when Jake arrives on the ISS to fix the problem, he meets a broadly multicultural crisis team who mostly have only the tiniest hint of story function, but at least give Geostorm a more diverse face.

All this character business takes a long and tedious time to set up, and it’s often handled in the clunky manner common to action movies that aren’t too particular about how information reaches the audience — as long as it shows up in time to frame the next set of explosions. Among the highlights: Max has far too many scenes with sassy hacker Dana (Zazie Beetz), who takes potshots at his girlfriend and spouts riveting lines like, “The user logs have been wiped clean! We have no digital fingerprints!” (She also compares a particular tempting risk to “going on a roller coaster eating Chipotle.”) Jake spends some charisma-free time fencing with the ISS chief scientist, Ute (Alexandra Maria Lara), who spends the whole movie trying to get him to take her seriously by competently proving him wrong, and still just gets a series of Butlerian smirks for her troubles. He also protagonist-splains Dutchboy’s working processes to the people who are actually running it, in an apparent bid to make himself the year’s most obnoxious protagonist. And then, a grim analysis of Dutchboy scenarios prompts the grim line, “They all end the same way… a geostorm .”

Geostorm is fundamentally devoted to making “geostorm” happen as a term, which explains why when things get critical on the ISS, a board lights up with “TIME TO GEOSTORM: 90 MINUTES,” and a friendly computer voice starts laying out the geostorm countdown. Maybe no one anticipated that Dutchboy could be weaponized, but the programmers sure as hell anticipated that they’d need themselves some kind of highly detailed, graphics-intensive geostorm warning. What they didn’t anticipate was that brothers Jake and Max would somehow find a way to get over their mutual grudges and work together, with Jake on the ISS and Max on the ground. Devlin and Guyot do bring some clever structural mechanics to the story, with twin mysteries playing out planetside and in orbit. It’s just that both play out the same way, with people staring at onscreen code and barking about their latest findings, or reminding each other of their past character conflicts before rapidly moving on.

And of course, this being a disaster movie, it’s all punctuated with disasters. “C’mon, aren’t you a little bit curious to watch the world burn?” sneers one revealed villain toward the end of the film, in a line that’s mostly cribbed from Heath Ledger’s Joker. But copycatting aside, the audience almost certainly is curious to see the world burn, or at least splinter under car-sized hailstones and cold waves that chase people around Brazil, exactly like the laughably memorable “fleeing from cold” sequence in The Day After Tomorrow . For viewers who are only in it for the disaster-porn, Geostorm ’s main problem is that these sequences play out too similarly, with the camera finding one “face of the catastrophe” victim to follow around as things fall apart, and then the usual glossy CGI weather tearing glossy CGI cities to shreds. The effects in Day After Tomorrow had more weight and gravitas, and were more convincing; there’s a glib feeling of frantic speed to Geostorm ’s disaster sequences that make them feel a bit like the hilariously elaborate cosmic deathtraps of the Final Destination movies.

And when the final plan is revealed, it’s a pretty stupid one. “I’m turning the clock back to 1945, when America was a shining city on a hill!” another villain yells, by way of explaining what the geostorm’s catastrophes are meant to accomplish. The moment feels like a self-conscious reference to Trump’s “make America great again” speeches, and their callbacks to an era an awful lot of people wouldn’t want to relive. But Geostorm doesn’t have time to examine the impact of these kinds of politics, or even to chuckle over the irony and insanity of trying to eke some political gain out of obliterating humanity. It’s one quick shouted moment in a long frantic rush of shouted moments and only partially formed ideas about current events. Geostorm could just as well have originated with someone channel-surfing through news channels and family melodramas, getting half-glimpses of reports on terrorist attacks and political commentary. “This would probably make a pretty good movie,” that theoretical exec might have thought. “As long as it ends in… a geostorm .”

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What To Watch Next?

A global catastrophe is on the horizon with an impending Geostorm. But wait! Gerard Butler is on hand to shoot off into space to the ISS to fix the problem in this jam-packed action movie. For a big-budget disaster epic, it still retains a sense of fun which makes it a decent watch.

There’s a storm brewing. A…geostorm. What’s a Geostorm? Well, it’s a storm so massive that it goes…geo. The lightning will never end. The seas will boil. Hot places will turn to ice. You get the idea. It is this kind of global catastrophe that the much-maligned Geostorm promises. Although, like any weather forecast you see in the morning, it’s worth giving such promises the benefit of the doubt.

Full disclosure: I don’t like disaster movies. Movies like The Day After Tomorrow , 2012 , San Andreas , etc… leave me cold. Such CGI devastation holds little interest and the characters running around making “bwa?” faces doesn’t engage me, nor does big family tragedy entice me in. Geostorm has elements of this, sure, but writer/director Dean Devlin treats his debut feature film as a chance to pull out any idea he may have had at any point and throw them all at the wall not only to see what sticks, but to throw things hard enough that even things that wouldn’t stick impale the wall with sheer determination.

The basic set up is that in an undefined future where climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe, a complex series of satellites designed by Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) are deployed to artificially control Earth’s weather. Controlled from the International Space Station (ISS) the system – dubbed ‘Dutch Boy’ – is under the stewardship of the USA before a handover to international supervision.

Except of course Gerard Butler ( RocknRolla ) is a man who doesn’t wait for stuffed shirts to tell him what to do! He’s not going to follow the book. He’s glared at the book with disdain. And then he’s taken off the project for not respecting the book. Oh, and the book is now owned by his brother, Max (Jim Sturgess). Awkward.

That paragraph doesn’t do justice to the amount of ‘plot’ going on in Geostorm . There’s a political conspiracy going on. Max is having a relationship with Secret Service agent Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish) which we are told is Definitely Not Allowed. There’s a father/daughter estrangement set up and coda bookending everything. There is sabotage in space. Sibling rivalry. Assassinations. Heat death lasers. The list goes on! Geostorm has such a melting pot of ingredients that it almost doesn’t matter than none of them individually taste any good: you don’t have time to notice.

Events are sparked off by mysterious weather patterns which indicate that not all is right with Dutch Boy. Jake is stuffed in a rocket and shot back up to the ISS to figure out what is going wrong. Perhaps surprisingly for a movie about global weather disaster, there aren’t that many weather effects taking place. This is mostly down to production and budget issues (substantial reshoots with a different director took place) but the end result is that freezing deserts or targeted heat attacks are used sparingly. These moments are disappointing in that they don’t deliver the large-scale threat we are promised early on, but in a practical sense, the deployment of weather threats to hurry along the action is well used.

