Geostorm Review

There's five new wide releases opening this weekend and there's no way I'm getting to all of them, especially since I'm also trying to get in as many Halloween movie reviews in as I can. But I needed to get at least one of these new movies in. Perhaps two or three. We'll see what I'm feeling like. "The Snowman" was my most anticipated movie of the weekend and I would've seen that one first had it not been for news of the absolutely disastrous production that apparently destroyed that movie. And I really want to see "Only the Brave." I've never seen a Madea movie or really anything from Tyler Perry, so don't be looking for that one. Yet for some strange reason I ended up settling on "Geostorm." Why? I don't know. I think it's mostly due to curiosity as to how bad this movie could be. Sure, there was a small glimmer of hope that maybe there was entertainment to be had. I rather enjoyed "San Andreas" from the other year, so maybe this movie could be similar? Uh... no. Not so much. If you were like me and you watched the trailers and came away thinking this movie would be an awful piece of trash, you were right. Don't waste your time or money on this one. However, I was surprised that this was bad for different reasons than I was thinking.

You know how this movie was being advertised as an epic disaster movie that seemed like it was made 20 years too late? Yeah, put that on hold. For as much Geostorming as this movie promised, there's not very much Geostorming at all. The movie is a dark, serious, whodunit political thriller for most of the run time with some major storms thrown in as an afterthought, most of which you already saw in all the trailers. Thought you signed up for a self-aware, fun, disaster movie where you could sit back and shove popcorn in your face for two hours? Well, put that popcorn down and take a nap for the first hour of the movie. We get teased for a brief few moments with a frozen Afghanistan city followed by some sort of fiery, volcanic earthquake in Hong Kong. Outside that, we have to wait for the storms and I started to get bored as heck. Most of the movie is I think was trying to make some sort of painfully horrible political statement that you absolutely don't want when you go into a disaster movie and a whole ton of family drama between our two main characters in the movie, who are brothers, that I just didn't care about it. For some reason the writers and directors thought that the world wanted a super serious drama with lots of politics and I found that baffling.

So get this. The movie starts with an opening montage, narrated by the little girl in the movie, in which we learn that the year 2019 there were a whole ton of major natural disasters that destroyed many major cities. Right off the bat I was like, no. Don't do this. Don't make this a huge political drama. But I facepalmed really hard because that's exactly what they did. We all know that 2017 has seen some horrific natural disasters. Is this movie trying to say that these are just going to get worse and we need to do something about it? Most likely. So in this fictional not-to-distant future, they built these major satellites to control all of the natural disasters so that they didn't happen. Jump a few years into the future, somewhere in the early 2020's, and we immediately go back to politics. Because just about every politician in this movie is portrayed as an evil, malicious idiot with no brain in their head. Because they are so corrupt, they take all credit for this space station thing and try to manage it themselves, not listening to a single word that the main architect is saying about what actually needs to be done. Poor Gerard Butler is trying to valiantly fight his cause while his idiot brother is texting him to shut up and roll over dead. Yeah, they decide to fire him after that.

OK, I get it movie. All politicians are evil, crazy idiots who can't be trusted. Can we drop it? No. We're not going to. Instead, after the fiasco where Gerard Butler gets fired, we jump into the future even more, making me completely lose track of what year we're in, and we get a whodunit thriller because apparently someone has inserted some sort of virus into our space station thing that is causing it to malfunction and create these huge storms. If they don't figure out who is doing this and how to stop them, the world is going to experience a Geostorm, a super huge mega storm where natural disasters everywhere combine together and destroy the world. You know, the title of the movie. So three years after this younger brother ruined his older brother's life, they are forced to go back to him to help them stop this thing. In order to save the world, he accepts. So he goes up to outer space while the younger brother handles things down on earth and after much investigation, they have determined that their prime suspect is the President of the United States. Who, get this, is a democrat. Oh, so now we're saying that the democrats specifically are all evil and going to destroy the world? Holy cow. I'm not even a democrat and that infuriates me.

Are we ready for the storms, yet? Because I thought I signed up for a movie where I got to watch the world get destroyed by natural disasters. Not a long, boring, drawn out political thriller where democrats are portrayed as evil human beings. I wanted my storms! Which, in thinking about, seems like insensitive timing anyways. With how much damage various earthquakes, hurricanes and fires have already done to our world, is this really a movie that we needed right now? But whatever. If we ignore that point, we didn't get those storms anyways. Not on the level that I thought I would. Eventually after all this nonsense, the storms started. I'm normally not an advocate of pulling out your phones during a movie, but when these storms started, I just had to know what time it was. My showtime was 1:00. The movie is 1 hour, 49 minutes long. It was 2:25 when the storms started. Granted, we had 15-20 minutes of trailers beforehand, but even with that it means we were at least at the halfway point through the movie before we started to get what we thought we were going to get. But even with the storms starting, we only got like a total of 15 minutes of storms scattered throughout the second half of the movie as we focused more on wrapping up our political thriller.

This baffled me. Granted, the movie wasn't unwatchable like I thought it was going to be, but the fact that they tried to make this a super serious, political thriller/drama was really frustrating. If you go back to the 90's when these types of disaster movies were super popular, half of the reason why people loved them is that they were mostly all self-aware of what type of movie they were. Even if they didn't make sense and were super ridiculous, they were still really fun. Had this movie taken a more lighter, non-serious tone that owned up to what it was, I think it could've been a fun, throwback film, much like "San Andreas" was. Now I do have to give credit where credit is due. All of our cast tried their best to make this work. Thus we can't blame Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish or Alexandra Maria Lara for what went wrong. They owned up to their roles and did their best. The movie is also well shot with visual effects that are serviceable. This won't get any visual effects nominations at the Oscars, but it's not bad. And the score is your typically decent blockbuster score. But the script and the tone of the movie is just so awful and so off, that anything good that these people tried to do is wiped away.

Again, there's a lot of movies in theaters right now. There's holdovers from the last several weeks that deserve to be seen. Five new options this weekend. Oscar-bait films that are starting to surface. There's a lot for you to see. And that's not even mentioning what appears to be a very fun holiday season in November and December with movies such as "Thor: Ragnorok," "Justice League" and "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" heading our way. There's no reason for you to ever waste your time with "Geostorm." I write movie reviews. That's what I do. And often I'll purposely try to see movies like this so that you can be informed as to what not to see. I consider it taking one for the team so that you don't have to. Had this been a self-aware, lighthearted, fun disaster movie, I may have been able to recommend it as a guilty pleasure like I did "San Andreas," but this movie tries to be so serious and dramatic that it ruins all that potential. No one cares about overdone drama in a disaster movie. It's not fun. And it's certainly not fun watching an in-your-face political thriller about how evil the democratic party is. Due to good acting and serviceable technical aspects to the movie, I'm not going to give this a horrible score, but I'm certainly not going positive. "Geostorm" gets a 5/10.