Showing posts with label Starring: Gerard Butler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Starring: Gerard Butler. Show all posts

Geostorm (2017)

Disaster film. 

The world has been saved from environmental disaster by a hi-tech space station (the actual science isn’t explained), but when it malfunctions extreme weather takes a deadly hit on Earth. It turns out that the tech has been sabotaged – with suspicion going all the way up to the US President – and it takes the station’s creator Jake (Gerard Butler) to save the world from total climate meltdown. 

The film is utterly ludicrous but quite entertaining if you don’t ask any questions. Jim Sturgess is laughable as Jake’s sweaty, anxious brother Max, who has family “issues” (and looks a bit like Chris de Burgh). Abbie Cornish plays his tough, secret-service girlfriend. Alexandra Maria Lara is the sensitive and appealing space station commander who becomes Jake’s love interest. Ed Harris is the U.S. Secretary of State serving the president, who is played by Andy Garcia. 

The script is wooden and the plotting is entirely predictable. But the CGI scenes of extreme weather are exciting and the action rattles along so quickly that you don’t have time to assess whether any of it makes sense.

Coriolanus (2011)


Directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, this one alienated me at first and I hated it for about 45 minutes. Set in modern Rome (although it doesn’t look like Rome), but with Shakespearean language, it really seemed to jar. I also didn’t like the brutal, bloody violence or the visuals in general, and I found Vanessa Redgrave hammy and overwrought. I don’t have an issue with modernising Shakespeare (machine guns, mobile phones), but it seemed to lack context: the where, when and why of the action.

The film improved as it went on. Fiennes is always watchable. And the ongoing thread of depicting action through TV news footage was a nice touch. There was even the neat joke of Jon Snow presenting news reports in Shakespearean English.

The themes of war, loyalty, pride and politics and so on are as relevant as they ever were, but I still wish it had been set in Ancient Rome. Even better would have been to see Fiennes performing it on stage.