Geostorm (2017)

Several years after the “Dutch Boy” weather control system saved millions of people by stopping massive storms caused by global warming, a village in Afghanistan is flash frozen. The Dutch Boy system is at fault and the only person who can save the day is Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler), the troubled scientist who built the system but was fired by his more political younger brother Max (Jim Sturgess). Jake heads up to a space station and quickly discovers that the problem is sabotage while Max finds this out separately on Earth. The two brothers must now uncover the plot and who is behind it in order to save the planet from a “geostorm” which will kill millions if not billions.

While advertized purely as a standard disaster feature, Geostorm is more akin to a SyFy channel disaster film. The normal multiple intertwined tales of unrelated and semi-related characters all experiencing the disaster in different locations are gone. Instead we have one rebellious he-man scientist and his unlikely younger brother (props to mom and dad for somehow raising two kids at the same time who appear to have been born 20 years apart) looking at computer screens and talking about conspiracies. Sure, there’s multiple scenes of disastrous storms knocking down building and killing folks, but these happen far away from anyone we know. Cut one or two of those, and cheapen the effects a bit and this would be a SyFy channel film.

Which isn’t to say Geostorm is bad. Those made-for-TV films can be fun in a stupid kind of way, and the FX aren’t cheap. It is more or less what you’d expect as the directorial debut of Dean Devlin, the writer and producer of Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, and Independence Day: Resurgence, at least after bad test screenings caused a lot of reshoots with a different director. The film feels like it was constructed from scratch in editing, inventing a story to go with the footage they had on hand and covering the seams with those re-shoots. The big set pieces look like Independence Day, but who cares if there’s no human characters to follow as the streets rip open and the oceans freeze? I have to figure there were originally some major characters in India and Arabia who got cut, leaving us some nice shots of major mayhem that don’t matter.

But this is a disaster film, meaning things tend not to matter that much anyway, and that includes the plot. Geostorm is as silly as film gets, with a good deal of questionable storytelling, but “I didn’t find a deeply meaningful theme” and “At least half the movie is nonsense” are not legitimate complaints against the movie. The Poseidon Adventure was light on theme and Independence Day didn’t make a lot of sense either. Geostorm is what it is: mindless action with a lot of big things going boom. It’s been done better before, several times by Devlin, but it is passable in its subgenre. It needed more compelling characters (rumor has it Butler didn’t know his lines and that’s how it looks while watching) and a reason to care about those collapsing buildings, but if you ask little of it and don’t have to pay full price, you’ll have a good time.