Dean Devlin
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Garcia’s bitsy performance reminded of Morgan Freeman, also playing POTUS, in 1998’s Deep Impact, a film – like Michael Bay’s Armageddon, released the same year – about an attempt to save the world by nuking a comet.
On the other hand, he has to serve up the mass destruction that everyone came to see. ( Armageddon had the same problem, solved via a shower of smaller meteors preceding the big one that Bruce Willis and company head out to blow up.)
The result isn't the end of the world, but it's certainly no Armageddon either.
What if Armageddon but weather?
And it reminded me of disaster movies more broadly: spectacles such as Volcano, Twister and Hard Rain, which fused environmental catastrophe with outrageous countermeasures.
Garcia’s bitsy performance reminded of Morgan Freeman, also playing POTUS, in 1998’s Deep Impact, a film – like Michael Bay’s Armageddon, released the same year – about an attempt to save the world by nuking a comet.
For the century prior, a filmmaker’s toolset was limited primarily to sight and sound, but 4DX assaults audiences with touch and smell as well, improving on such short-lived 1959/’60 gimmicks as “The Tingler” (an in-seat joy buzzer rigged to vibrate on cue) and Smell-O-Vision (which spritzed nauseating perfumes at pre-programmed intervals).
Ever since Irwin Allen passed from this mortal coil and took his terrifically tacky disaster films with him (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno), the only person capable of capturing his campy kitsch craziness in the wake of an Armageddon is Roland Emmerich.
Far more often, you get the incidental absurdity of vehicles like San Andreas or 2012 or any number of disaster “classics” going back to The Towering Inferno and other luminaries of the early era.
Ever since Irwin Allen passed from this mortal coil and took his terrifically tacky disaster films with him (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno), the only person capable of capturing his campy kitsch craziness in the wake of an Armageddon is Roland Emmerich.
Natural disaster titan Roland Emmerich lead the charge with films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, with Dean Devlin’s Geostorm acted as the peak example of natural disaster flicks gone bad.
Cue a whole lot of cut-rate CGI variously burning, freezing or drowning a few hundred over-emoting extras in a compendium of scenes that look uncannily like out-takes from Roland Emmerich's 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow.
Instead of trying to raise the movie barometer, Geostorm becomes a generic by-the-numbers calamity that mirrors many of the clichés from Roland Emmerich's (The Day After Tomorrow) disaster flicks.
Geostorm comes to us from the mind of director and co-writer Dean Devlin, long-time producer and writing partner of Roland Emmerich, and the pair have form for this sort of thing – see 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow as proof.
As it turns out, people who were leery of going to see it for that reason can rest easy because, despite the ad campaign to the contrary, the film is actually an utterly idiotic and oftentimes boring amalgamation of “ The Day After Tomorrow ,” “ San Andreas ,” “ Gravity ,” “The Manchurian Candidate” and the lesser Irwin Allen productions.
But whereas Emmerich seems to intuitively understand audiences go see movies like Indepedence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 to watch stuff blow up real good, Devlin has somehow lost that thread.
If you go into Greenland , the latest world-threatening disaster opus fronted by Gerard Butler, expecting the over-the-top scene-chomping chaos in the vein of Geostorm , you’ll find something quite different.
Well if we recall back to the before times (in this case 2017), Gerard Butler’s last “the sky is falling” genre film was “ Geostorm .”
Its elitist strain is reminiscent of the narrative for 2012 (2009) but is about as disaster-epic fluff as San Andreas (2015) and miles away better calibrated than another Butler flick, Geostorm (2017).
At first glance, Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland appears to be a spiritual sequel to Geostorm .
Butler is definitely the man for these kinds of roles, following action packed hits Angel Has Fallen and similarly apocalyptic themed Geostorm .
The last time Gerard Butler made a disaster movie, it was the atrocious Geostorm .
Far more often, you get the incidental absurdity of vehicles like San Andreas or 2012 or any number of disaster “classics” going back to The Towering Inferno and other luminaries of the early era.
Cue a whole lot of cut-rate CGI variously burning, freezing or drowning a few hundred over-emoting extras in a compendium of scenes that look uncannily like out-takes from Roland Emmerich's 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow.
From Independence Day and the brilliant 2012, no one understands the buoyant bombast of blowing up entire cities and sweeping away the aftermath via tidal waves and earthquakes better than this diabolical director.
Geostorm comes to us from the mind of director and co-writer Dean Devlin, long-time producer and writing partner of Roland Emmerich, and the pair have form for this sort of thing – see 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow as proof.
But whereas Emmerich seems to intuitively understand audiences go see movies like Indepedence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 to watch stuff blow up real good, Devlin has somehow lost that thread.
Usually, the characters in this sort of environmental disaster movie—think The Day After Tomorrow , 2012 , The Impossible , San Andreas —are concerned solely with surviving.
