Title – Geostorm (2017)

Director – Dean Devlin (feature debut)

Cast – Gerard Butler, Abbie Cornish, Jim Sturgess, Daniel Wu, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris

Plot – When a collection of weather controlling global satellites run by a command centre known as Dutch Boy get hacked by an unknown source, Dutch Boy’s designer Jake Lawson (Butler) must venture up to space and find a way to fix the system before a catastrophic weather event known as a Geostorm destroys our planet.

“We built a system of satellites to stop natural disasters and someone is using it to create them”

Review by Eddie on 20/10/2017

To be perfectly honest, Geostorm isn’t as offensively bad as its terrible marketing campaign has made it out to be but debut feature director Dean Devlin (a man whose been involved in many big budget projects like Godzilla and Independence Day) fails to bring the excitement to this natural disaster film with a difference and those seeking thrills from mother nature wreaking havoc across the globe will be disappointed to find this film is more a whodunit time filler than a weather gone wild thriller.

There’s still carnage to be had as a futuristic weather control system known as “Dutch Boy” goes haywire, seemingly after some nefarious human interference and Dutch Boy brings some hellfire down on earth by melting parts of Hong Kong or freezing a lowly village in the middle-eastern desert but it’s not one of those natural disaster films like 2012 or even The Day After Tomorrow, where consistent CGI mayhem lays waiting at each turn.

The whole plotline of Geostorm is Hollywood cheese at its finest but these type of films can work when the tone and vibe of the film remains’ perfectly self-aware but Devlin’s film leans far too much towards the serious side of the business and zaps a lot of the potential dumb fun to be had from a story that is both highly unbelievable and utterly preposterous.

There’s the odd one-liner, the sparingly used touch of filmmaking pizazz and some decent eye-candy spectacles but overall Geostorm is a bland exercise in big-budget filmmaking, playing things so close to the rulebook that there’s never any real surprise to whose going to do what, whose the secret big bad or what cities we will see facing the wrath of Dutch Boy’s rogue weather systems and it really drains a lot of the potential energy the film could’ve bought to the table for an audience willing to accept the film for what it is.

In a film like Geostorm it was also important we get a colourful and enthusiastically up for it cast but led by the increasingly tired looking Gerard Butler as the gruff designer of Dutch Boy Jake Lawson, Jim “can’t find a good film to be in” Sturgess as Jake’s government employed brother Max, the embarrassed looking Aussie Abbie Cornish as secret agent Sarah Wilson and the doing it for the pay check casting of Ed Harris and Andy Garcia, Geostorm finds no memorable character amongst the generic and fails to unearth any performer willing to up the ante and take the film to the next level of pure popcorn entertainment.

Final Say –

Delivered in a po-faced manner, Geostorm is zapped of much of its potential to be a fun blockbuster ride and while it’s far from the worst big-budgeted event to be unleashed on our cinema screens this year, this is one natural disaster film that fails to make much of a splash in the entertainment stakes, making it an experience you’d do well to skip.

2 cats in a fridge out of 5