If you’re going through Roland Emmerich withdrawals, or perhaps you’ve always wanted to know what Armageddon would be like if it wasn’t as good, then may I present to you the latest trailer for — wait for it — Geostorm. Yes, that’s the actual title. Really. No, it’s not a fake movie, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much after sitting through two and a half totally bonkers minutes of footage.
It’s odd — as our planet rapidly hurdles towards any number of very real oblivions, disaster-porn movies have started to play a little more fancifully. ‘Malfunctioning weather-controlling spacecraft triggers climate cataclysms’ sounds like a kinda quaint way for the world to end, as opposed to nuclear holocausts or World War III or a total breakdown of humanity’s societal order. It’s been a minute since the Earth last swallowed up its inhabitants with the earthquake-sploitation picture San Andreas, and frankly, it’s just a relief to see a fictitious vision of the apocalypse that’s not entirely our fault.
Gerard Butler’s environmental disaster movie Geostorm is in a perfect storm of its own. Most of the time, when news leaks out that a film is undergoing reshoots, a bigger deal is made of it than it actually deserves. The two big ones this year were Suicide Squad and Rogue One, which both seemed to have changed huge parts of their stories months before their release. Geostorm is the latest movie to enter reshoot hell, but that’s not all: it’s also getting a new director.