Although it was a great idea for a plot and story, the execution fell way short. The dialogue was corny and dry while the every "twist" was far too predictable.
A great idea that fell short in execution.
In beginning the movie, I was excited to see how they created an adversarial situation out of a man-made creation in charge of managing the world’s weather. In the first several minutes I was still very hopeful for the movie, seeing the relationship of brothers Jake and Max as an intriguing side-story. You saw Jake as the arrogant and often careless Jake, who gave his life’s work to better the world, but seemed to think that because he did so, it gave him the right to constantly do as he pleased. You saw Max as a character that cared immensely about his work, but the only thing he would ever put before is a loved one in-need. With Max you saw very early on that his relationships were the most important thing in his life; whether it was his broken relationship with his brother, his discreet relationship with the love of his life, or how much he loved his semi-estranged niece.
The general overview, in case you hadn’t seen the trailers or any other teasers, is easy to follow. Jake Lawson created a network of satellites called DutchBoy, designed to maintain the world’s weather patterns and keep extreme weather events from happening. There had been no problems with Dutchboy but all of a sudden cities are being frozen, set aflame and experiencing other ridiculous weather events that kill hundreds of people at a time. Of course, the initial reaction is “oh, this is isolated and just a mistake,” As you would guess, not the case. Someone has been tampering with the satellites and the people finding out are being silenced. Why would someone do that? Someone weaponized the weather system.
At the end of the first act, you understand the problem and the characters were fairly well developed. Aside from some very corny dialogue between Jake and Max, there was still some relative positivity left for a decent film. Unfortunately, my hope was quickly axed as the second act began. In order to not spoil anything for you readers who intend to see this film, I will be very vague. With that said, things just escalated very quickly and there wasn’t really a very good explanation for why it was happening. You start to meet all of these characters once Jake goes into space and ultimately the movie becomes very predictable. I can honestly tell you that within the first 10 minutes of Jake’s time in space, I had identified half of the ending of the movie and the other half only took me about 10 minutes longer.
The movie, luckily, followed an OK version of a three-act plot structure. This made the movie slightly better for me, just because I somewhat knew the way it was going to develop, although the developments themselves were, in my opinion, rather poorly executed. Throughout the second act there were several interactions between the two brothers that made me physically cringe. The dialogue between them was painfully ridden with corny jokes and extremely broken attempts at creating a more intense relationship between them than what the movie was showing. There was one point in the movie << minor spoiler ahead >> where there was a two-line comment and reply about a secret code the brothers had which one of them declined being true to the other, and this code ended up being important 10 minutes later. To me, this was incredibly lazy. I literally said to myself that their little code was going to be important upon mention and it wasn’t even painted as important because the line literally had no place in the movie. There was another lapse in writing when the solution was said to be in one place, which the creator of the system tells us where that is, for someone to tell you 15 minutes later that it was a completely different solution. To me, it felt like someone initially wrote it one way and changed it later, forgetting to edit the dialogue to the new solution.
As I have been fairly negative throughout this review, I would like to point out that there were good ideas involved. I think the premise of the movie was a brilliant attempt, given the societal climate for environmental issues. Everyone in the world today talks about the environment and climate change; so a movie written about a system that solves weather issues that ultimately has major issues, pointing to the solution being the entire human race working together to take care of the planet was a solid plot premise. I think that the idea was creative and the story was, at its onset, good. I had no issues with what the movie was designed to be, I just personally think that the execution could have been far better.
Some of the concrete things that I would change would be the dialogue; I would remove most of the corny commentary between Jake and Max. Also, I won’t spoil the ending, but if you can watch the last twenty minutes of the movie and not physically shake your head at some of the “jokes,” during the most intense scene in the film, then you would probably rate this film an 11/10. I would also fix some of the lazier writing that I discussed above in order to make the movie less frustrating to a viewer. The last thing I’d do would be to make the movie significantly less predictable. I would have liked to have been even moderately surprised at any point in the movie, but unfortunately I was able to predict different outcomes in the movie all throughout.
Although an attempt was made at something that I think could have been great, this project fell way short. I understand this was his first time directing a film, but I look forward to seeing if Dean Devlin bounces back with his second directing attempt.
