March 29, 2024

Weather gone wild in GEOSTORM. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Weather gone wild in GEOSTORM. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Courtney Howard // Film Critic

Disaster movies have been just the sort of escapism audiences have gravitated towards over the years. Hollywood studios have reaped great monetary rewards from this beloved genre – most recently Warner Brothers with their massive hit SAN ANDREAS, which was budgeted at around $110 million and took in around $474 million worldwide. And there’s no one better at crafting a solid epic better than triple threat Dean Devlin (INDEPENDENCE DAY), who returns to the milieu he’s had a hand in shaping, this time directing GEOSTORM.

This end-of-the-world action-adventure positions astronauts, engineers and scientists as the badass heroes out to save the planet from Mother Nature’s doom. They’ve invented a program called “Dutch Boy” which, through an intricate network of satellites, controls extreme climate change on a global scale. However now, just as the US is about to hand over the controls, the tech begins failing, thus weaponizing the weather. It’s up to loose cannon engineer Jake Butler (Gerard Butler), his Assistant Secretary of State brother Max (Jim Sturgess) and Max’s highly-specialized Secret Service agent girlfriend Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish) to save the planet before this tech can exact a – you guessed it – world-wide geostorm.

At the film’s recent Los Angeles press day, I was able to speak with Devlin, Sturgess and Cornish about the highlights of making a movie such as this.

Our interview with Jim Sturgess and Abbie Cornish:

Our interview with director Dean Devlin:

GEOSTORM opens on October 20.

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