Performances from the cast are an amorphous thing. Abbie Cornish has little to work with beyond love interest but her hard-line dedication to her job means she carries the weight of making Jim Sturgess interesting. Sturgess also has a jobsworth role in that he functions to link up the Earth plotlines with the Space plot lines through a series of huge video screen calls with Butler.

Their sibling rivalry never gets past the testosterone testiness surface level of scripting but Butler’s sheer bullishness is fun by virtue of being so unnecessarily macho that Russell Crowe might complain of the theft of his shtick. But you also get some Ed Harris and Andy Garcia for your money who churn out solid, if unshowy, performances.

Among this mangled mess, Geostorm still somehow emerges like a ray of sunshine because, unlike other big-budget disaster epics, it retains a sense of fun. It is ridiculous and can’t pick a lane, sure, but despite – no – because it jumps all over the place it keeps things interesting throughout. It doesn’t matter than it makes no sense (a lot of scenes can be countered with the questions “but, why?”), the movie asks nothing from you beyond joining it for the ride.

It’s not often that Gerard Butler ( Kandahar ) can swagger into a room full of suits and (not) apologise by saying he ‘literally’ just flew in from space. Some more destruction to warrant the whole plot would have been nice, but Geostorm turns potential global disaster into a gaggle of smile-inducing daftness. As we enter month 7 of stress over a real and frighting global threat I, for one, am grateful for some smile-inducing escapism.

Words by Mike Record

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‘geostorm’: what the critics are saying.

Well, it's certainly a disaster movie.

By Graeme McMillan

Graeme McMillan

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So, how bad is Geostorm ?

The Hollywood Reporter ‘s John DeFore seems to suggest that it’s pretty bad. In a review that describes the movie as “big, dumb and boring,” Dean Devlin’s weather horror flick comes across as being … not necessarily the best, shall we say.

“Viewers may have been drawn in by ads featuring tsunamis in Dubai and killer hail in Tokyo. But most of the body of the film consists of people logging into servers, talking about encryption and reviewing surveillance footage,” DeFore complained. But the disappointment goes beyond a lack of disaster porn. Describing Jim Sturgess ‘ performance, DeFore said it “suggests Devlin shouldn’t be directing actors for a living.” Moreover, he adds, “Judging from the badly deployed and oddly unmoving mayhem onscreen here, maybe he shouldn’t be directing CGI effects, either.”

Other critics aren’t any kinder to Geostorm . According to Collider ‘s Matt Goldberg , “it’s a film where the dialogue is laughably awful [and] the twists are only surprising if you’ve never seen a film before.” Which isn’t necessarily the best review a movie has ever received, but it’s also not the worst … probably.

Eddie Harrison from The List offers a little bit more about what to expect from the actual movie. “The film playing out like a whistle-stop global tour to casually gawp at the deaths of untold millions before America saves the day,” he explains, adding, “ Clichéd codas like a little Indian boy reunited with his lost dog in the rubble do nothing to create investment in Devlin’s folly. Bombastic and noisy, yet minuscule in emotional heft, it’s a geostorm in a teacup.”

Sure, but “bombastic and noisy” might actually be what some people are looking forward to in a movie like this, no? ScreenCrush ‘s Matt Singer doesn’t think so . “Most of this movie is a slog,” he complains, “but the final act, where one hero makes a selfless sacrifice to save the planet but then survives anyway in a series of events so preposterous they make the rest of Geostorm look like a nature documentary, achieves a kind of transcendent idiocy.” (Ad makers — “ Geostorm looks like a nature documentary” is your pull quote.)

The AV Club ‘s Mike D’Angelo was similarly unimpressed by the pic’s finale. “On the one hand, [Devlin] wants to fashion a race-the-clock action thriller, and even goes so far as to place a hokey “TIME UNTIL GEOSTORM” countdown on the big screen at NASA headquarters, steadily ticking toward 00:00:00. On the other hand, he has to serve up the mass destruction that everyone came to see,” D’Angelo wrote. “For most people, 15 minutes’ worth of impressive annihilation won’t be worth enduring an hour and a half of dramatic monotony.”

If nothing else, we can consider Geostorm on point for one thing: Like the eponymous storm that the movie seeks to avoid, it certainly seems like a cataclysmic disaster. Surely that earns it some points for verisimilitude?

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Geostorm Review

If you have kept up with movies in 2017, then there's a good chance that you have already heard of Geostorm . Dean Devlin's global warming-inspired, Gerard Butler -led disaster epic has captured the imaginations of many moviegoers since the first trailer dropped -- primarily in the hope that the film could live up to the campy, fun, B-movie quality promised by the marketing material. Alas, the film has now screened for critics, and I am saddened to say that delivers all of the camp and ham that we expected it to, but considerably less of the fun.

In the near future, humanity's contributions to climate change have brought planet Earth to a tipping point. After a series of "extreme weather events" kill millions and lead to global socio-political unrest, brilliant (albeit hot-headed) astronaut Jake Lawson leads the development of Dutch Boy -- a satellite capable of controlling Earth's weather patterns. But when outside forces begin to tamper with Dutch Boy and cause unnatural disasters all over the planet, Jake's brother Max ( Jim Sturgess ) calls him back into action to go up to Dutch Boy in an effort to get the space station working correctly again while Max investigates the mystery on Earth's surface.

For a movie attempting to blend the disaster and political thriller genres so thoroughly, it's honestly shocking that Geostorm is as dull as it is. While the basic premise of the movie would seemingly promise non-stop action and intrigue from start to finish, it features surprisingly few "Geostorm" sequences. To fill in those gaps, Geostorm offers up a half-baked political thriller mystery that's a little too predictable and a little too static to carry the film between action set pieces. In the end, what we are left with is a movie that mostly devolves into Jim Sturgess and Gerard Butler monologuing exposition at each other on video monitors for two hours, while nameless civilian characters get frozen or burned to death.

That formulaic take on the disaster movie model shines brightest when you realize exactly how many movies Geostorm rips off in the creation of its story. It has the global warming story angle of The Day After Tomorrow , the apocalyptic scale and gung-ho machismo of Independence Day , and the (attempted) outer space tension of Gravity (in fact, there's more than one space walk scene that are DIRECT rip-offs of Gravity ). Geostorm Frankensteins these ideas (and others) together in an attempt to freshen up the disaster movie genre, but the film lacks any of the urgency of the projects that it takes inspiration from, so the intended Frankenstein monster is really more of a lifeless corpse.

