Parents' Guide to Geostorm

The forecast calls for a CGI haze that can't obscure increasing clouds of laughability, resulting in a Category 4 eye-rolling storm. When you buy a ticket for a sci-fi/disaster movie, you know you're signing a suspension-of-disbelief contract. No worries! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the CGI. But Geostorm strains that contract to its breaking point. We start with the notion that in 2019 (so soon!), a global network of satellites will shoot stuff into the air to control the weather. (Apparently, this will be necessary because climate change will kill two million people in one day in a major city.) OK. But within a film's world, people should still have to behave as if there are rules. Here, it seems to come as a total shock to everyone that anyone would think of weaponizing such godlike power ... even though it's in the hands of the country that created the atomic bomb.

Geostorm lives and dies by its visual effects; disaster junkies will get their fix of Hong Kong, Moscow, and other major cities getting destroyed by magic weather powers. But its true inspiration comes from whodunits and '70s paranoia thrillers, as the good guys try to unravel a conspiracy before the manipulated system creates the geostorm that will end us all. Bad boy Butler, who's becoming a bit of a warning sign for ticket buyers, battles/teams up with by-the-rules Sturgess (in a non-administration-approved haircut) to solve the mystery. Helping out are two criminally underused actresses, Alexandra Maria Lara as a space station commander and Abbie Cornish as a powerful Secret Service agent, plus rising star/scene stealer Zazie Beetz as a highly skilled IT tech. Beetz gets the laughs, Cornish provides the action, and the wonderful Lara deserves more screen time. But that's it for the highlights, as Geostorm clearly wasn't thought through too carefully. When things go wrong, instead of sending up 100 scientists to analyze it, the president sends one man (guess who?); the most basic questions of the investigation come as a surprise to all; there are one-passenger shuttle flights (think of the cost, even in coach); clumsy exposition hobbles many scenes; and an attempt at brotherly drama goes nowhere. Even the CGI destruction doesn't satisfy. The only interesting dialogue comes in one scene near the end, when the mystery is solved. The real mystery, though, is whether disaster movies have run their course for now, as we've all become inured to VFX. That's a question for another day, and Geostorm isn't the answer.