When a network of satellites designed to control and prevent extreme weather patterns starts to malfunction, it’s a race against the clock for its creator Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) to figure out what’s going on in the space station, while his younger brother Max (Jim Sturgess) tries to figure out a conspiracy on Earth, before a worldwide Geostorm wipes out everyone and everything on the planet.

Let’s get this out of the way. Depending on your taste in films and your definition of “good” Geostorm isn’t necessarily going to be classed as “good”. However, it is enjoyable. Geostorm is in the same vein as Roland Emmerich’s disaster films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, but unlike 2012 which has some truly awful characters that you don’t care about, Geostorm’s cast does well with what they’re given and for the most part portray likeable (yet often cliché) characters with decent chemistry.

The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag. The stuff in space looks great from the various high-tech satellites and rockets to the space station itself, but it’s the extreme weather that doesn’t always looks so great, from tsunami’s to large hail stones to tornadoes, there’s every kind of weather imaginable. It’s when sequence focuses on a character experiencing the disaster like Cheng (Daniel Wu) trying to outdrive molten lava exploding from the streets of Hong Kong, that are tense and exciting. The effects are most noticeable with a tsunami that hits Dubai, especially because the tsunami that hits New York in The Day After Tomorrow, a film released over 10 years earlier, still looks a lot better.

Geostorm is entertaining nonsense. The conspiracy in of why the technology is going wrong and who could be behind it and why, is predictable a lot of the time but the speed of which the reveals and action happen helps you forget about that. It’s the perfect film to watch when you don’t want to think too hard but there’s still some intrigue and some exciting moments. 3/5.