On that note, one of the most evident reasons for Geostorm 's inability to generate tension is the fact that we seldom see any characters that we have come to know or care about in any real danger on the screen. Almost every single time Dutch Boy fires, it uses its weather-altering power to bring chaos and destruction down upon unnamed and unknown characters. The result of this creative choice is a series of natural disaster scenes that lack any real personal stakes from a character perspective, and feel decidedly gratuitous and impersonal.

That's when it becomes clear just how many characters go underused in this movie. Despite the size of its core ensemble, Geostorm only really cares about Jake and Max, and it leaves some of its most intriguing perspectives waiting on the sidelines for something interesting to do. Two of the most notable examples of this are Annabelle: Creation 's Talitha Bateman (who goes criminally underutilized as Jake's daughter), and Abbie Cornish as Max's girlfriend -- a Terminator-esque secret service agent Sarah Wilson. The film keeps most of them out of harm's way for the bulk of its runtime, as it instead opts to focus on redshirts who come and go with little fanfare.

In a particular sense, you can almost see the fantastic movie that Geostorm could've become in more capable hands -- and when I say amazing, I do not necessarily mean good. Between its made-for-TV level CGI during many of the "extreme weather events," to the hammy acting, and the remarkably straight-faced take on the story, Geostorm had the potential to become one of those delightfully fun disaster movies that you throw on with some friends on a Friday night. The film does occasional hit those notes in a really fun way (seriously, there are brief flashes in which I had some fun), but there just aren't enough to keep it interesting.

If there's one bright spot amid Geostorm 's ineffective action and muddled storytelling, it's the fact that none of the actors appear to be taking the film too seriously -- in a good way. Familiar faces like Gerard Butler, Andy Garcia, and Ed Harris chew the scenery in almost all of their scenes, and it's clear that the cast knows something about Geostorm that Geostorm doesn't.

Too campy to be taken seriously, but too boring to be pure fun, Geostorm embodies the worst of both, and the result is a sometimes enjoyable (but mostly bland) disaster (movie). After all of that build-up for something epic, the response to Geostorm could be summed up with little more than a simple "meh."

Originally from Connecticut, Conner grew up in San Diego and graduated from Chapman University in 2014. He now lives in Los Angeles working in and around the entertainment industry and can mostly be found binging horror movies and chugging coffee.

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Geostorm (2017)

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Film Review: ‘Geostorm’

A race to save the planet from the worst weather event in human history is mostly just an excuse to unleash a series of freaky CG disasters in 'Independence Day' producer Dean Devlin's feature directing debut.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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When it comes to the issue of global warming, the world divides into two camps: those who believe in science, and those who adopt an actively skeptical position toward other human beings’ ability to interpret and in any way impact what nature has in store. An inanely spectacular disaster movie — though perhaps “spectacularly inane” would be more apt — from the producer of “Godzilla” and “Independence Day,” Dean Devlin ’s “ Geostorm ” attempts to have it both ways, treating a gang of scientists who’ve “solved” the problem of global warming as its heroes while exploiting how little its target audience knows about the subject to supply an extreme-weather clip reel with contributions of variable quality from a dozen different visual effects houses.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a tidal wave sweep over the horizon of a waterless desert or eggs frying on a superheated city street, “Geostorm” is the movie for you! And if you’re one of the millions of human beings on this planet who was recently impacted by hurricanes and tropical storms, well, Devlin’s ill-timed destruct-a-thon (already delayed more than a year from its intended March 2016 release) succeeds in being even more callously insensitive/offensive than our president’s response to your plight. Then again, the only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, “Geostorm” is right on forecast.

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Thanks to the immersive “environmental effects” of 4DX cinema technology, audiences in participating theaters who pay the upcharge can experience “Geostorm’s” freak weather phenomena for themselves, sitting in seats that jostle and shake along with the action, while lightning flashes, wind blows and a fine watery mist is blasted into their faces as they watch the movie. Introduced in South Korea around the time of “Avatar” and now available around the world, 4DX is an elaborate and thoroughly obnoxious add-on to the moviegoing experience worth trying once, and “Geostorm” may as well have been conceived for the occasion.

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For the century prior, a filmmaker’s toolset was limited primarily to sight and sound, but 4DX assaults audiences with touch and smell as well, improving on such short-lived 1959/’60 gimmicks as “The Tingler” (an in-seat joy buzzer rigged to vibrate on cue) and Smell-O-Vision (which spritzed nauseating perfumes at pre-programmed intervals). During “Geostorm,” puffs of air hit your neck as bullets whizz by a character’s head, and hydraulically mounted four-seat segments shake fast enough to simulate whiplash during car crashes and other traumatic on-screen moments. Thankfully, we’re spared the sensory equivalent of Gerard Butler ’s breath, although a soothing summer-breeze aroma does accompany the denouement, and they haven’t figured out a way to recreate the movie’s many exploding fireballs indoors.

By comparison, one can only imagine how frustrating “Geostorm” must be for audiences seeing it on a normal megaplex screen, where, without the added distraction of trying not to puke up one’s popcorn, they are directly confronted by the ghastly preposterousness of it all — as in a scene when a random Asian (later revealed to be an important character) tries to outrace a sudden Hong Kong heat surge, dodging toppling skyscrapers and cracks in the road from behind the wheel of his tiny Smartcar. Why are these things happening, you ask? Well, Devlin has engineered an elaborate plot under the pretext of cautionary entertainment, when in fact, his true motive is to show as much devastation as possible. (Sure, his characters are racing to prevent a massive “Geostorm,” but audiences want a taste of what that might look like.)

To address the problem, the president (Andy Garcia) asks Jake to return to the space station he built and reboot the system, which is being sabotaged by a virus planted by someone on board (hint: the more suspicious and flop-sweatier a supporting actor looks, the less likely they are to be the culprit). Jake’s a colossal hothead with a bad habit of jumping to conclusions, and the only way he’ll succeed is with the help of an international team (led by Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara) up there, and his bureaucrat brother Max (Jim Sturgess, weak) back in Washington — where he’s joined by Abbie Cornish (bland), Ed Harris (brusque) and lesser-known “Atlanta” star Zazie Beetz (literally the only one in this ensemble you don’t want to see crushed by a taco-truck-sized piece of hail).

