Geostorm (2017)

A Disaster Film About a Disaster Film

Geostorm has one good idea and no idea what to do with it. After years of devastating storms, the nations of the world have built a vast network of satellites that can control the weather, stopping hurricanes and droughts before they start. When the system begins to malfunction, freezing tropical beaches and boiling city streets, somebody has to find out why before a chain of storms destroys the planet.

Dean Devlin, the producer and co-writer of Independence Day and Godzilla, made his directing debut with it, and it arrived in October 2017 after a long, troubled production. It lost a great deal of money, critics were almost unanimously hostile, and it has become a byword for bloated, forgettable blockbusters. I give it a 3. A few sequences are enjoyable in a silly way, and nothing else works.

Dutch Boy

The satellite network is called Dutch Boy, after the legend of the boy who put his finger in a dam, and it was designed by Jake Lawson, an engineer played by Gerard Butler. Lawson is brilliant, arrogant and impossible to work with, and in the opening scenes he’s fired after defying a Senate committee. His younger brother Max, played by Jim Sturgess, replaces him as head of the project.

Three years later, the system starts to go wrong. A village in Afghanistan freezes solid in the desert heat, and the streets of Hong Kong erupt in gas explosions. The government sends Jake back up to the International Climate Space Station to find the fault, and the two brothers, who can barely stand each other, have to work together from opposite ends of the solar system’s worst weather.

It’s a promising setup, and it’s the kind of premise that could support a clever science-fiction thriller. The film treats it instead as an excuse for disaster sequences, strung together with a conspiracy plot that anyone could guess from the cast list. The film never finds a way to make the weather itself frightening, because it never explains the rules well enough for the audience to feel the danger building.

The Disasters

The disaster scenes are the reason anyone watches Geostorm, and a few of them are entertaining. A beach in Rio de Janeiro freezes in seconds, catching sunbathers and joggers in a sudden wall of ice. Giant hailstones smash through Tokyo. A wave of extreme heat buckles the roads in Hong Kong, and a tidal wave sweeps through Dubai.

These sequences have the silly, spectacular pleasure of a Roland Emmerich film, and they’re competently made. The problem is that they have no emotional weight. The film cuts to each new catastrophe, shows a few seconds of destruction and cuts away, and the thousands of people presumably dying in each one never register as more than digital extras.

The finale, in which a series of storms threatens to combine into a global geostorm, is a blur of effects, and it’s hard to follow what’s happening or why it matters. Storms, explosions and countdown clocks pile up until the screen is full of noise, and the human story disappears inside the effects.

Gerard Butler in Space

Butler plays Jake as a gruff, stubborn genius who fixes things with his hands and trusts nobody, the same character he’s played in many action films. He’s likeable enough, and he throws himself into the silliness, but the script gives him almost nothing to work with beyond brotherly resentment and a daughter he misses.

His scenes on the space station follow a familiar pattern: a mysterious malfunction, a suspicious crew member, a death that looks like an accident, and a race against time. The station crew, led by a German commander played by Alexandra Maria Lara, are an international assortment of stock characters, and several of them exist only to be suspected and then cleared.

Butler’s charisma keeps these scenes watchable. He never looks embarrassed, even when the script asks him to explain orbital mechanics in a voice suited to a pub brawl. He’s a better actor than the role requires, and he seems to know it, playing every absurd line with total conviction.

The Conspiracy

On Earth, Max discovers that the malfunctions aren’t accidents. Someone inside the American government is sabotaging Dutch Boy and plans to use it as a weapon, and the trail leads to the highest levels of power. With the help of his girlfriend, a Secret Service agent played by Abbie Cornish, Max tries to expose the plot and protect the President, played by Andy García.

The conspiracy is obvious from the start. Ed Harris plays the Secretary of State, and anyone who has seen a political thriller will guess his role within minutes. The film’s attempts to create suspense around the villain’s identity fall flat, and the revelation, when it comes, lands with a shrug.

