Geostorm (2017)
Directed by Dean Devlin
After an unprecedented series of natural disasters threatened the planet, the world's leaders came together to create an intricate network of satellites to control the global climate and keep everyone safe. But now, something has gone wrong: the system built to protect Earth is attacking it, and it becomes a race against the clock to uncover the real threat before a worldwide geostorm wipes out everything and everyone along with it.
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15 films that influenced Geostorm
What critics say influenced Geostorm
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).
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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.
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.
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.
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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.