But where in tarnation did he get the idea that once two dozen such natural disasters had been unleashed, it could all be reversed if Jake just flushed the virus from the system? Better not to ask questions. Up on the space station, “Geostorm” plays so fast and loose with physics that James Bond’s “Moonraker” (or “Godzilla,” for that matter) suddenly looks plausible by comparison — although, in its defense, the movie seems to know no one came here for a science lesson. If audiences really, truly cared about science, they’d be out trying to stop global warming in the first place, rather than reveling to a worst-case clip reel of where it all could get us.

Reviewed at Cinépolis Pico Rivera, Pico Rivera, Calif., Oct. 19, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 109 MIN.

Production: A Warner Bros. release, presented with Skydance Media of a Skydance Media, Electric Entertainment production. Producers: Dean Devlin, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg. Executive producers: Herb Gains, Don Granger, Mark Roskin. Co-producers: Cliff Lanning, Rachel Olschan-Wilson. Director: Dean Devlin. Screenplay: Devlin, Paul Guyot. Camera (color, widescreen, 4DX), Roberto Schaefer. Editors: Chris Lebenzon, John Refoua, Ron Rosen. Music: Lorne Balfe.
With: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Andy Garcia Ed Harris, Alexandra Maria Lara, Zazie Beetz, Talitha Bateman, Mare Winningham, Daniel Wu, Robert Sheehan, Eugenio Derbez, Amr Waked, Adepero Oduye.

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Geostorm, a disaster movie about a weather apocalypse, somehow manages to be unbelievably boring

If you must see it, see it in 4DX.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Geostorm is not as interesting as its lead art might make you think

It’s not a crime for a movie to be boring. Boredom can be a rare and precious gift in a culture of distraction. We should all be bored more often.

But the level of boredom I experienced during Geostorm ought to qualify as at least a second-degree felony in the state of New York. Consider the title of the movie. Consider its central conceit, which is that the whole entire world will experience a massive “weather event” at once. Consider also that I saw it in one of the nine theaters nationwide projecting the film in “4DX,” which means my chair bucked around while lights flashed, the lumbar support occasionally punched me from behind, and the seat in front of me sprayed what the theater calls “face water” at me during key moments.

Experiencing such a film, I should not be fighting the temptation to check my phone (I didn’t) or yawn (I did) at regular 10-minute intervals. I don’t demand cinematic greatness from every film. But I should, at the very least, be entertained .

But even though no movie that lends itself to individually tailored special effects should be a royal snoozefest, it’s 2017 and everything is awful, and so, too, is Geostorm , a disaster movie without a disaster and an apocalypse flick lacking the apocalypse. In a weekend that also features the debut of the weather-themed catastrophe The Snowman , I’m hard-pressed to tell you which is worse.

Geostorm has a plot, which it takes far too seriously

If you for some reason are concerned about spoilers, just stop. You know what this movie is before it starts. If you doubt me, refer once again to the title.

Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess play brothers named Jake and Max Lawson, a mechanical genius and a bureaucrat of some kind, respectively, who have found themselves in the highest echelons of the corridors of power after the world was narrowly saved from destruction by climate change when all the nations of Earth banded together to figure out how to control the weather via a network of satellites controlled by a central space station everyone calls “Dutchboy.” (Don’t worry, that all happens in the film’s prologue.)

What might be most baffling is the movie’s apparently sincere belief that we care about Jake and Max’s relationship, or, indeed, anyone’s relationships at all. Give us the geostorm! We came for the geostorm!

Nope. You’ll have to wait. There’s all this plot to slog through first. Max is seeing a Secret Service agent named Sarah ( Abbie Cornish ), which is technically against the rules, a fact that furnishes 95 percent of their conversations, whether flirtations or pillow talk.

Also, Jake basically built Dutchboy because he is some kind of engineering and mechanical genius, but he is booted off the project a few years later because he insists it needs to be handed over, on schedule, to an international governing body, instead of continuing to be maintained solely by the United States. (This is a film firmly in favor of what’s getting called globalism these days.) Who gets put in charge? Max, of course, who gets promoted way up the ladder in the State Department, as the protégé of Secretary of State Leonard Dekkum (played by a truly embarrassed Ed Harris ).

So Jake is mad and living in Florida with his 13-year-old daughter. But a few years later, when the weather control system starts to falter, Max comes knocking. Jake needs to go up into space and save everybody by fixing Dutchboy. And so that is what he does, as the plot grows thick as molasses with complications that include far too many motormouthed technical explanations and a convoluted conspiracy that may go all the way to (gasp) the top, a.k.a. the president ( Andy Garcia ). It wouldn’t be a save-the-world movie without a president.

If you’re hell-bent on seeing Geostorm , pony up for the 4DX

The fact that most of the country will see Geostorm without the aid of 4DX depresses me greatly. Not that 4DX makes the movie good — this could have been accompanied by free margaritas and puppies to cuddle and it still wouldn’t be a good movie.

But at least 4DX lends an element of novelty to the whole boring endeavor. When would my chair move? (Whenever it damn well pleased, whether it lined up with what was onscreen or not; sometimes I was the camera, sometimes I was in the car, sometimes I was just feeling random rumbles beneath my tush.) When would it emit puffs of air at roughly ear level? (When someone shoots a gun.) When would it spray water at my face? (Whenever waves are coming at me, which happen a lot.) There was also a plume of smoke that occasionally rose near the front of the theater, I hope on purpose, and sometimes lights flashed.

At one point the smell of maple syrup filled the air, but your guess is as good as mine on that one.

Without the novelty of 4DX, this experience would be the absolute pits, though. It’s impossible to stop comparing Geostorm to what it could have been. There is so much material to work with. Space! Hurricanes! Tidal waves! Tornadoes! Action heroes! Dust storms! Highways exploding from beneath the ground because of overheating! How do you mess this up?

Turns out you can! So badly. There is one amazing thing that happens in this movie, and it is when a countdown clock appears onscreen, courtesy of a simulation that determines when the “geostorm” will hit. A countdown clock! At this point, I lost it entirely.

Thing is, the geostorm can’t hit, because this is not that kind of disaster movie. So even though the last 20 minutes or so of the film begins to approach the Disney World level of thrill ride we all paid to see, there is still a truly baffling amount of data and tech specs presented throughout even that sequence. I wish I knew why. In the end, Geostorm pulls off one big, gutsy trick: to make you long for the end of civilization, just so the movie will end.

Geostorm opens in theaters on October 20.

