Geostorm was produced on a $120 million budget. With that much money, the movie had to have been pretty good, right? After spending that large sum of money, movie companies Warner Bros. Pictures and Skydance Media had all the tools they needed to produce an award-winning movie.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

Geostorm was a terrible storm of a movie. The plot was bland and at every turn of events, it was highly predictable. Every time the movie attempted to throw a wrench in the gears to change it up, I already saw it coming.

The main plot opens with the planet being hit with a series of random and natural disasters that cause widescale casualties. These disasters are larger and more deadly than your normal, everyday tornadoes or hurricanes. Nations come together to form a solution. It is decided that a net will be put around the earth to prevent these large-scale natural disasters from happening again. The device’s name is Dutch Boy.

With Dutch Boy up and running, the world feels safe and can relax from the stress of the weather. However, when Dutch Boy starts glitching, the recently fired creator of Dutch Boy is called into action to help fix it. Eventually, this glitch turns out to be more than they could ever imagine.

The acting throughout the entire movie is average. No actor was noticeable enough to really receive any extra commendations, but they all fit their role. The two main characters, brothers Max and Jake, were played by actors Jim Sturgess and Gerard Butler. These two, being the main characters, are meant to show the great dynamic of being brothers. However, the dynamic is very poorly shown and just comes off as an annoying, unnecessary extra struggle. Jake, the older brother, doesn’t like when his younger brother bosses him around. The actors did a good job portraying what they were told to portray, but most the fault comes from another area — the writing.

The writing and script in this movie are very weak. It contains all the cheesy, heroic lines you would expect in the action parts and all the dramatic lines in the weakly presented emotional scenes. Some lines almost made me want to cringe when they said them because they were just so predictable and, as I previously said, cheesy.

Another problem this movie faced was character development. Throughout the film, characters are just thrown at you left and right; you never really get to learn much about them to gain that connection. At one point in the movie, one character sacrifices himself to save one of the main characters, but it didn’t really hit me that hard because I had no connections or emotions for that minor character. Even the main antagonist, once revealed, doesn’t really have a strong impact. The character was shown very little, and it almost seemed like making him the antagonist was a last minute fix to the story.

My biggest problem overall with this movie was the ending. Like any film, it tries to give you that emotional ending that really gets you feeling for the characters. This was not done effectively. I felt nothing for the characters due to how they were speaking and just the fact that I don’t care for these characters. I never found that connection to them so I sat there bored by what I was watching.

The one thing Geostorm did have going for it was the special effects. I would bet that most of the $120 million budget went right to the SFX department. Everything from the storms to the explosions, even a scene with a plane crash, was beautifully done. It looked amazing. The scenes in space look very realistic and altogether are well presented to the audience visually.

Overall, Geostorm is a movie I would not recommend to anyone. If it happens to be a free movie one day or there is nothing else to do, I would say go see it. If you never get the chance to see this movie, you aren’t missing out on anything.

Geostorm is a movie that had good potential but definitely faded without making any impact – kind of like a tornado that never materialized.