Geostorm: A Rant
I really like disaster movies. Day After Tomorrow? One of my favorites. San Andreas? That dumb one with the Rock that just came out last year? Really liked it!
So when I heard Geostorm was coming out, a film that by all accounts looked like heinous villans creating massive storms to destroy a world that only sexy, sexy Gerard Butler can save, I stood up and went woo hoo!
I had today off of work, and haven't taken myself on a date in a while so I thought what the hell, let's go see Geostorm. It's probably going to be campy and stupid, but at least there will be cool special effects and sexy actors with sexy accents.
I WAS SO WRONG, YOU GUYS.
I present to you this rage-fueled list of things I thought were ridiculous about Geostorm:
1) You'd think in a film marketed with a bunch of natural disasters in the trailer, and called "Geostorm", it would have tons of cool scenes of natural disasters tearing apart cities, right? NOPE. In this nearly 2 hour movie, there were probably 15 minutes tops of weather events. The rest of it was "intruige." Sure, there were tons of explosions. A whole space station gets ripped apart. (And yes, science friends, there was LOTS of noise in space.) Lots of action-y sequences, where people shout intensely, and stare a lot, and run with their guns drawn. But excellent sequences of storms there were not.
2) And let me tell you about the storms they did have. I am not asking a lot out of these films. I realize that when one watches a disaster movie, one must suspend a certain amount of disbelief because obviously it's science fiction. But this level of "science fiction" was frankly insulting. One town was deluged with a constant lightning storm. Okay. Cool. But then shit started happening like all of a sudden A BUILDING BLEW UP. An entire convention center. Whuuuut. That's not how lighning works, friends.
They didn't even bother to preface it with "oh, we hit a gas main on accident." Nope, just a needless explosion. One bold of lightning struck a car, and it exploded into a fireball, flipping several times as it went. Or like this man is riding his camel through THE DESERT, and all of a sudden a wave as big as a buildling rushes towards him and sweeps him away. Where did all the water come from, guys? IT CAME FROM NOWHERE.
And at the end, when all was set to rights, and the storms ended, the desert metropolis that was literally flooded with water half way up it's skyscrapers emptied out suddenly like someone had pulled the plug on a bathtub. That's not how nature works, people. There's exaggerating things to make a fun natural disaster movie, and then there's taking a giant dump on top of all known laws of physics and nature. This did the latter.
3) The two main characters of the film were played by Gerard Butler (Scottish) and Jim Sturgess (British.) Both talented actors, both very pretty with great accents. And, in a terrible stroke of stupidity, they made both those actors use American accents. Now they weren't terrible American accents, but come on! Why lock away all that lovely!
4) There was no depth to literally anyone. The only fun character was the plucky computer whiz, who was in a total of three scenes, got all the fun lines. They tried to hard to make us CARE about the relationships between the characters - insert lots of pained glances and angst here that really only makes people look like they have to poop.
Some people may say these movies are all about action, and yeah, there's a lot of that, but the best disaster films have heart too. Twister? Day After Tomorrow? Even San Andreas made me care about the Rock and the girl from Percy Jackson to a surprising degree. But this movie had none of it.
Also, insert rant here about the fact that my popcorn was $7, and no, it was not a large, and my soda was only slightly less than that. I get that it's a popcorn business that sometimes sells movie tickets, but geez. My ticket was more than I should have spent because it was in the fancy theatre with the recliners. (I am totally okay with paying an extra $3 for recliners and enough room so that small kids don't kick my chair.) This was definitely a $10 I want back though. This movie isn't even worth getting free from the library.
I was going to go see the new Bladerunner, too. I should have seen that.
Oh well, that can be Tuesday's film.
Rant over, thanks for listening.