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Movie Review: Geostorm

by Carrie Vaughn

Published in Dec. 2017 (Issue 91) | 1732 words

Climate Catastrophe as Entertainment

So the dog lives. We only really see the dog for a couple of minutes, but still, I wanted to get that out of the way up front. The dog lives.

A few years ago I had a chance to rewatch a bunch of the old G.I. Joe cartoons from the 1980s. It was one of my favorite shows ever back in the day, the inspiration for some of my first fanfic writing (no, I haven’t posted it), and I’ve since come to realize that the cartoon was a way for me to come to terms with my father’s military career and its impact on my life. (When the cartoon first aired, Dad was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, where he commanded a B-52 crew. His job was to fly to Russia and drop nukes when Reagan pushed the button. In hindsight, this was a little stressful. But the Joes always came home in one piece, right? It made me feel a little better. I was around twelve at the time.) Watching it more recently, I was struck by something astonishing: The cartoon never mentions nuclear bombs. The threat of nuclear annihilation is totally off the table. In fact, the Joes became friends with their Soviet counterparts, because Cobra was a threat to both countries and they had to work together to stop it. This was amazing. I was explaining this to a friend, that there were no nukes in the G.I. Joe cartoon, like, at all, and she asked, “Then what was there?” What was the big terrible weapon the bad guys used to terrify us?

Answer: The Weather Dominator. Because of course, right? (There were other weapons of unlikely chaos: the Mass Device, the McGuffin Device (I am totally not making that up), that ray gun that turned Iceberg into a killer whale (I am totally not making that up either).) With the Weather Dominator, Cobra could control the weather all over the world, causing snow in Egypt and the ice caps to melt, thereby disrupting the entire geopolitical system in preparation for taking over the world.

So imagine my utter delight when I saw the trailer for Geostorm , with its system of malfunctioning weather-control satellites. This movie has recycled a thirty-year old plot device from my favorite cartoon. Wonderful. When the heroes of Geostorm discover that the malfunctioning weather control satellites aren’t malfunctioning but are being sabotaged, and when it becomes clear that the mastermind behind the sabotage is a high-ranking U.S. government official bent on disrupting the entire geopolitical system in preparation for taking over the world . . . Oh my word, I swooned . This was just like an episode of G.I. Joe but without the Joes and Cobra. Which makes it a terrible G.I. Joe episode, but still.

This is the kind of movie where the earnest computer analyst phones one of our heroes, tells him he’s figured it all out and can he meet him to pass along the info, and is then horribly murdered literally seconds before the meeting. This is the kind of movie where Ed Harris appears and you think, “Oh, I bet he’s the villain,” and you will absolutely be right. Toward the end, the massive space station that controls all the weather satellites is in the process of self-destructing, so control of the satellites is transferred to a NASA ground station and you think, “Wait a minute, could you do that the entire time ? Why did everyone have to go to the station then? What?” Seriously though, there’s some pretty awesome space porn here: Apparently, in just a couple of years, a coalition of nations was able to build a massive space station with a crew of hundreds and vast manufacturing capabilities to construct thousands of satellites and distribute them all over the planet. This movie is almost space opera. (Two people even get sucked out into the vacuum!) Also, it’s the kind of movie that would have us believe it isn’t really about weather control satellites and saving the world, it’s about our heroes, estranged brothers Jake and Max, learning that they really do care about each other and hugging it out at the end. Because the screenwriter read somewhere that the audience needs to have an emotional connection to the characters. Voila .

The screenwriter and director is Dean Devlin, who has made a career out of mindless stupid disaster movies, including both Independence Day films, the ’98 Godzilla , and a handful of others. But Geostorm is different. Geostorm has a message: Climate change is bad, and only by uniting the nations of Earth and building an outrageously complex system of space stations, satellites, and a fleet of new space shuttles to service to them, will humanity triumph. Or something like that.

While the issue of anthropogenic climate change has come to be a hot-button political topic in the U.S.—will admitting its existence make you unelectable in certain districts? —Hollywood has been aware of and using speculation about the consequences of climate change for quite a long time now. Starting with, dare I say it, 1995’s Waterworld , in which melted polar ice caps have completely submerged every single landmass on Earth. Never mind that there isn’t enough water for this to actually happen, we’re entering the land of metaphor and moral parable, not realism.

Turns out we can go back earlier, at least to 1989’s Slipstream , a surprisingly great SF flick starring Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton. Here, an unspecified disaster has caused the planet’s weather patterns to shift and expanded the jet stream until the entire planet is covered with deadly winds. There are airships. It’s kind of amazing.

I’m interested in how movies handle climate change as a vector of disaster. I’m interested in what movies about climate-change-as-disaster say about culture, entertainment, and what we’re afraid of. In the ’50s and ’60s, hundreds of movies about radioactive giant critters rampaging across the land clearly revealed a pervasive societal fear during the first decades of the atomic age. Now, we’re seeing the actual real effects of climate-driven disaster. So what do the movies have to say about it? Turns out, given the magnitude of the issue, there haven’t been all that many disaster films about climate change. It may be a little too real.

The prologue at the start of Geostorm , in which a young girl’s voiceover explains the terrible storms and weather ravaging the planet in 2019 along with all the relevant real news footage, was uncomfortable after this past disastrous summer full of floods, hurricanes, mudslides, and wildfires all over the world. It drew a straight line between actual, real disasters in which actual, real people are killed, to the mining of those disasters and accompanying images as entertainment. I believe Geostorm’s explicitly stated message—that humanity will have to unite to combat climate change—is made in earnest. But who is going to listen to a goofy Gerard Butler action vehicle sporting a ten percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes?

Geostorm surprised me a little bit in one way. The trailers led me to believe the technology itself would be the villain—this cure for climate change, however unlikely, would be worse than the disease. One recent film, Snowpiercer , did that, depicting a world plunged into permanent, freezing winter by a misguided attempt to thwart global warming. (I thought Snowpiercer was overhyped and problematic, a potentially intriguing metaphor stomped to the ground with repetitive action and a lack of understanding of what its own metaphor actually was.) In Geostorm , science and scientists are not the villains, and that was a relief. Amoral politicians and their cronies are, and, well—I don’t suppose I can really argue with that, can I?

