Yesterday I took the unusual step of going to a movie that I had never heard of and therefore had no clue as to its quality.
The reason I went to see Geostorm was that my original pick for a Saturday movie – The Snowman – was so badly panned by critics in spite of a decent looking trailer, that I couldn’t bring myself to potentially waste the time.
And yet this morning, when I googled Geostorm – a Gerard Butler-starring disaster movie about global weather control gone wrong – its reviews are arguably worse. The first review that comes up asks if its the
worst movie of the year, while others score it at 1.5/4, 2/5, 1 Star etc.
Now I find this quite interesting. Instead of going to see The Snowman with the prejudiced view that it was known to be terrible, I’ve blindly seen a movie considered equally bad but with no preconceived notions.
So how does my viewpoint compare with the critics?
Well last night I was asked on Twitter how it was and my brief summation was that it was “Incredibly bad and yet good”. I think that’s pretty fair.
On the one hand, it is just absolutely terrible.
The acting is just unbelievably bad on almost all fronts. The New York accents from Brits Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess have to be heard to be believed, while Irish actor Robert Sheehan’s take on an English accent seems to slip from one region to the next depending upon the scene.
The writing is atrocious, filled with Hollywood cliches and exposition up the wazoo. Put it this way, when Butler speaks to Sturgess’s character for the first time, the first thing he says is “How are you doing Little Brother”, so we instantly know they are related. Nobody talks like that in real life. That type of info dump dialogue continues all the way through the film; it’s so, so bad.
The plot is also entirely predictable, and I doubt anyone in that screening I went to last night would have been unable to spot the bad guy(s) from the moment they came on screen.
Honestly, dear reader, you’d be hard pressed to find a film this year that is quite so awful on almost every critical level.
And yet in spite of that, or perhaps even because of that, it’s enjoyable.
Maybe I found the shonky accents and the one dimensional, wooden characters perversely entertaining or perhaps the way I was able to guess what was about to happen next every time gave me a sense of smug self satisfaction, but all the way through, I sat there with a smile on my face.
But it could be that I take the view that it is what it is. This is a disaster movie; you expect the cliches, the bad acting and the predictable plots and you trade them off for seeing people dying or escaping from some kind of catastrophic event.
And if you get enjoyment out of that sort of thing then you’ll enjoy Geostorm.
I did.
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