For starters, our hero is a loud, obnoxious jerk that few people would want to spend any amount of time with and I fear that Butler embodies that characteristic to a T—you spend the first half of the movie hoping that the film is going to pull an “ Executive Decision ” and knock him out early so that the real and actually likable hero can come in and save the day.
Imaginary fans of the imaginary Geostorm I will be disappointed to hear that the new picture has little to do with inland tsunamis and much to do with a clunky conspiracy plot knocked together from unused bits of The Manchurian Candidate and Team America: World Police.
As it turns out, people who were leery of going to see it for that reason can rest easy because, despite the ad campaign to the contrary, the film is actually an utterly idiotic and oftentimes boring amalgamation of “ The Day After Tomorrow ,” “ San Andreas ,” “ Gravity ,” “The Manchurian Candidate” and the lesser Irwin Allen productions.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
Directed by Michael Dougherty
influenced by Geostorm (2017)
Visuals
The only comparison I can make is with 2017’s Geostorm but that film had more of a spirit of fun about it than Godzilla: King of the Monsters and the visuals were fine.
Imaginary fans of the imaginary Geostorm I will be disappointed to hear that the new picture has little to do with inland tsunamis and much to do with a clunky conspiracy plot knocked together from unused bits of The Manchurian Candidate and Team America: World Police.
Usually, the characters in this sort of environmental disaster movie—think The Day After Tomorrow , 2012 , The Impossible , San Andreas —are concerned solely with surviving.
The 90-odd minutes before that are a different kind of terrible; the kind that makes you question your decision to travel 45 minutes to a theater in Bayonne, New Jersey at 9:45 on a Thursday night to watch the directorial debut of Dean Devlin , one half of the writing team that gave us Stargate, Independence Day, and the bad Godzilla with Matthew Broderick.
This is all stuff that you have seen better before—even the aforementioned bit of someone trying to outrun the cold comes directly from “The Day After Tomorrow,” a film that I am fairly certain that director/co-writer Dean Devlin is familiar with since it was directed by Roland Emmerich , the guy he collaborated with on “ Stargate ,” “Godzilla” and the “ Independence Day ” films.
It comes as no surprise that Geostorm's director is Emmerich's long-time collaborator, with the pair teaming up to work on both Independence Day outings and 1994's sci-fi action Stargate.
An inanely spectacular disaster movie — though perhaps “spectacularly inane” would be more apt — from the producer of “Godzilla” and “Independence Day,” Dean Devlin ’s “ Geostorm ” attempts to have it both ways, treating a gang of scientists who’ve “solved” the problem of global warming as its heroes while exploiting how little its target audience knows about the subject to supply an extreme-weather clip reel with contributions of variable quality from a dozen different visual effects houses.
The directorial debut of the man who, with Roland Emmerich, pretty much pioneered modern cinema’s appetite for destruction on a global scale with Independence Day and Godzilla, you’d imagine we’d be in safe hands, and that Devlin might even be able to bring a few new wrinkles.
It should come as no shock to discover that Dean Devlin, here making his directorial debut, served time as producer on Roland Emmerich films such as Independence Day and Godzilla .
This may be Devlin's debut as a director, but as a writer and producer on Independence Day and the woeful 1998 version of Godzilla, he's got form with cheesy special effects punctuated by even cheesier soap opera histrionics.
Over-the-top disaster pictures are the specialty of Dean Devlin, making his feature directorial debut after a long career of producing and writing movies like “Independence Day” and “Godzilla.”
The 90-odd minutes before that are a different kind of terrible; the kind that makes you question your decision to travel 45 minutes to a theater in Bayonne, New Jersey at 9:45 on a Thursday night to watch the directorial debut of Dean Devlin , one half of the writing team that gave us Stargate, Independence Day, and the bad Godzilla with Matthew Broderick.
Every so often, you get an Independence Day , a film which uses the cinematic language of bombast to speak to something oddly poignant about the power of unity.
I can only imagine what it was like working on the set of Dean Devlin’s Geostorm, but I like to think it involved Devlin, who after writing such 90s blockbusters as Independence Day and Godzilla, told cast and crew to gather round and hear stories about making movies in the 1990s.
Having written both Independence Day and its sequel , Dean Devlin—here directing his first theatrical feature, after two decades collaborating with Roland Emmerich—isn’t exactly known for his commitment to narrative logic.
It should come as no shock to discover that Dean Devlin, here making his directorial debut, served time as producer on Roland Emmerich films such as Independence Day and Godzilla.
An inanely spectacular disaster movie — though perhaps “spectacularly inane” would be more apt — from the producer of “Godzilla” and “Independence Day,” Dean Devlin’s “Geostorm” attempts to have it both ways, treating a gang of scientists who’ve “solved” the problem of global warming as its heroes while exploiting how little its target audience knows about the subject to supply an extreme-weather clip reel with contributions of variable quality from a dozen different visual effects houses.
Written, produced and directed by American Dean Devlin – best known for producing Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998) and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) – Geostorm has the potential to become an important cautionary tale.