The biggest hurdle so many of these movies face is their own complete lack of scientific accuracy. Because real climate and real weather don’t act that way. The instant deep freeze depicted both here and in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow (which I thought was also Devlin but turns out was actually written and directed by Devlin’s Independence Day partner in film-crime, Roland Emmerich. Hollywood’s disaster film dynamic duo.), the instant tidal waves, the ability to measure the start of flaming heat waves to the second—don’t happen in real life. We’re shown many disaster film staple images of innocent people fleeing for their lives—from wind. From cold. From heat. In the real world, you can’t really escape these things, and they creep up so slowly as to hardly feel like disasters until you’re in the middle of them, until people are already dying. Fleeing a real-life hurricane involves sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway. By necessity, movies have to make these events bigger, faster, more spectacular, more compelling—and escapable. Survivable. Geostorm needs there to be an actual ticking clock (I counted three in the climactic scene: the space station’s destruct mechanism, the clocking ticking down the approaching geostorm catastrophe, and the upload bar for the reboot order. Three ticking countdown clocks at once, people!!!) so that we know how much time we have before it’s too late to stop the weather from killing us. And it wants there to be a switch to flip to make that happen. If only confronting climate change could be that simple.

In what may be an image of supreme symbolism or wish fulfillment, either intentional or accidental, I can’t really decide which, the key code to reboot the satellites, thereby undoing the sabotage and saving everything, turns out to be biometrically linked to the U.S. President’s own fingerprints and retinal scan. Part of the plot involves Max kidnapping the President (with the help of his über-competent Secret Service girlfriend, who for some unfathomable reason just goes along with everything he says) and convincing him that the threat is real and that he must act.

From the mouths of mindless stupid disaster flicks, amirite?

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Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless , the New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel, Questland , is about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong and the literature professor who has to save the day. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com .

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Consequence

Film Review: Geostorm

A weathered, shoddily assembled exercise in disaster porn that falls short of the genre's highs

Directed by

Dean Devlin
Jeremy Ray Taylor
Gerard Butler
Abbie Cornish

Release Year

Even within the pantheon of American disaster movies, there are films which elevate the genre and there are films that confirm the worst suspicions of skeptics. Every so often, you get an Independence Day , a film which uses the cinematic language of bombast to speak to something oddly poignant about the power of unity. Far more often, you get the incidental absurdity of vehicles like San Andreas or 2012 or any number of disaster “classics” going back to The Towering Inferno and other luminaries of the early era. It’s hard to deliver an unironically enjoyable disaster movie; to consider the gravity of the destruction caused is to cast a pall over what’s supposed to be a genre that allows for escapist tales of survival against impossible odds, at its best. To take it too seriously is to misunderstand the foundation on which it’s built, one of optimism pitted against the fetishistic joy of watching an unseen, unforgiving god of destruction lay waste to so many global cities like a kid demolishing a LEGO metropolis at the end of the day.

Geostorm finds itself in the curious position of simultaneously taking itself too seriously and not enough so. It’s a disaster movie far too ridiculous to generate any real gravitas, but it’s also just glum enough to suck any fun out of watching the beaches of Rio de Janeiro freeze over in an instant. Despite positioning itself as the disaster movie to end all others, a tale of a storm so chaotic that it would irreparably alter the topography of Earth as we know it, Geostorm makes the critical error of sacrificing that sense of play, leaving it in a position where the only lasting takeaways are that the accents are bad, the filmmaking is worse, and the missed opportunity the film represents may be its most egregious failure of all.

In 2019, as declared by a narrator who disappears until the film’s last moments and feels surreptitiously tacked on as such, the planet is in a state of crisis. Climate change has caused massive storms, unthinkable death tolls, and all manner of destruction, which the film illustrates with a series of time-lapse disaster videos and one sustained image of lonely polar bears. In response, the global community joins forces to repurpose the International Space Station as the “Dutchboy,” an orbiting hub through which an interconnected grid of globe-spanning satellites can be deployed to change the weather, so as to prevent any cataclysmic storms in the future. If a Category 5 hurricane is brewing, a batallion of small bombs is dropped to break up the cloud formations. If excessive heat or cold overwhelms a region, the satellites can return the atmosphere to a place of relative normalization. With the best minds from around the world manning the ISS, Earth now enjoys a time of previously impossible prosperity, as natural disasters are seemingly now a thing of the past.

The peace only lasts until a military unit in Afghanistan discovers a village, in the middle of desert, killed off instantly by a freak ice storm. Soon the streets of Hong Kong grow hot enough to instantly fry an egg, scientists aboard the ISS are mysteriously being ejected into space, and the American government is left to work out what’s wrong with the station before control is ceded to the global community in a matter of weeks. (Why the U.S. has sole power over the satellite grid is just one of the many questions raised by the film’s premise that Geostorm has absolutely no interest in exploring at further length.) A more darkly playful film could have run for miles with a premise that essentially lends the filmmaker carte blanche to wreak any kind of havoc on the planet that a nutty Hollywood screenplay could dream up, but mega-producer Dean Devlin (in his directorial debut, sadly enough) stops far short. Long stretches of Geostorm omit any kind of weather-based chaos at all in favor of chasing after its many uninteresting human protagonists, sidelining the main event promised by the title in favor of attempting to earn investment in paper-thin character types.

See if you can piece together exactly where the film goes from those types alone. Jake Lawson ( Gerard Butler ) is the mind behind Dutchboy, a brilliant scientist whose only downfall is his incorrigibly roguish demeanor. After being kicked out of his own space station for insubordination, he’s left estranged from his brother Max ( Jim Sturgess ), a high-ranking government official who oversees Dutchboy in his stead. When the malfunctions begin, Max is told by President Palma ( Andy Garcia ) to find “one man, who we can control” to quietly repair the station before the international handoff takes place and the nation at large is embarrassed. Before long, Max’s best-laid plans come undone, and he’s left to rely on the help of the Secretary of State, Dekkom ( Ed Harris ), and his clandestine Secret Service fiancee Sarah ( Abbie Cornish ) to help Max unearth Dutchboy’s secrets before the planet is overwhelmed by the titular cataclysm.

The beats are familiar enough. Max and Jake have to repair their estranged relationship. Max has to solicit help from an eager government hacker ( Zazie Beetz ), and Jake has to put aside his lone-wolf tendencies in order to coexist with the ISS’ current director, Fassbinder ( Alexandra Maria Lara ). On the ground, suspicions begin to arise around President Palma and his possible involvement in the increasing number of deadly malfunctions. Jake’s ragtag pan-ethnic crew cracks excruciating jokes while attempting to help him undo the damage before it’s too late. In the grand tradition of disaster movies, both a dramatic countdown clock and an adorable dog in peril both enter the proceedings before the film’s end. All the while, Devlin neglects to put the storm in Geostorm , filling far too much space between disaster sequences with tedious banter and flat emotional moments. If you forget by the end of the film about Jake’s daughter ( Talitha Eliana Bateman ), don’t fret; Geostorm does as well.

