Shout-Out to the Extra(s): Geostorm Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care. 

Disaster movies are inherently obligated to spend large swaths of time simply filling the screen with their chosen calamities, whether it’s monsters or meteorological events or some mixture of the two. No matter how impressively rendered these disasters might be, however, they are often not enough to in and of themselves communicate the full weight of terror. No, that requires a human counterpoint, and so for ages directors have employed standby reaction shots, cutting from the disaster to some nameless, slack-jawed extra staring up at a green screen, or capturing some nimble-footed extra fleeing the impending doom wrecker. If so many of these stock scenes are forgettable even as they are happening, some occasionally, whether through intentional or unintentional inspiration, can achieve glory, like the Margarita Guy from “Jurassic World.”

Dean Devlin’s “Geostorm” is packed with these stock scenes. The scenic beaches of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, are swallowed whole by an icy tidal wave, blotting out the sunshine and sending scantily clad beachgoers scrambling, including one young — expositorily deemed Bikini Girl in the closing credits — the camera locks onto as she runs, and runs, and runs, somehow staying not only one step ahead of the looming tidal wave but evading a jetliner that ices over in the sky and crashes directly behind her. The latter happens directly behind her as she comes up against a no-way-out wall in some alley, which seems like far too small a space to accomodate such a theoretically smashing sequence, never mind allowing her to escape unharmed, which she apparently does, despite doing nothing more than covering her head as the plane smashes apart, though who knows because we never see her again. Once the tidal wave sequence is complete, the movie’s use for her ceases, as is the case with so many valiant disaster movie extras.

If it’s not the funniest scene in the movie, that’s only because there are so many to choose from, like the Democratic National Convention getting incinerated by lightning. To explain why our extra in that scene rules, we have to set up the scene fully, which requires us to explain the whole movie, which is to say that a global satellite system designed to control the weather has been hacked in order to unleash the eponymous Geostorm on an unsuspecting Earth. Only the President of the United States (Andy Garcia) has access to the codes that can kill the Geostorm, and to get to the President, the film’s co-hero (Jim Sturgess) and his secret service agent lady friend (Abbie Cornish) stage an assassination attempt at the Democratic National Convention by firing a few shots into the air. This naturally causes everyone to panic and flee, though the Secret Service, if you watch closely, is really, really slow on the draw in getting to POTUS in the aftermath of those shots, and, long story short, the President winds up in a car with the film’s co-hero and his secret service agent lady friend as the Geostorm is about to devour the arena where hosting the DNC where they just were.

Okay. So. While simply showing the arena from the outside as it is incinerated does allow for some prime LOOK CONCERNED WHILE LOOKING AT THE GREEN SCREEN! reaction shots from Andy Garcia and Jim Sturgess, that is nothing compared to the brief scene back inside the arena just before it gets blown to smithereens, a scene involving a nameless extra we will simply deem Dr. Phil Lookalike. This extra.....

If most everyone else has fled on account of, you know, an assassination attempt and an impending Geostorm, Dr. Phil Lookalike is still sitting there on his folding chair with this miniature American flag waiting for...who knows what. Obviously he is just planted there by the film’s director to proffer the aforementioned human counterpoint to the arena being incinerated a couple seconds later, but the make-believe backstory that emerges in one’s mind over Dr. Phil Lookalike waiting the Geostorm out is nonetheless pretty comical. And, of course, that comicality is brought home in his expression, which is brilliantly juxtaposed against the more conventional Oh No expression of the extra in the lower left hand corner of the frame. Dr. Phil Lookalike’s expression is more crabbily fatalistic, seeming to suggest a man who chose to shelter in place and now realizes, a split-second before he merges with the infinite that, hells bells, he choose wrong. Godspeed, Dr. Phil Lookalike, we hardly knew ye.

Pour one out for the extra(s).....

Geostorm

“Geostorm” begins and ends with references to the meteorological state of things, suggesting, at least in a broad sense, our impending peril if we refuse to take climate precautions. This is heart-warming and a little surprising because “Geostorm” was written and directed by Dean Devlin, old running mate of Roland Emmerich, who himself made an ecological disaster movie almost fifteen years ago, signaling how these men who once teamed up to cinematically destroy the earth now have an interest in trying to save it. But fear not, Movies Are Escapism absolutists, because between these bookends “Geostorm” exists purely as an aspirant action movie spectacle with nary an environmental lecture. Alas, even in that context “Geostorm”, if you will permit a weather metaphor, is like a snowmageddon that fizzles out, leaving us with less excitement than a few disappointing flakes, and without any good weathermen front and center to describe the action.

