“Geostorm” will probably be heralded as one of the worst movies of the year. Filled with bad CGI, insipidly stupid characters and a plot so confusing that hours of trying to dissect it afterwards will still lead one to failure, there’s no doubt “Geostorm” is a bad movie. It is a very, very bad movie. But it’s not the worst movie ever made. For all of its faults, against all odds, with absolutely nothing going for it and not a single character that is likable in even the loosest sense of the word, the third act of “Geostorm” is actually a really good time.
Dean Devlin directed and wrote “Geostorm” as his directorial debut, and it seems more likely he simply went with the first idea he had every single step of the way and never bothered to think through any moment of the film for longer than three seconds. The plot, which stems from the seemingly simple idea of weather-controlling satellites going haywire, quickly becomes mired in confusing government allegiances, unclear character motivations and an evil plan so nonsensical that it renders almost every single action taken by a character in the film to be meaningless.
The villain’s goal appears to be to use the weather satellites to unleash extreme weather upon countries and peoples he doesn’t like, but then he later initiates the self-destruct mechanism of the satellite control station, which if successful would render all the satellites worthless, returning the earth to a state of global warming-induced chaos. Why the villain would be okay dying with everyone else on earth when the satellites go down is not explained in the movie. How or why the villain is doing anything that he does is not explained in the movie. There’s an attempt to explain why the space station even has a self-destruct feature, but the explanation falls flat on its face and only serves to call out the idiotic story that is being told to the audience.
Gerard Butler (“London Has Fallen”), Jim Sturgess (“Kidnapping Freddy Heineken”) and Abbie Cornish (“6 Days”) all fall completely flat as the main characters of this film. Only Andy García (“Passengers”), as the U.S. President Andrew Palma, shows any signs of life, and it is the third act in which he begins to throw in one-liners that the movie finally becomes watchable. After an hour and a half of what essentially amounts to different people sitting in rooms, staring at computer screens and exclaiming, “Ahhhh — so that’s what’s going on!” the movie finally arrives at the actual storms, and a semblance of what could’ve been an entertaining movie begins to assert itself.
Make no mistake: the final act of “Geostorm” is still completely asinine. Butler, at one point, survives a giant spaceship explosion by wearing nothing more then a spacesuit. But unlike the rest of the movie, the last half hour is at least fun to watch. It’s dumb fun, rather than dumb drivel. It’s what the trailers and advertisements for “Geostorm” actually promised. At last, the movie finally acts like the garbage disaster flick that it is. At last we get to watch Andy García utter lines like, “I’m the goddamn President of the United States.” This is what we came for. Not for the hackneyed plot. Not for the terrible special effects. Not for the actors and not for the first-time director. For dumb punch lines and famous people running from falling buildings. “Geostorm” isn’t enough of a disaster to be worth the effort.