Even the destruction, the ostensible reason for the film’s whole existence, is surprisingly dull. Devlin helms the disaster sequences with a remarkable lack of panache, fusing a derivative assemblage of massive tidal waves and tornadoes with some strikingly poor CG. To complain about the science in a movie about space-controlled weather feels like a fool’s errand, but the film’s internal logic is so genuinely poor that you’d be forgiven for letting your mind wander from the tiring story to consider exactly how and why a giant ray of heat would be able to shoot through the atmosphere and accomplish anything other than the eventual destruction of Moscow that it achieves. Whatever shreds of quality might have been mined from a reportedly troubled production are lost in a fugue of increasingly laughable editorial choices, as entire blocks of story are omitted, key characters disappear for protracted periods of time, and the whole of Geostorm seems to be sprinting to its own finish, as flagrant a ripoff of Gravity ‘s moving climax as you’ll see in theaters this year.

To be sure, there are pleasures here for those who prefer their bad movies triumphant in their failure. Government officials reveal rocket launchers in the trunks of cars, inexplicable potshots are taken at the Democratic party, and Butler delivers a gruffly complimentary “you son of a bitch!” with nary a wink to be found. But these brief moments of knowing camp are undercut by the sense that Geostorm went terribly awry somewhere along the way, much like its hazardously assembled space station. (For an apparatus built to withstand any kind of failure, it’s eventually demolished with astounding ease.) Devlin’s debut aims high, but instead sees him deliver the poorest man’s rendition of a Roland Emmerich film possible, and given that Devlin cut his teeth on features like Independence Day , it’s almost impressive how little he seems to have picked up on his own. Geostorm will offer the bits of campy fun that some will desire most from it, but as a disaster movie, it’s an almost entirely unmitigated fiasco.

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Geostorm movie review: Like Gerard Butler repeatedly yelling ‘This is Science’ at your face; one of the worst films of 2017

Geostorm movie review: it’s the movie equivalent of gerard butler yelling ‘this is science’ at your face, being drowned alive, and being pelted with ice all at the same time. it’s a disaster (movie)..

Geostorm Director - Dean Devlin Cast - Gerard Butler, Abbie Cornish, Jim Sturgess, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris, Alexandra Maria Lara, Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Wu, Robert Sheehan Rating - 1/5

Gerard Butler has developed an oddly abusive relationship with his audience.

Psst. You’re going to get some inside information now, so listen close. Did you know that even with a very superficial understanding of how press previews work, you could make a fairly accurate prediction about how a movie will ultimately be received?

You did? Then feel free to skip ahead. The rest of you, gather ‘round.

Allow me to illustrate with three examples, all from 2017: Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok, and the reason behind this blatant procrastination, Geostorm.

A large part of Baby Driver’s marketing highlighted its (then) phenomenal 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. Sony premiered the film at the South by Southwest Festival, more than three months before its worldwide release. During the weeks leading up to its release, they encouraged everyone who’d seen it to talk about it online, and no embargoes were enforced on critics’ reviews. So when the time finally came for the world to watch what Wright had made, the buzz was firmly in place.

It’s been a similar story for Thor – and, you will notice, most Marvel films – which held its first press screenings two whole weeks before release day. It’s currently the highest-rated MCU movie ever, with a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes. That number will go down for sure, but the fact that it has become a talking point illustrates what I’m getting at.

Geostorm, meanwhile – let’s just get this over with – was not screened for the press in advance. The first batch of professional reviews appeared online a day after its release. If you take a look at its RT page, you’d see only a handful of them - a suspiciously small number - all presumably written by journalists who’d paid to see it.

The point being, despite what they tell you in trailers and advertisements, studios usually know exactly what they have on their hands. And in the case of Geostorm, the latest in our scheduled biannual abusive appointment with Gerard Butler, Warner Bros saw a cut back in 2015, decided it wasn’t up to the mark, had the director unceremoniously booted off the project, spent millions on reshoots, and still delivered one of the worst movies of the year.

It’s a personal rule to avoid reading/watching opinions about a film before having seen it myself, but it’s so difficult to resist a signature Mark Kermode rant. “I think it’s the stupidest film I have ever seen,” said the Observer critic, slouched on his chair with an appearance of a man forced to reconsider everything he’s believed in.

And that’s the overall emotion Geostorm leaves you with – oddly introspective. Not only does it make you question your life – why do you love movies at all, why did you waste precious moments of your youth yelling “This is Sparta” at your friends, what’ll it take to get Gerard Butler to stop – but it also makes you question things you genuinely adore.

For example, nothing in this movie is as far fetched as your average Tintin comic – but only one of them is a timeless masterpiece. And just the fact that you had this thought at all is a testament to the soul-sucking evilness of this movie.

Watching it – or more accurately, enduring it, and surviving it – will make you want to undergo an exorcism, or a lobotomy. It’ll leave you wondering if being frozen alive, or being pelted in the face with football-sized hail, or being crushed under an airliner dropping out of the sky – all honest-to-god things that happen in this movie – would be such a bad idea after all.

Without wasting much time – because, let’s be honest, most people have gone already; they saw that rating – here’s taking a stab at the insane plot: After a series of calamitous events caused by climate change, a group of international scientists lead by Jake Lawson (Butler), builds a system of satellites called ‘Dutch Boy’ designed to control weather disruptions. Soon, however, Dutch Boy is hacked into, hijacked, and weaponised. Temperatures plunge in Rio, the heavens burst open in Hong Kong, and the oceans rise in New Orleans – and this is just the beginning, Jake prophecies. It’s all leading up to an apocalyptic event, a Geostorm. Cue the dramatic music and cheesy sound effects.

It’s all utterly ridiculous, of course. But that doesn’t necessarily have to spell disaster, pun not intended. 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Armageddon were each borne out of central ideas that were equally, if not more, outlandish as anything in Geostorm – but they’re all a blast. It’s how the filmmakers choose to treat these ideas is what really matters – the tone they take, the pacing of it, how the actors pitch their performances, and whether or not we care about the characters.

