Geostorm (Dir. Dean Devlin, 1h 49m)

Around an hour into Dean Devlin's hokey disaster-cum-thriller film, at around the point where a suspiciously Ellen McLain-ish voice merrily announces first the destruction of the entire planet via the titular Geostorm in a mere hour and a half, then the self-destruction of the ISS, I was forcibly reminded of a certain other line from another, far more accomplished disaster-thriller. You do plan, I wondered to myself, paraphrasing Jeff Goldblum, to have disasters in your disaster movie. Geostorm, however, had other ideas, merrily rumbling on for the next forty minutes with little to show for it. When it inevitably ends with a messy Aesop, a half-assed knot of its various plot threads and everyone, relatively speaking, back to where they were at the beginning of the film, with surprisingly little disaster-ing to show for it, I began to wonder: is the Disaster Movie dead?


Geostorm is just the most recent in a conveyor-belt of brain-lite, CGI-heavy blockbusters, stretching back over the last twenty-five years to Independence Day-an admittedly spectacular, and, through its co-stars of height-of-his-popularity Will Smith and height-of-his-popularity Jeff Goldblum, we at least felt attached to our main characters, gave a damn about their continuing survival. Roland Emerich, together with most of Hollywood, has spent the last twenty or so years trying to recapture that success, to little result, from the execrable American take on stompy Japanese suit hero, Godzilla, to a worldwide ice storm (The Day After Tomorrow), to volcanoes in downtown Los Angeles (uh, Volcano) to the Mayan Long Count (the particularly daft 2012). Geostorm, strangely, feels like a mix of all of them (with the possible exception of Godzilla)

We begin with that beloved tool of this kind of movie-stock footage of a lot of weather happening. It's quite concerning that much of this real weather is not only more dramatic but, due to the frankly terrible effects in some sections of the film (the tidal wave that destroys most of Manhattan a few seconds later, and the killer heatwave that decimates Spain frankly look like excerpts from a Playstation One game), more real than much of the geostorm itself. The ropey effects, sadly, are not restricted to this opening scene, and at many points, both on earth and on the ISS, there's a noted artificiality to everything-it comes and goes, but for a film with a budget of $120 million, which had to undergo re-shoots to make it watchable, it's laughably cheap.

The other major problem with the entire disaster part of Geostorm is that the film spends so little time being one, that by the time it has to be one it's rather forgotten what to do. There's a decent couple of scenes where Dubai is menaced by a huge wave, that, in probably the film's best single shot, crashes in over the desert, but the film cuts away. Repeatedly. It does this with not one but four scenes (a somewhat dull menacing of Delhi by dusty tornadoes, Moscow getting warmed to death and a frankly ridiculous scene where Rio is frozen, except for one woman who outruns her icy doom, including falling seagulls and an entire plane). Whilst each is decently composed, the choppy editing, and focusing upon three otherwise anonymous characters, one in each location, in the attempt to create some-any-tension or threat, fatally undermines the film.

We're told repeatedly that the geostorm is practically an Armageddon but given little to no sense of its destructive power-given that the MacGuffin for all this weather-related chaos is a rogue satellite system, intended to bring the climate back under control, this film could have been so much more inventive. A tornado of super-heated air, setting everything in its path on fire? A giant killer wave that then freezes solid? Some volcanoes? Lighting-shooting twisters? What we get is some sub-par 2012/Day After Tomorrow b-roll effects, with only the destruction of St Basil's particularly whetting any disaster movie fan's appetite.
The fact that the poster for this film shows Gerard Butler's absent space engineer cradling his (surprisingly precocious daughter, as a wave barrels down on them, in a scene that doesn't even happen in the movie, (in sharp comparison to the "Destroy-a-monument"-fest that usually accompanies posters and DVDs for this sort of film) indicates just how dis-interested this film is in the destruction it should be wreaking.

What this film is interested in is a slow moving conspiracy thriller. Not a very good one-Ed Harris's Chief of Staff is a transparently awful villain, who ratchets up from misguided patriot to flat-out crazy within a single scene,  one-part of Channel 4's Misfits is his "Tea and Crumpets British" British henchman in space, and the conspiracy, in short, is to use the Geostorm to wind the clock back to the end of the Second World War, reinstate America as the world's leading power, and start again. I would say this was a biting attack on Trump's MAGA, but that would require this film to actually have the concept of political satire. As a result, Butler, his brother, played by Jim Sturgess, his Secret Service girlfriend, and the rest, are left to play catchup, both in space and on Earth, in order to find out what is making the climatic satellite, called "Dutch Boy", go wrong, reboot it, unmask the conspiracy, and fix their relationship as brothers.

This film is a mess. It feels, as I mentioned to fellow theatre goers, like every disaster movie of the last decade, at once, badly. It's an attention -deficit disaster movie, flicking back and forth between the thriller it so badly wants to be, the family drama it thinks it needs to be, and the disaster movie it has to be. It's visually boring, not a single character, apart from Henry Wu's quickly-offed computer technician, is at all likable, and the disasters themselves are almost an afterthought, the film  almost ashamed of them. Above everything else, Geostorm is stupid. Painfully, headache inducingly, stupid, from its plot hole riddled conspiracy thriller to its frankly laughable attempt to be green-positive, to almost every single line that the film gobs up, culminating in the immortally, spectacularly stupid line
"I'm the goddamned President of the United States"
Honestly, a better director would have suggested that the ISS's AI itself begins to act like a god, looks at the mess we've made of the planet, and decide we don't deserve to exist, thus unleashing the geostorm-this, however, would be far too smart, far too thought-provoking, and altogether too fun for this dull, predictable, stupid grind. If this is the shape of disaster movies to come, then I hope a hurricane, tidal wave, avalanche, or wrath of god (or gods) quickly flattens whoever churns these things out.

Rating: Avoid.