Review of Geostorm (2017) by Marcel A — 28 Oct 2017

In the prologue to Dean Devlin's directorial debut, the world is being ravaged by the effects of global warming, resulting in the construction of 'Dutch Boy': a phalanx of satellites designed to manipulate the earth's climate into compliance.

Three years later, chinks mysteriously begin to form in the planet's orbital armour, leading to a race against time to avoid a chain reaction of extreme weather patterns that would doom us all. Fun stuff, yes? One might be tempted to give long-time producer Devlin (who also co-wrote the screenplay) credit for even tackling the most pressing issue of our times in a mainsteam Hollywood film, but GEOSTORM is the kind of hackneyed disaster flick that chronicles humanity's "courageous" fight against the deadly effects of climate change without sparing a thought to its own complicity in its creation.

Fronted by Scottish meathead Gerard Butler (whose feeble attempt at an American accent makes his dialogue delivery sound even more hammy than usual), the film is an insipid hodgepodge of government conspiracies and familial tensions strung together with every genre cliché imaginable (including my personal favourite: the dreaded countdown timer that stops exactly one second before total disaster erupts).

Visually unremarkable, its scenes of major cities being swollen up by extreme weather fall depressingly flat; it's nothing we haven't already seen in past (and equally dumb) disaster yarns like 'Armageddon' and 'The Day After Tomorrow'.

Too unremarkable to qualify as a guilty pleasure, 'Geostorm' is itself a perfect storm of lazy plotting and bad acting that crashes to earth under the weight of its own stupidity.