And Geostorm, for close to two agonising hours, routinely makes the wrong choices. It’s dull, too earnest for its own good, and like Gerard Butler’s 2016 gem Gods of Egypt , completely unaware of its own silliness. For God’s sake, it’s a movie in which a Scotsman, an Englishman and an Australian play Americans, an Irishman plays an Englishman, an Egyptian plays a Frenchman, and an American plays an Indian.

Watch the Geostorm trailer here

Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @RohanNaahar

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COMMENTS

Geostorm movie review & film summary (2017)
Dutch Boy is the brainchild of two-fisted, hard-drinking and inexplicably Scottish American scientist Jake Lawson (Butler) who runs the system along with an international crew up in space. However, he is one of those guys who just cares too much and when a Senate hearing goes sideways, he is fired from the project by its new head, his own ...
Geostorm
Sometimes, we all need a Geostorm in our lives. [Full review in Spanish] Rated: 3/5 Jun 27, 2022 Full Review Daniel Howat Next Best Picture I'm generally okay with disaster movies being dumb, so ...
Review: In 'Geostorm,' Gerard Butler (and His Stubble) Save the Planet
Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller. PG-13. 1h 49m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 20, 2017. If I had to spend a global meteorological catastrophe with anyone, I don't think Gerard Butler would be my first choice ...
Geostorm
Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 17, 2022. Bill Chambers Film Freak Central. That it was finally unleashed without fanfare in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria isn't Devlin's fault, though ...
Geostorm (2017)
Geostorm: Directed by Dean Devlin. With Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara. When the network of satellites designed to control the global climate starts to attack Earth, it's a race against the clock for its creator to uncover the real threat before a worldwide Geostorm wipes out everything and everyone.
Geostorm
Geostorm is a 2017 American science-fiction disaster film directed, cowritten, and coproduced by Dean Devlin (in his feature directorial debut). The film stars Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Ed Harris, and Andy García.It follows a satellite designer who tries to save the world from a storm of epic proportions caused by malfunctioning climate-controlling satellites.
'Geostorm': Film Review
Judging from the badly deployed and oddly unmoving mayhem onscreen here, maybe he shouldn't be directing CGI effects either. Rated PG-13, 108 minutes. 'Independence Day' co-writer Dean Devlin ...
Geostorm Review
Geostorm Review. After extreme weather ravages the earth in 2019, scientist Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) builds a network of satellites to keep it in check. Years later, he's recalled to space to ...
'Geostorm' review: Global-warming flick whips up a disaster of a
An inanely spectacular disaster movie — though perhaps "spectacularly inane" would be more apt — from the producer of Godzilla and Independence Day , Dean Devlin 's Geostorm attempts to ...
Geostorm Movie Review
Parents need to know that Geostorm is an action/disaster movie starring Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess about a global superstorm that threatens to wipe out the planet. So you can expect tons of large-scale death and destruction (whole cities wiped out abruptly, etc.) -- as well as a fight, a shootout, a car chase, and a character dying after getting hit by a car -- but nothing particularly ...
Geostorm review
Your relationship with Geostorm may be best measured by where you stand on 1994's Charlie Sheen skydiving movie, Terminal Velocity. Terminal Velocity, by many, was dismissed as a trashy ...
For those who want to watch the world burn, there's Geostorm
Hence Geostorm, an overstuffed, comically lousy thriller that tries to worry about all these things at once, and doesn't do a particularly convincing job of worrying about any of them.The ...
Geostorm Movie Review
7.6. Good. 8. User Avg. A global catastrophe is on the horizon with an impending Geostorm. But wait! Gerard Butler is on hand to shoot off into space to the ISS to fix the problem in this jam-packed action movie. For a big-budget disaster epic, it still retains a sense of fun which makes it a decent watch. There's a storm brewing.
'Geostorm' Reviews: What The Critics Are Saying
October 20, 2017 2:01pm. So, how bad is Geostorm? The Hollywood Reporter 's John DeFore seems to suggest that it's pretty bad. In a review that describes the movie as "big, dumb and boring ...
Geostorm Review
While the basic premise of the movie would seemingly promise non-stop action and intrigue from start to finish, it features surprisingly few "Geostorm" sequences. To fill in those gaps, Geostorm ...
Geostorm Review
A bad film that is surprisingly consumable. Brazenly corny and watchably stupid, Dean Devlin's Geostorm only manages to transcend its palpable sense of banality through the sheer force of its own ...
Geostorm
After an unprecedented series of natural disasters threatened the planet, the world's leaders came together to create an intricate network of satellites to control the global climate and keep everyone safe. But now, something has gone wrong—the system built to protect the Earth is attacking it, and it's a race against the clock to uncover the real threat before a worldwide geostorm wipes ...
Geostorm (2017)
Gordon-11 12 October 2017. This film tells the story of a network of satellites that controls weather. When the satellites fail, the world is in for apocalyptic weather that will end humanity. The trailer appears to tell people that "Geostorm" is a natural disaster thriller.
'Geostorm' Review: Dean Devlin's Disastrous Directing Debut
Film Review: 'Geostorm'. A race to save the planet from the worst weather event in human history is mostly just an excuse to unleash a series of freaky CG disasters in 'Independence Day ...
Geostorm, a disaster movie about a weather apocalypse, somehow ...
In the end, Geostorm pulls off one big, gutsy trick: to make you long for the end of civilization, just so the movie will end. Geostorm opens in theaters on October 20. You've read 1 article in ...
Movie Review: Geostorm
The prologue at the start of Geostorm, in which a young girl's voiceover explains the terrible storms and weather ravaging the planet in 2019 along with all the relevant real news footage, was uncomfortable after this past disastrous summer full of floods, hurricanes, mudslides, and wildfires all over the world.
Film Review: Geostorm
Long stretches of Geostorm omit any kind of weather-based chaos at all in favor of chasing after its many uninteresting human protagonists, sidelining the main event promised by the title in favor of attempting to earn investment in paper-thin character types. See if you can piece together exactly where the film goes from those types alone.
Geostorm movie review: Like Gerard Butler repeatedly yelling 'This is
Geostorm Director - Dean Devlin Cast - Gerard Butler, Abbie Cornish, Jim Sturgess, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris, Alexandra Maria Lara, Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Wu, Robert Sheehan Rating - 1/5. Gerard ...

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A global catastrophe is on the horizon with an impending Geostorm. But wait! Gerard Butler is on hand to shoot off into space to the ISS to fix the problem in this jam-packed action movie. For a big-budget disaster epic, it still retains a sense of fun which makes it a decent watch.

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