GEOSTORM
Outlook: poor
released OUT NOW! 12a | 109 minutes Director dean devlin Cast Gerard Butler, Jim sturgess, abbie Cornish, andy Garcia
Given Dean Devlin’s history conjuring up some of the biggest and (commercially, at least) successful disaster movies of the ’90s and early ’00s as co-writer and producer alongside Roland Emmerich, you might imagine that he’d bring that experience to his first stint in the director’s chair. Yet instead of a fun, exciting ride that channels some of the madness he was known for, Geostorm is, while not a total disaster in the other sense of the word, a bland, patchworked, clichéd chore.
The plot should prime us for entertaining chaos: after the weather became increasingly devastating, the world banded together to create a network of satellites that can control climate conditions. Now, though, things are starting to go badly wrong – peoplecicles in Brazil, for example – and as scientist Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) and his White House staffer brother Max (Jim Sturgess) discover, it might not be an accident.
The idea that Butler has helped to build a structure in space might be the most far-fetched concept here, especially in a year that has seen huge, destructive storms. And the movie somehow wastes even his particular gifts by shunting him into orbit for most of the runtime. While he never punches a cloud (boo), he does get to partake in some fisticuffs (hooray). For the most part, though, the movie doesn’t indulge in the sort of winking outrageousness you might expect, and that’s more of a problem. Had it ended up a crazed, entertaining mess, it would work on a whole other level. As it is, this remains a missed opportunity, and you can see why its release has been delayed a couple of years. Stormy weather? More like a mild drizzle with the occasional monsoon of CGI. James White
A bland, patchworked, clichéd chore
The character of hacker Dana (Zazie Beetz) was added during two weeks of reshoots overseen by Danny Cannon.