Director: Dean Devlin
Year: 2017
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes
After global climate change leads to a string of catastrophic weather events, all world governments come together and decide to build a giant network of weather-controlling satellites to fix the problem. The device, known as 'Dutch Boy', works very well, but when something goes wrong, it starts to cause massive weather events far worse than anything it was built to prevent.
We can see it now. Writer/director Dean Devlin thought to himself, "you know how there are movies about tornadoes, floods, massive fires and huge snowstorms? What if, in the Hollywood tradition of "bigger is always better," we took all of those natural disasters and combined them into one film? How amazing would that be?! Oh, you want me to think of a name? I've got it! We'll call it....."Geostorm."
...yes, that's right, "Geostorm." What the fuck is a Geostorm you ask? Well, it's a made up fucking word, but in the context of the film, it's when a series of storms occur simultaneously all around the world, setting off a never-ending chain of catastrophic weather events that cannot be stopped. Luckily, we know down to the second of how long it will take once the disasters start, thanks to the giant countdown clock on a computer screen, so exactly how long our protagonists have to stop it from happening is no mystery.
To sum up the plot of this movie, in short, people have fucked up the planet to the point where catastrophic weather events are a regular occurrence. Now, the only one who can fix it is Gerard Butler and his giant weather-controlling machine known as DUTCH BOOOOIIIIII. Politicians don't like Butler's insubordinate attitude, so they make his little brother Jim Sturgess fire him. With Gerard Butler gone, several years later, something goes wrong, and apparently, the person who can fix it is the guy they fired. Ed Harris demands that Jim Sturgess hires Gerard Butler back, and everything goes tits up from there.
This movie is, without a doubt, one of the biggest, most gigantic messes of the year. The acting is next level awful, especially from Jim Sturgess. The story doesn't make a lick of sense. The dialogue is terrible. The CGI isn't up to par when it comes to the epic disaster scenes. It's painfully obvious director Dean Devlin kind of wanted this to be fun like "Armageddon," but he also wanted a more serious tone with social and moral repercussions like "Deep Impact." What we wind up with is a muddled mess that lands somewhere in between. And yet...
And yet....
This disaster film is such a, well, disaster, that it flings itself towards the bottom of our rating scale and hits it with such force that it actually bounces off the bottom and somehow, despite all logic and reason, heads
back up the scale. How is this possible? This movie such an epic failure that, about 20 minutes into its runtime, we started uncontrollably laughing and couldn't stop. Not laughing at any of the jokes or wit, because, let's be real, there's none of that to be found, but laughing at how bad this piece of crap was. There are certain buzz words and phrases used to make the project seem more serious. Whenever anyone uttered the word "Geostorm" or said the phrase "I'm locked out!," we just cracked the fuck up and roared with laughter. There is a car chase scene that happens during a lightning storm, and at the end of it, someone fires a bazooka. This caused uncontrollable laughter from both of us. This was much to the chagrin of the couple behind us in the theater, who seemed upset that we were laughing at what was supposed to be an intense scene, but we're not sure they could tell the difference since they were talking loudly the entire movie.
"Geostorm" is one of the funniest movies we've seen this year. That probably wasn't Dean Devlin's intent, but so what? We had a good time watching this movie, we cannot deny it. Don't get us wrong, this movie is atrocious. It will and should wind up on many worst of the worst lists of the year, so chances are, you won't enjoy it. However, we have seen so many soulless comedies this year that for us to have enjoyed something on this scale was a feat we didn't think was possible. We enjoyed ourselves because to make a movie that is a failure isn't hard, but to make a movie that is such an epic failure on every conceivable level takes some real talent.
My Rating: 4/10
BigJ's Rating: 4/10
IMDB's Rating: ~5.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ~10%
Do we recommend this movie: No.
