UK Edition
Review
Geostorm, review: Gerard Butler plays a meteorologist in this appalling action flop
Dir: Dean Devlin; Starring: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Robert Sheehan, Ed Harris, Andy Garcia; 12A cert, 109 min
In The Day After Tomorrow, there was no arguing with climate change: when a modern-day ice age blew in, accompanied by catastrophic flash floods and typhoons, all its protagonists could do was take cover, light fires, and hope.
Geostorm plays things a little differently. In Dean Devlin’s film, which stars Gerard Butler as the world’s leading meteorologist, when the weather misbehaves, you bomb the weather into submission.
Here’s how it works. Butler’s Jake Lawson is the head of a global initiative called "Dutch Boy", for its supposed thumb-in-the-dam pragmatism: whenever threatening weather starts to brew, it’s immediately blasted by a network of enormous lasers mounted on satellites, and civilisation rolls on untroubled. Thanks, science!
Except one day, the system malfunctions, and whips up a cold snaps that flash-freezes an entire desert village in seconds. So it’s up to Jake to pay a visit to Dutch Boy’s command centre, on a space station, and work out what’s afoot.
The poster for Geostorm shows a burly-looking man (presumably Butler) with his back to the camera, cradling a young girl while they both watch a tidal wave crashing towards them through the middle of a city. This scene doesn’t actually appear in the movie.
The closest is probably when a young bikini-clad Brazilian woman flees a freezing wind that batters Copacabana beach and turns her boyfriend and countless others into blue-grey waxworks, before she is, I think, squashed by a falling passenger jet.
Butler’s character does have a 13-year-old daughter (Talitha Bateman), but they’re barely on screen together, since he spends the vast majority of the film up on the space station, solving the mystery of the malfunctioning satellites.
Two drawbacks to this arrangement quickly arise. Firstly, watching Gerard Butler solve a whodunit is like watching the PG Tips chimpanzees move a piano downstairs: a kind of teeth-baring, flea-picking burlesque of recognisable human behaviour that’s funny for a while until you start to worry about the ethics of it.
Secondly, since Jake is roughly 20,000 miles above the mayhem unfolding on Earth, he doesn’t look much like a hero, even when he’s running around the place with Commander Fassbinder (Alexandra Maria Lara), his one trustworthy ally in orbit.
All terra firma heroism is carried out by Jim Sturgess, who plays Jake’s semi-estranged younger brother Max, and Abbie Cornish, who plays Max’s girlfriend Sarah, a presidential bodyguard: the meteorological chaos turns out to be a conspiracy which goes right to the top, as these things always do.
Much is made in the script of Jake and Max’s supposedly bristly fraternal relationship, but on screen, Butler and Sturgess have all the chemistry of two strangers standing at a baggage carousel.
Geostorm was filmed in late 2014 and early 2015, but underwent significant reshoots in December of 2016 – some roles were recast, new characters were added – after the film scored poorly in test screenings, and there’s a gnawing, deadening sense in the finished item that nothing quite matches up.
Some spectacular or imaginative set-pieces would help make amends for the above, but Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes. (First-time director Devlin was a writer and producer on Independence Day and the 1998 Godzilla remake.)
That particular sequence, which involves Sarah and Max driving the president (Andy Garcia) through a thunderstorm in a stolen taxi, may be the single ugliest action sequence I’ve ever seen.
I’d have to watch Geostorm again to be sure, but that’s not going to happen, so let’s just take it as read.