The Geostorm, it turns out, is not a natural event but a potentially catastrophic manmade one, brought about by a global network of satellites created to control Earth’s weather that is sabotaged. This system, designed by quasi-grizzled Jake Lawson, and now overseen by Jake’s less quasi-grizzled brother Max (Jim Sturgess), is deemed Dutch Boy as a reference to the fable in which the little dutch boy put his finger in the dam to prevent its bursting until the town’s adults could arrive to fix the leak. This could well evoke shades of Right Now, what with various Florida children calling certain adults on the carpet, suggesting that these kids can only hold their finger in the dam for so long and so, for God’s sake, Responsible Grown-Ups, do something. But “Geostorm” was, of course, made well in advance of Right Now, and anyway, as previously stated, this is all about Escapism, not Relevancy, so my apologies for even bringing it up (again). And that, perhaps, is why the Big Twist involving the sabotage of Dutch Boy connects not to, say, some eco-terror group determined to let Earth decide its own fate without manmade intervention, but a government operative gone rogue.

That’s an ancient reveal given more mustiness by the character responsible, a person whose identity you will see coming from a long way off given the Law of Names on the Movie Poster. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, just as the idea of the government being in on the Geostorm doesn’t have to feel rote. Indeed, the movie’s best line connects directly to this development, when the secret service agent in a relationship with Jake’s brother, Sarah Wilson (Abbie Cornish), whose lifeless name correlates directly to her lifeless character, is pressed for help in putting a stop to this diabolical ruse and quizzically remarks: “You’re soliciting a Secret Service agent to break into the White House server and illegally obtain files?” There’s your movie! That’s a movie conjuring up thoughts of Nicolas Cage stealing the Declaration of Independence to save it! Yet Dean Devlin, who so long ago demonstrated aptitude for whimsically rendering the hokey, proffers no such imagination here, never embellishing his absurd plot with any cornball flair, and never giving his action sequences any insouciant je ne sais quoi, emblemized in a car dodging Geostorm-induced lightning bolts like some foggy arcade game.

That leaves the performers, and performers can elevate these sorts of movies so long as they have that twinkle in their eye. If they don’t, however, the whole operation becomes a slog, with the difference between the twinkly joy of “Independence Day” and the dead eyes of “Independence Day Resurgence” functioning as primo evidence. And while Gerard Butler isn’t bad, per se, that twinkle is mostly MIA, evident in his very first scene where Jake is called to testify before a Senate panel. Butler doesn’t have the government testimony flippancy of Robert Downey Jr. in  “Iron Man” movies nor the I’m-Taking-This-Very-Seriously cheesy gravitas of Dennis Quaid in “The Day After Tomorrow.” As the President, Andy Garcia, who my girlfriend, half-listening from other rooms in the house as I watched, cited, cruelly, as C-List, does not always have that twinkle either, though he occasionally does, never more so than the moment when the in-house saboteur wonders how the President caught him red-handed to which Garcia growls: “How? Because I’m the goddamn President of the United States.”

In that line, for a second, “Geostorm” lives its most joyfully ludicrous life, making you wish they’d torn the whole production down and built it back up infused with the scent of that line reading’s agreeably stinky cheese.

Double Feature of Faux Dreams

This blog, as loyal frustrated readers can painfully attest, is nothing if not an acolyte for 1996 box office champion “Independence Day.” As such, most any Roland Emmerich release is met with unrepentant gaiety, and is why last year’s “Geostorm”, written and directed by Emmerich’s ID4 cohort Dean Devlin, was must see for this blog too. It was not must see for everyone. It finished 75th in box office rankings and seemed to vanish from theaters right quick. The brevity of “Geostorm’s” theatrical run was made even more disappointing because it coincided with the equally swift run of “The Mountain Between Us”, which finished six places below “Geostorm” in the box office stakes, which I also wanted to see on account of Kate Winslet, of whom I am no longer a completist, and may never be again, but to whom I still feel a sense of loyalty. I figured, “Geostorm” and “The Mountain Between Us” would make a stellar — that is to say, intentionally terrible — double feature.

Each movie’s appearance on the big screen, however, coincided with my October trip to Paris where, for some mystifying reason, my beautiful, perspicacious girlfriend did not want to take time out from art-seeing and cheese-eating and café-sitting and all-around joyous life-living to see subtitled screenings of “The Mountain Between Us” and “Geostorm.” (Reader: “That’s why she’s perspicacious!”) But at long last, nearly five months later, the fates conspired to grant me an afternoon in which I had the opportunity for a home base double feature. I mention all this not just in case you were wondering why over the next two days you see back-to-back reviews of “The Mountain Between Us” and “Geostorm”, with a special Wednesday “Geostorm”-inspired kicker, but because this stellar — intentionally terrible — double feature is something to celebrate!

So while the masses prattle over recent releases, this blog will turn the clock aaaaaaaaaaall the way back to late 2017 for a couple movies you had already forgotten and wish you still forgot if not for our bringing it up. Join us, won’t you? (Or don’t.)