Geostorm is amazing.
Amazing in that it’s completely tone-deaf and fails on every conceivable level. It has such a lack of understand of what it’s doing that it straddles at least three different genres and gets every single one of them wrong. Family drama? WRONG! Science Fiction action? WRONG! Empty-headed disaster movie? WRONG!
The story is this: Gerald Butler, looking odd and swollen like he’s recovering from a really bad sunburn hidden by his makeup, is a super scientist which means, in the tried and true cliche, he’s really smart and he’s an jerk who thumbs his nose at authority. This jerk has created a weather modification system in orbit made of millions of satellites that alters the weather and saves us all from climate change which is good, but when his brother suddenly becomes his commanding officer, he snubs his nose at him too creating a rift that looks like it won’t be changed until some hack copies the end of the third act from Armageddon.
Years later and the weather modification system goes wild and starts to create something called a Geostorm that totally The Day After Tomorrows up the Middle East and Backdrafts up Hong Kong. Now, with the swollen jerkface going back up to the space station to fix things, the asshole brother discovers that there is a conspiracy to turn the satellites into a weapon to wipe out all of the undesirables off the planet and the president might be in on it… which we know that’s not the case since they gave that away in the marketing.
Come on, if Ed Harris is in a movie without a clear villain, it’s him.
Man, what does it say about America that an American plot to destroy all of America’s enemies targets Florida. You people are on notice, so stop messing everything up!
Okay, as I said, this movie is close to the most elegant failure I’ve ever seen in my life. It throws everything it can to a wall to see what will stick without realizing that the wall is made of teflon. This is an embarrassing failure where the action, the intrigue, and even the dialogue never works. There isn’t a single scene in this movie that does! Literally none!
Even the disaster scenes of weather-related destruction are snoozers, done before in other movies and done better in other movies and not helped by the fact that it’s about as interesting as watching flies hit a windshield since we’re not remotely interested or invested in what’s happening to these running, screaming pixels that can’t even be called characters.
That movie poster with Gerald Butler holding his little girl as a tidal wave bears down in them? IT’S A LIE! They’re never in the middle of the weather! Not once!
This movie is pee in the wind. The millions spent on it could have been spent on humanitarian projects.
Jason Gaston 