Into the Storm review

STORM PASSES AWAY

Rating: 5 out of 10

When I watched the trailer of Into the Storm, I did not want to watch the movie. Now, that rarely happens. Unbeknownst to me till I stepped into the theater, it was directly proportional to horrifying childhood memories of a film called Twister (1996). Admittedly, in other words, I was scared of watching this film.

Into the Storm is exactly the kind of movie it expects itself to be. Nothing more, nothing less. It is like every disaster movie you have seen before. It doesn’t improve upon what you’ve seen in films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or 2012 (2009). It doesn’t subtract anything from the sub-genre either. It has brilliant special effects and a band of actors that make terrible dialogue look passable.

The film opens with a few teenagers falling prey to a tiny tornado. We are then introduced to the main cardboard cutouts; I mean characters; divided in two groups which later meet, the family and the storm chasers. The former running away from the storms and the latter towards it. The family consists of Gary (Richard Armitage, Thorin from The Hobbit films) and his two sons, Donnie and Trey. The storm chasers include Pete and Allison, played by the stars of Veep and The Walking Dead. 

If you just listen to the clunky dialogue and think this film can’t get any dumber, there are two idiots given to you. These hillbilly "jackasses" want to be YouTube stars by filming the storms and are easily the most infuriating part of the film. Sorry for the spoiler, but the worst scene in the film is the one at the end where we are shown that they survived. Donnie has a time-capsule project which shows himself and many other people leaving messages for themselves 25 years into the future. This periodically proves the film's willingness to plunge into stupidity. Why Donnie would introduce his brother and father to his older self is still beyond me. Oh yes, it’s called bad exposition.

Director Steven Quale’s Into the Storm is a watchable amateur hour and a half. Then again, when you have raging tornadoes every 15 minutes, who wouldn’t be gripped by what’s happening on screen? The real stars of the film are the big bad whirlpools of wind. You see what’s wrong with that? The stars of Twister, to this day, are Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. The chasers, not the storms. It’s the people that mattered, even when it's not the best disaster film you could find.

The found footage genre has decided to branch out from horror after The Blair With Project (1999) paved the way. We saw alien invasions, monsters and superheroes find their way into the gimmick with District 9 (2009), Cloverfield (2008) and Chronicle (2012). At a point I used to hate shaky cam. Until Paul Greengrass came along and showed me how it can be used as an effective cinematic tool. Into the Storm does the opposite. It reminds me why it’s annoying and not every child should be allowed to play with big boy’s toys.

There is a massive action set piece involving airplanes in the film. The person sitting next to me cheered while the havoc befell. When I watched Twister as a kid, I was sufficiently horrified and speechless. Cheering was the last thing on my mind. There can only be two explanations for why this happened. Either film audiences today have started to relish... or worse, crave destruction, or filmmakers have become parasitical devastation-mongers. Either way, this deeply worries me.

In all fairness, the tornadoes are extremely terrifying. Especially the scenes where we see a vortex forming, how a tornado creates itself literally out of thin air. That image is frightening. Then, there are those big moments where a tornado catches fire and when a number of storms combine to make “the biggest storm there has ever been”. The film is watchable because of each of the storms, and there are quite a few. If you are a person who enjoys watching heavy amounts of destruction, go and watch this film, sure. But do come back home and ask yourself why. Let that storm rage on.