Sturgess and Cornish are appealing, a young couple trying to do the right thing in a city full of people who want them silenced, and their scenes have a little more energy than the space station plot. The climax, in which Max drives the President through a lightning storm in Orlando while assassins chase them, is silly and fun in a way the rest of the film rarely manages. Lightning strikes around the car like artillery, and for a few minutes the film finds the pulpy energy it needed all along.

The Troubled Production

Geostorm was shot in 2014 and originally scheduled for release in 2016. Test screenings went badly, and the studio brought in the veteran producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the writer Laeta Kalogridis to rework it. Large portions were reshot with a different director, Danny Cannon, and the release was delayed by more than a year.

The result shows the scars. Characters appear and disappear, subplots go nowhere, and the tone shifts between straight-faced disaster epic and knowing silliness. The budget, reported at well over a hundred million dollars before marketing, was not recovered at the box office, especially in the United States, where the film performed very poorly.

Geostorm is a textbook example of a film rescued in the edit and never quite saved. Every repair is visible, and none of them fixes the underlying problem. A new subplot can’t make an audience care about characters who were never given a reason to be cared about, and a new villain can’t create suspense in a story built around an obvious twist.

The Science

Geostorm’s science is nonsense, and the film doesn’t seem to care. Satellites don’t control weather, storms don’t combine into planet-destroying chain reactions, and the physics of the space station scenes would make an engineer wince. None of that would matter if the film were fun enough, and it isn’t. Plenty of great disaster films rest on silly science. They make up for it with characters and momentum.

The more interesting problem is that the film sidesteps the real issue it gestures toward. Climate change is the reason Dutch Boy exists, and the film’s premise is that humanity solved it with technology. The idea that a single machine could fix the weather, with the only danger being someone misusing it, is a strangely comforting fantasy for a film supposedly about catastrophe.

A braver film might have asked what it would mean to hand the planet’s weather to a single machine run by a few governments, and who would decide where the rain falls. Geostorm raises that question in its premise and then forgets it, preferring a traitor with a remote control to any real debate about power, responsibility or the climate.

What Almost Works

There are pleasures here for viewers in the right mood. The frozen beach in Rio is a striking image, the car chase through the Orlando storm is lively, and Butler, Sturgess and García seem to be enjoying themselves. As a background film on a lazy afternoon, it passes the time without demanding much attention.

It also has a certain innocence. It’s not cynical or cruel, and its message about brothers learning to trust each other and nations learning to cooperate is sincere. It lacks the wit, invention and craft to make any of it land. Sincerity is a virtue in a disaster film, and on its own it isn’t enough.

Compared With Its Ancestors

Geostorm belongs to the tradition of big-budget disaster films that Devlin helped create with Roland Emmerich on Independence Day. The best of those films work because they combine spectacle with memorable characters, humour and a sense of scale that makes the audience feel the stakes. The people in them are types, but vivid ones, and the audience wants them to survive.

Independence Day had Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and a genuinely thrilling sense of a world in danger. Geostorm has the spectacle without the characters, the scale without the fear and the jokes without the wit. It’s a copy of a copy, and it proves how quickly the formula falls apart when its heart is missing.

Devlin clearly loves the genre, and his affection shows in the film’s sincerity and its willingness to go big. He simply never found the story to carry it, and the studio’s interventions made things worse. Geostorm ended up a warning about what happens when a franchise formula is applied without the elements that made it work in the first place.

Where It Collapses

The script is weak, the villain is obvious, the characters are thin, the science is absurd and the reshoots left the story in pieces. The disaster sequences are the only reason to watch, and they’re brief and emotionally empty. Critics were right to savage it. Few films of its budget have received such uniformly poor reviews.

It’s a 3. Watch it only if you love disaster films and have seen all the good ones, or if you want to see a beach freeze in two seconds. Otherwise, rewatch Independence Day. It does everything Geostorm tries to do and does it with far more wit.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Geostorm

It’s a 3, a bloated, confused disaster film with a good premise, a troubled production and a handful of fun effects shots. Watch it only if you’re a devoted fan of the genre, and even then, keep your expectations very low.

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