Geostorm (2017) Review!!!

Synopsis – When the network of satellites designed to control the global climate starts to attack Earth, it’s a race against the clock to uncover the real threat before a worldwide Geostorm wipes out everything and everyone.

My Take – Right from the film’s first trailer, it was quite evident that this Warner Bros. production was trying hard knockoff of director Roland Emmerich signature style and with the obvious release date in the downside of October in hopes of making a quick buck until Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League & Star Wars: The Last Jedi kick in and shatter box office records. Personally I don’t mind global disaster films no matter how cheesy the films usually tend to be, mainly as I have to do nothing but just sit back and enjoy the large scale cinematic disaster. However, after viewing this film, I am actually way more disappointed than I thought I would be. 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. However, despite the promise of major cataclysm, this film is surprisingly bare of storm sequences for much of the film, as many of these scenes are in the background, with only a few having that thrilling, on the seat edge moments. Marking the directorial debut of writer/producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day, its terrible sequel, 1998’s Godzilla, The Patriot and Stargate), the film seems confused about what genre it wants to fit in. On one hand, it takes it too seriously by bringing in a political conspiracy angle, which never works as it’s just too predictable and on the other hand it’s trying to serve up the mass destruction, that everyone came to see, with a race against the clock situation thrown in. Most importantly, the so called loud, big, and dumb visual effects action sequences, have been created by mostly bad and noticeable CGI, hereby making this film neither entertaining or exciting. Seriously, even 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow looked better!

Taking place in the near future, the story follows Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler), a snappish & arrogant engineer, who led the designing & building of a weather-control satellite system known as Dutchboy, which was sanctioned by most of Earth’s top nations in order to control the rising number of natural disasters around the world. However due to his constant incorrigibly roguish demeanor towards U.S.A’s senate & constant insubordination, Jake is fired by his younger brother Max (Jim Sturgess), a high-ranking State Department official & overtakes as the in charge of Dutchboy. Nonetheless, three years after it has goes online, malfunctions begin to appear, leading to sudden shift in temperatures in some countries around the world and a minor loss of life, & in order to avoid a national embarrassment for the country, Max is ordered by the U.S. President Palma (Andy Garcia) to find someone to quietly repair the damage before the international hand off takes place in the next few days. But when Max’s former college mate Cheng (Daniel Wu) hints at conspiracy led by someone high up in the U.S. government, Jake and Max are left with no choice but to keep their differences aside & seek the help of Ute Fassbinder (Alexandra Maria Lara), the current lead scientist on the space station, Leonard Dekkom (Ed Harris), the Secretary of State, Dana (Zazie Beetz), an IT expert and Sarah (Abbie Cornish), his clandestine Secret Service fiancée to help unearth Dutchboy’s secrets before the planet is overwhelmed by the titular cataclysm. Director Devlin and his co-writer Paul Guyot cram the first hour with characters and complications, like Jake’s estranged relationship with his brother Max & his relationship with a daughter (Talitha Eliana Bateman), who’s mostly in the story to precociously analyze his character, and 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 has only the tiniest hint of story functions, but at least give the film a more diverse face. The film tries its best to throw you off the trail to the culprits, but the trailers and obvious foreshadowing will give you the answer within the first 30 minutes. In addition, the fate of other characters is not surprising at all, mostly because they figure things out minutes within the film. Yes, also the political thriller stuff makes no sense. Had it not been for the visuals and exciting pace, the story would have been drab and put me to sleep. I’ll admit there was a nice little uncertain moment, reminiscent of a few other flicks you are certain to remember, yet, when the final plan is revealed, it’s a pretty stupid one. Even the destruction, the ostensible reason for the film’s whole existence, is surprisingly dull.

There are too few scenes and too many murky effects. Hell, all the best stuff is in the trailer! Say what you want about director Roland Emmerich – and I do – but at least his disaster films make it look like the disaster is real. Here, director Devlin, a man who worked on a few Emmerich projects, helms the disaster sequences with a remarkable lack of panache, fusing a derivative assemblage of massive tidal waves and tornadoes with some strikingly poor CGI. To complain about the science in a film 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. The film’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 & even 2012 had more weight and gravitas, and were more convincing; there’s a glib feeling of frantic speed to this film’s disaster sequences that make them feel a bit like the hilariously elaborate cosmic deathtraps. Some stand out moments includes a frozen plane plummeting out of the sky, the space station disaster and the exploding gas lines! Unfortunately many of these scenes we have already seen in previous disaster flicks & lacks some originality. It’s also weird to see a smart car outrun a giant earth quake with the ground breaking away from the heat wave & avoiding buildings that are being knocked down like dominos, plus seeing all these explosions is filled with obvious CGI that looked too fake, a similar scene in director Emmrich‘s 2012 with a limo driving away from all the chaos was way more convincing. In the final stages the film just jump from country to county, disaster to disaster with little time to focus on any particular moment. A key plot device is a timer counting down to the titular catastrophe, and while it ticks giant hail begins pummeling Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro is subject to a freeze wave, Orlando is peppered with a barrage of lightning, Mumbai is run over by a tornado swarm & Dubai is slammed with a massive tsunami, we have the family situations, emotional moments, mandatory fists, guns and car chases, narrow escapes and cheesy one-liners (some cringe worthy), this is what we wanted right? The film also raises the bar for being inept, for example, how we often follow one non-protagonist character during the disaster in hopes of seeing this person make it out alive? And, at the end, we are either relieved or devastated based on the result? Well, here director Devlin does this a couple of times – once, eye-rolling, with a dog. One of those times, we don’t get the cathartic follow-up, as we watch a woman run away from a tidal wave, dodging debris and even an airplane that falls out of the sky, but we never find out if she survived or not. The film has an interesting cast – Ed Harris, Andy Garcia, Gerard Butler, Abbie Cornish, Jim Sturgess, Daniel Wu and Alexandra Maria Lara, but somehow each one of them seem least interested in the proceedings & just sleep walk through the whole film, save, Zazie Beetz! As a tech wizard who helps Max, Beetz is fun to watch in a stock role, mainly as she plays it as if she’s still on FX’s Atlanta, providing a dose of brazen wit and personality that’s otherwise sorely lacking in rest of the characters. On the whole, ‘Geostorm’ is a flat, overstuffed, comically lousy disaster film that even doesn’t do a particularly convincing job of aggressively displaying expensive digital effects.