Geostorm

Geostorm is the worst kind of action thriller.  It's the kind where something is constantly happening, and yet the whole enterprise feels dead inside.  Nobody looks like they had any fun making this one.  And for a movie that promises the spectacle of seeing major cities being attacked by extreme weather, we see very little of it here.  What we get instead is a mystery as to who is behind a plot to sabotage a weather control computer and control the world.  It should be easy for the audience to figure out the culprit.  Just look for the big name actor who has nothing to do for a majority of the movie.

The movie wants to be a throwback to those big budget disaster films that were so popular in the mid to late 90s.  The co-writer and director of this movie is Dean Devlin, who has some experience with this genre, having been partly responsible for Independence Day back in 1996.  Given the lifeless effort on display, he has either been to the genre well one time too many, or his heart is just no longer in it.  This is the kind of movie where we can see every cent that went into the expensive production, but none of it registers with us, simply because there is nothing to care about.  The plot, characters, suspense and one-liners are all old hat.  If you're going to fill your script with such bargain basement elements, you need to at least throw in some decent action to distract us from all of this.  In this case, the filmmakers forgot this necessary ingredient, so the film collapses in on itself.

As the film opens, a little girl narrator informs us that in 2019, global warming finally peaked with a string of extreme weather that wiped out most major cities.  The U.S. joined up with a variety of other countries to combat the threat with a massive satellite system called Dutch Boy.  Its purpose is to track extreme weather and destroy it before it can cause damage.  The Dutch Boy system was created by a hard-drinking scientist named Jake Lawson (a charmless and uncharismatic Gerard Butler), who originally ran the system from up in space, until he angered some Senate buffoons during a hearing, and he was fired from his own creation.  He was replaced by his younger brother Max (Jim Sturgess), with whom he has had a long-standing feud with.

Jump forward three years later, and Dutch Boy seems to be going through a series of malfunctions that is causing catastrophic weather down on Earth.  In one instance, a village in Afghanistan becomes covered in snow and ice, with all of the inhabitants frozen solid.  The President of the United States (Andy Garcia) wants Max to send someone up to the Dutch Boy satellite, and find out what happened.  Since Jake invented the thing, he seems to be the most logical choice to investigate.  Up on the satellite, Jake and a fellow scientist (Alexandra Maria Lara) figure out within minutes that the system has been sabotaged, and they begin a private investigation, since they fear someone on board the Dutch Boy is responsible for slipping a virus into the program.  Down on Earth, Max and his Secret Service agent fiance (Abbie Cornish) discover that someone high in the government is killing anyone who gets too close to uncovering the truth that the incidents of extreme weather (which includes hail the size of boulders in Tokyo and flash-freezing cold in Rio) is an act of someone involved with the project.

Geostorm is built around a world-wide threat that never resonates, frankly because the movie doesn't make the effort to get us involved.  Aside from a scene set in Hong Kong where the streets explode in fire, and a wild lightning storm that strikes Orlando, we get to see very little of the extreme weather's effect on the world.  In fact, most of the sequences of special effects destruction are so brief, they seem like snippets from the trailer.  We see people running from massive dust clouds and tornadoes, a little boy cowering in fear and clinging to his dog for support, a bikini-clad woman manage to outrun the cold, cars being flipped over by massive hunks of ice falling from the sky, and people getting roasted by the extreme heat, but it never stays on the screen long enough for it to make an impression.  It often feels overly edited, like the movie has been hacked to pieces, but the filmmakers wanted at least the tiniest portion of these effects shots to appear in the movie.  When you learn that the film has gone under massive reshoots and has missed several release dates, it all starts to make sense.

But more important than the fact that we don't care about the spectacle on display is that we also don't care about these people.  As the protagonist, Gerard Butler largely comes across someone you wouldn't want to sit next to during a bus trip, let alone watch a movie about him having to save the world.  He comes across as a loudmouth and a jerk, and no matter how many subplots the movie throws at him, such as his relationship with his daughter and his ex-wife as well as his estranged relationship with his brother, nothing gets us in his corner.  And let's face it, a movie like this is hard to take seriously to begin with, so it helps if the film can have some fun with itself.  This movie does try to have a sense of humor, but it's of the very lame one-liner variety.  When you consider that most of these jokes and gags occur while the main characters are staring death straight in the face, it seems all the more lame and forced.

There is simply nothing to Geostorm, even if you are a fan of big dumb special effects movies.  It's a lifeless, drab and dead in the water experience that looks like it had gobs of cash thrown at it in a vain attempt to liven it up.  When you consider how dead the movie is, it almost seems sad how much money (reportedly around $120 million) was spent on it.  That money could have gone to movies much more clever, exciting or funny than this.  This is as cynical a studio film as there has ever been.

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