Geostorm by Dean Devlin brings us another natural disaster fanfare with all your favorite explosions and extreme weather ripping the entire globe apart. Gerard Butler plays Jake Lawson, the hot-headed architect of “Dutch Boy,” which is a global space station designed to counteract extreme weather. Jake butts heads with his brother Max, played by Jim Sturgess. This anger comes from Max taking over Dutch Boy operations and firing his own brother on orders of the government. Three years later, when Dutch Boy malfunctions and creates extreme, dangerous weather all around Earth, Max enlists Jake’s help in saving the world and figuring out who’s causing the mayhem.

If you love explosions and natural disasters like me, then this movie is for you. If 2012 by Roland Emmerich wanted to make you barf, then Geostorm isn’t for you. Speaking of 2012, Geostorm does have many of the same clichés as the former and every single other natural disaster movie in existence.

We have: a distant father who saves the world, a government conspiracy cover-up involving murder, and to top it all off, poor side character development. For instance, we look at Daniel Wu’s Cheng, the head of the Dutch Boy division in Hong Kong. He is a friend of Max, and when he finds out about the conspiracy, he barely makes it out of Hong Kong with his life. Cheng makes it to America only to be pushed into the path of an oncoming car twenty feet away from Max in Washington D.C. Cheng just has enough life in him left to whisper to Max the key to saving the world. Is the purpose of Cheng’s whole existence just to push the storyline forward? We may never know.

Another example of a poorly developed character is Alexandra Maria Lara’s Ute Fassbinder, the decorated space commander of the space station and Jake’s obvious love interest. She even stays back with him and helps him save the world up in the space station. But after they save the world, Fassbinder completely disappears and isn’t even mentioned as a love interest in the epilogue. Personally, I think that having a love interest who magically vanishes is kind of irritating. All in all, Geostorm does what it does best: have big, flashy and deadly natural disasters and lots of explosions. However, if you are looking for something with character development and a decent script, look elsewhere.

Rating: 7/10