“The pacing and general structure of Geostorm allowed for a quick death, but it was far from painless.”

Last night, on a whim, I decided to go and see Geostorm. Let’s just say that this is the exact reason I don’t usually do things ‘on a whim’. Geostorm is a film that takes place in the near-future, and follows a society who has built a satellite that can control the weather. Well shit goes down when this satellite starts to malfunction, and our “charismatic” lead has to figure out if it is just a technological failure or if it is intentional.

Where do I start when talking about Geostorm? First of all, the name and all of the marketing is borderline false advertisement. Sure all of the scenes that are in the trailers are in the film, but to me this movie was supposed to be about numerous natural disasters that occur simultaneously and destroy things on a catastrophic level. It’s not about that at all. We don’t even get to see the first “storm” until more than halfway into the film, and there isn’t even a “Geostorm”. It was my understanding that the storms would be the plot of this film, but it turns out they were only the climax. So what filled the time before the storms? Not much worth mentioning. Geostorm is essentially a shitty mystery instead of a shitty action film. The entire first half of Geostorm is reserved for Jake (Gerard Butler) going into space and “investigating” what went wrong with the satellite. What we get during this section is not only a great look at how two-dimensional the characters and performances are, but also this fucking weird, pseudo-haunted house ride wherein things continuously go wrong for no reason. Using a robot arm to move a giant pice of machinery? The robot arm malfunctions almost killing you. Jet-packing around in space? Your jet-pack malfunctions almost killing you. Drinking a glass of water? Watch out, that glass can be hacked because it’s the future. Everything that happens in Geostorm is so predictable, and it’s even worse because you put up with it hoping that the next scene will be full of glorious destruction the likes of which would make Roland Emmerich cream his jeans. But that destruction never comes; so neither does Roland.

Well, thats not expressly true. The storms do show up, but when they do you end up wishing they hadn’t. I didn’t think it was possible for Geostorm to get any more boring, but as soon as those natural disasters started occurring I was proven wrong. I’m not sure exactly how a giant wall of water destroying Dubai or lighting destroying Florida could be boring, but Geostorm found a way to make it so. And to top this off, the CGI wasn’t even good enough to save these sequences. Most of what you would see in Geostorm looked like a “computer simulation” that you would see in movies from the 90’s. That’s not to say there weren’t moments of pretty good CGI, but can you guess where those were? That’s right, only in the scenes that were featured in the trailers. So once again I fall back to my point of this movie being false advertising. Alright so I hated the plot of the film, and the actions scenes and effects weren’t enough to save it; but what about the rest? Well Geostorm had a lot of comedy in its script. This comedy presented itself in two ways: intentional, and unintentional. But really if you want to get into the nitty-gritty, the comedy was really only present when it was unintentional. The “jokes” that were written for Geostorm made me want to die. Most of them just got a sigh from me, but others got physical reactions as well (like me clenching my fists really hard so that I wouldn’t scream). Luckily there were some moments of comedy, but those only came when the film tried to be serious. Something else that annoyed me in Geostorm were the abundance of plot-holes present in the film. I’m not going to go through all of them because that would take years, but the big one that bothered me was the inclusion of guns on a spaceship. Not only were there guns on the spaceship (which is dangerous), but it wasn’t just the bad guys that had them. There is a scene where a “good guy” has a gun, he threatens our main character with his boss standing right next to him, and nobody cares that he has a gun. Why wouldn’t you even mention the fact that puncturing this spaceship would kill everyone? Why would bring a gun to space in the first place? How did you get a gun to space? Do they not check for guns before you get on the spaceship? Is there some kind of arms dealer who lives in an alley on the spaceship? What the fuck is going on in this movie?! And to make matters even worse all of the performances in Geostorm were fucking awful. I’m not kidding when I say that cardboard cutouts would have been more charismatic than what we got. The manufactured feelings were the worst parts of this, because it was kind of like robots trying to emulate humans. I mean even Blade Runner 2049 had a more human cast, and half of them were literally robots. The one saving grace about Geostorm, and it is the only one, is that the pacing in the film was done very well. Everything flowed nicely, and there was very little lag between plot points (however bland they were). The pacing and general structure of Geostorm allowed for a quick death, but it was far from painless.

Overall Geostorm is not a good movie. I went into it expecting a fun disaster film, but what I got was a shitty mystery with a hint of disaster at the end. The performances are wooden, the effects are on-par with terrible 90’s movies, and the plot has so many holes you could use it as a colander. In short, don’t go see Geostorm. Just let it die in peace.

I give Geostorm a D