Geostorm: Gerard Butler Joins Weather Conspiracy Thriller From ID4 Writer
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From his bare-chested leading man breakout in Zack Snyder’s 300 to his stunt-heavy turn as the President-saving secret service agent in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler is not known for choosing films that can be described as subtle. He just signed on to star in the upcoming thriller Geostorm, but his involvement is only one of the reasons this flick could be the biggest guilty pleasure of 2015.
Though Geostorm was originally developed by David Ellison’s Skydance Productions, Warner Bros. bought their way into the project. Dean Devlin will make his feature directorial debut, though he is most notable as the screenwriter for such modern sci-fi favorites as Roland Emmerich’s Stargate and Independence Day. He’s a guy who has had big ideas on the brain in the past, and Geostorm legitimately sounds like he’s packed way too many of them into one place.
It starts off innocently derivative enough. Butler plays a nice but hardheaded satellite designer who teams up with his estranged brother when all of the world’s climate-controlling satellites go haywire and a catastrophic man-made storm threatens to turn everything to dust. So far it sounds like your average disaster movie, right?
Here’s where the description, via THR, goes off the rails. Following this heroic effort, the story then somehow involves a trip into space, while Earthbound problems soon turn to an assassination attempt on the President. Giant storms, space, and conspiracy theories create a combination that can’t possibly just exist in mediocrity. This movie will either be a crazy good or a complete waste of space, there is no middle ground. I’m already duct taping a bunch of umbrellas together in anticipation.
Devlin backed away from sci-fi after 1998’s Godzilla, which he co-wrote, was a franchise killer. His most recent work has been directing episodes of the TNT series Leverage, and he’s still on board as a producer in the proposed ID4 sequels.
Butler, meanwhile, will soon be heard reprising his role as Hiccup’s father Stoick Vast in DreamWorks Animations’ How to Train Your Dragon 2. Currently filming Dark City director Alex Proyas’ fantasy adventure Gods of Egypt, he’s also set to star in the upcoming remake of Point Break, takin on the surfing criminal mastermind role of Bodhi that Patrick Swayze made famous/infamous in the original film. Other than that, there is the proposed Olympus sequel, London Has Fallen, though it doesn’t have a director attached as of now.
Geostorm sounds like a splashing good time, much like the video below, in which Butler is a guest on BBC Radio 1’s “Innuendo Bingo.” The segment basically features two people taking mouthfuls of water and trying not to spit the water out as they listen to sexual-sounding out-of-context quotes. I could watch hours of this.
