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’: film review.

'Independence Day' co-writer Dean Devlin makes his directing debut with another Earth-in-jeopardy yarn, 'Geostorm.'

By THR Staff

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The planetary disaster film equivalent of a two-hour call to tech support, Dean Devlin’s Geostorm boils down to that classically annoying hail-mary bit of advice: Have you tried shutting it down and rebooting? Big, dumb and boring, it finds the co-writer of Independence Day hoping to start a directing career with the same playbook — but forgetting several rules of the game. The result isn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly no  Armageddon either.

In the face of a wave of extreme weather events in 2019, we’re told, “The world came together as one,” building a network of weather-adjusting satellites. The scientist behind the whole thing, the genius who saved humanity, was Gerard Butler. You got a problem with that, buddy?

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Release date: Oct 20, 2017

Butler’s Jake Lawson was a maverick, though (you don’t say!), and his unwillingness to follow protocol got him fired from his so-called “Dutch Boy” program. He was replaced by his brother Max (Jim Sturgess ), presumably because the U.S. senators in charge understood that disaster movies, for whatever reason, require some long-seething family resentment to briefly get in the way of saving the world.

Three years after Max takes over, things start going wrong with the God machines. A desert village in Afghanistan is flash-frozen; the streets of Hong Kong erupt in flame. The president (Andy Garcia, speaking from his sternum) and his secretary of state (Ed Harris, slumming like crazy) call Jake back into service, sending him up to the International Space Station IV to do diagnostics. There, the new crew doesn’t even recognize the man who saved the world three years ago.

As Jake starts collecting evidence of sabotage aboard the ISS , his brother is gathering disturbing clues about what may be going on. A colleague from Hong Kong comes all the way to Washington, D.C., to warn him of the “ geostorm ” someone may be planning to unleash — that’s an irreversible chain-reaction of disasters — but he’s killed before he can explain much. Luckily, Max’s girlfriend Sarah ( Abbie Cornish) is on the president’s Secret Service detail, and her ethics prove remarkably flexible when her honey asks for illegal favors. (On three separate occasions, he asks her to commit possibly treasonous acts; each time, she offers one sentence of argument before agreeing.)

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. This happens both on Earth and out in space, and when the brothers need to testily share intel , they don’t just log on to Skype: Jake must go into a special room for some reason, where a wall-sized “virtual conference” screen may be intended to remind us we’re in the future . (On the plus side, design-wise, the little fold-out “ holoframes ” that have replaced smart phones here are sort of cool.)

A conspiracy to seize global power by destroying most of humanity eventually comes into focus, but in their screenplay, Devlin and Paul Guyot have laid no groundwork for the villain’s unmasking. They know we’ve heard this story before, so why bother? More puzzling is their refusal to attend to the other business that makes viewers care about individuals when the end of humanity comes knocking. Having introduced Max’s teenage daughter before he leaves on his mission, they completely forget about her until the movie is almost over; they also decline to create any kind of rapport between Max and the astronauts who are about to help him save the world.

It can’t be easy to brew onscreen chemistry when one of the molecules involved is Butler, perhaps the least charismatic leading man working today. But the failure is pretty spectacular when it comes to Butler and Sturgess , whose performance suggests Devlin shouldn’t be directing actors for a living. Judging from the badly deployed and oddly unmoving mayhem onscreen here, maybe he shouldn’t be directing CGI effects either.

Production companies: Electric Entertainment, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Skydance Media Distributor: Warner Bros. Cast: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess , Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris, Talitha Bateman Director: Dean Devlin Screenwriters: Dean Devlin, Paul Guyot Producers: Dean Devlin, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg Executive producers: Herbert W. Gains, Don Granger, Marc Roskin Director of photography: Roberto Schaefer Production designer: Kirk M. Petruccelli Costume designer: Susan Matheson Editors: Chris Lebenzon , John Refoua , Ron Rosen Composer: Lorne Balfe Casting director: Ronna Kress

Rated PG-13, 108 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

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

Chief Film Critic

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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.

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.

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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• Karo Premiere

Summary 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 uncove ... Read More

Directed By : Dean Devlin

Written By : Dean Devlin, Paul Guyot

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Gerard Butler

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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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Metacritic reviews

• 40 Arizona Republic Randy Cordova Arizona Republic Randy Cordova It’s an action movie without an exciting moment. It’s a special effects flick with chintzy visuals. And it’s a Gerard Butler vehicle without enough Gerard to go around.
• 40 Time Out Anna Smith Time Out Anna Smith Geostorm is a watery blend of Armageddon and 24, with enough action to entertain on a basic level. It’ll probably be most appealing to scientists looking for a good laugh.
• 33 The A.V. Club Mike D'Angelo The A.V. Club Mike D'Angelo Butler sleepwalks through his thinly written role, and the ostensible tension between the two brothers, flaring up whenever the energy starts to sag, never feels like anything but a bald contrivance.
• 30 Los Angeles Times Noel Murray Los Angeles Times Noel Murray When the long-promised global barrage of tornadoes, lightning strikes, tidal waves and extreme temperatures hits in the final half-hour, the special effects are stunning. But the razzle-dazzle arrives too late, and is strangely unmoving.
• 25 Entertainment Weekly Entertainment Weekly A disastrous disaster movie that is actually quite low on the disasters to its own detriment.
• 25 TheWrap Robert Abele TheWrap Robert Abele The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.
• 20 The New York Times A.O. Scott The New York Times A.O. Scott Geostorm uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors.
• 20 The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore Big, dumb, and boring, it finds the cowriter of Independence Day hoping to start a directing career with the same playbook — but forgetting several rules of the game.
• 16 IndieWire David Ehrlich IndieWire David Ehrlich Geostorm is terrible entertainment, but it’s a remarkably effective window into Donald Trump’s soul.
• 10 Variety Peter Debruge Variety Peter Debruge The only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.
• See all 22 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for Geostorm

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