At long last...GEOSTORM - Review Thread
Oct 25, 2017 12:12:03 GMT -5
Neverending and thebtskink like this
Post by Doomsday on Oct 25, 2017 12:12:03 GMT -5
Geostorm
What's there to say about Geostorm? Why even delve into it and give it attention it doesn't deserve? Where would you even begin? I may not know the answer to some of those questions but I do know this; Geostorm represents everything that's wrong with the state of Hollywood to the most extreme degree. It's a movie that should have been stopped before even being given a green light. It's a movie with a huge production budget but at no point could anybody working on the film have thought that this was going to be anything but a bad film. I want to know at what point Warner Bros. thought this was going to be a legitimate, quality money maker and when the gear shifted to them going '....oh no.' There's no way anyone greenlighting this thing could have thought people would want to see it. It's impossible to even fathom. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. delivers yet again with another huge budget bomb that's making them cling to Justice League that much more tightly.
The story is simple; in 2019 thanks to climate change (but never referred to as climate change) the weather has turned into an ecological nightmare and millions of people are killed by heatwaves, real waves, etc. The humans band together and several countries led by America and China (these references have nothing to do with the film marketplace I'm sure) build a giant satellite system and space station that controls the weather. We're expected to believe that Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is the scientist who built the entire thing from the bottom up so naturally when things go wrong and cities start to be destroyed by the satellite he's the first one sent up to fix it. Unfortunately he's also reporting to his brother who happens to be the White House staffer who also fired him. Drama, right? Anyways, we find out that it's actually hackers who are turning the weather machine into a series of James Bond space lasers and only Lawson can save the day.
This movie almost feels like it was written by a computer algorithm. People put data into a program and told it that audiences like 'explosions, cheap comedy and some family strife.' They put a few movies in for reference, namely any movie by Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, and after about 10 seconds the computer spit out Geostorm, a movie that took the already stupid and tired elements of the Emmerich/Bay movies and kicked them down about 5 more levels. Lawson's character is as cookie-cutter as they come, a single dad/brilliant scientist now reduced to fixing car engines. And would you look at that, his daughter likes fixing car engines too! But don't get ahead of yourselves, they have a rough relationship because she says things like 'you aren't the most dependable person' and 'you never keep your word.' No context is given, we're just meant to believe it. Thanks, computer-generated script! Don't worry, he saves the day but not before the space station goes into its self-destruct sequence (why do machines even have this?). Everyone on board rushes onto shuttles to escape but not Lawson, he has to stay to 'reboot the satellites.' Sounds like a pretty crummy reason to sacrifice yourself. They try to explain how everything 'must be done manually' but it's 2019, you can't do things remotely? Well I guess you can self-destruct remotely but you can only disable that manually which makes about as much sense as having satellite kill codes on the President but the kill codes have to be input manually from a device on the satellite. Whatever. This movie is uninspired, forgettable and a symptom of just how out of touch Hollywood is with the mainstream. I remember Chris Nolan's 'state of cinema' write-up a couple years back. I believe it was Steven Spielberg who said that we're going to see studios release big, bloated movies that are going to bomb and that's what's going to shake up the industry. Let's hope it does because I don't know how many more Geostorms I can tolerate seeing release while other better scripts sit there unproduced.
On a personal level, it's been well over a year since I was a part of the Geostorm crew but the movie (in)famously went through some reshoots last winter with a new director (Warner Bros. fired Dean Devlin but he's still credited as Director). The reshoots did next to nothing to improve the quality of the overall film and it's almost funny because you can clearly tell which scenes Butler and Co. filmed in 2014 and which ones were filmed almost 3 years later. Par for the course for this movie.
What's there to say about Geostorm? Why even delve into it and give it attention it doesn't deserve? Where would you even begin? I may not know the answer to some of those questions but I do know this; Geostorm represents everything that's wrong with the state of Hollywood to the most extreme degree. It's a movie that should have been stopped before even being given a green light. It's a movie with a huge production budget but at no point could anybody working on the film have thought that this was going to be anything but a bad film. I want to know at what point Warner Bros. thought this was going to be a legitimate, quality money maker and when the gear shifted to them going '....oh no.' There's no way anyone greenlighting this thing could have thought people would want to see it. It's impossible to even fathom. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. delivers yet again with another huge budget bomb that's making them cling to Justice League that much more tightly.
The story is simple; in 2019 thanks to climate change (but never referred to as climate change) the weather has turned into an ecological nightmare and millions of people are killed by heatwaves, real waves, etc. The humans band together and several countries led by America and China (these references have nothing to do with the film marketplace I'm sure) build a giant satellite system and space station that controls the weather. We're expected to believe that Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is the scientist who built the entire thing from the bottom up so naturally when things go wrong and cities start to be destroyed by the satellite he's the first one sent up to fix it. Unfortunately he's also reporting to his brother who happens to be the White House staffer who also fired him. Drama, right? Anyways, we find out that it's actually hackers who are turning the weather machine into a series of James Bond space lasers and only Lawson can save the day.
This movie almost feels like it was written by a computer algorithm. People put data into a program and told it that audiences like 'explosions, cheap comedy and some family strife.' They put a few movies in for reference, namely any movie by Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, and after about 10 seconds the computer spit out Geostorm, a movie that took the already stupid and tired elements of the Emmerich/Bay movies and kicked them down about 5 more levels. Lawson's character is as cookie-cutter as they come, a single dad/brilliant scientist now reduced to fixing car engines. And would you look at that, his daughter likes fixing car engines too! But don't get ahead of yourselves, they have a rough relationship because she says things like 'you aren't the most dependable person' and 'you never keep your word.' No context is given, we're just meant to believe it. Thanks, computer-generated script! Don't worry, he saves the day but not before the space station goes into its self-destruct sequence (why do machines even have this?). Everyone on board rushes onto shuttles to escape but not Lawson, he has to stay to 'reboot the satellites.' Sounds like a pretty crummy reason to sacrifice yourself. They try to explain how everything 'must be done manually' but it's 2019, you can't do things remotely? Well I guess you can self-destruct remotely but you can only disable that manually which makes about as much sense as having satellite kill codes on the President but the kill codes have to be input manually from a device on the satellite. Whatever. This movie is uninspired, forgettable and a symptom of just how out of touch Hollywood is with the mainstream. I remember Chris Nolan's 'state of cinema' write-up a couple years back. I believe it was Steven Spielberg who said that we're going to see studios release big, bloated movies that are going to bomb and that's what's going to shake up the industry. Let's hope it does because I don't know how many more Geostorms I can tolerate seeing release while other better scripts sit there unproduced.
On a personal level, it's been well over a year since I was a part of the Geostorm crew but the movie (in)famously went through some reshoots last winter with a new director (Warner Bros. fired Dean Devlin but he's still credited as Director). The reshoots did next to nothing to improve the quality of the overall film and it's almost funny because you can clearly tell which scenes Butler and Co. filmed in 2014 and which ones were filmed almost 3 years later. Par for the course for this movie.
