Into the Storm
Director: Steven Quale
Starring: Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Matt Walsh Two stars
Into the Storm addresses the fearsome power of nature. Alas, it also addresses the fearsome power of a bad script to distract us from the fearsome power of nature.
Add to that cardboard characters and what you have is a movie that should have dispensed with the humans and dialogue and been a documentary. If, of course, the storms were real. Which they aren’t.
The film is only 89 minutes long, yet despite the often engrossing special effects, it drags. It seems there are only so many times you can watch a funnel cloud bear down while someone yells: “We gotta get out of here. C’mon!”
The action takes place in a single day in the small town of Silverton. Four high-school students have just been killed by a tornado in nearby Oklahoma, yet Silverton’s high school is planning to go ahead with its outdoor graduation ceremony. Maybe this is why the vice principal – Richard Armitage, the dwarf leader Thorin in the Hobbit movies – frowns constantly.
Meanwhile, a storm-tracking team is on the chase, led by a driven, self-centered documentary filmmaker (Matt Walsh), who has spent years developing the perfect storm-tracking vehicle. His assistant is a no-nonsense meteorologist (Sarah Wayne Callies), a single mother to a five-year-old daughter.
Back at the graduation, the storm hits – a series of tornadoes like no one has ever seen. The movie uses a found-footage scenario to tell its story. These snippets of “real” video are supposed to lend a documentary-style feel, but they’re often ditched for conventional storytelling, rendering the idea ineffective.
What’s worse is that there’s nothing interesting about any of these characters. The star, the only star, is the weather. The CGI tornadoes are interesting to watch – for a while. But there’s little attention to logic. Silverton is a small town and yet, we suddenly see huge jet planes being lifted up into the sky. Where’d they come from?
Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe we should sit back and be awed by the power of Mother Nature. OK. But she deserved a better script.
