Any movie that makes you long for the cinematic elegance of Twister is simply not a good one. Into the Storm has some occasional thrills and some superlative visual effects, but the foolhardy decision to film this disaster movie using the “found footage” technique robs what could have been a broad but broadly entertaining epic of any sense of scale, wonder or terror. Instead of pointing the camera at the many tornados that devastate the countryside, Into the Storm spends more of its time filming homemade selfies of cartoonishly thin characters who just get in the way of what we really paid to see: an entertaining spectacle.
It doesn’t help that Into the Storm portrays storm chasers, heroic as they may be in real life, like teen slasher victims who can’t resist the urge to say “Let’s check it out” over and over and over again. They claim to be searching for valuable information that could save countless lives from deadly tornadoes, but their credibility goes out the window when you realize that their lead meteorologist (Sarah Wayne Callies) is getting all of her information from watching The Weather Channel. Besides, if Into the Storm is any indication, the only way to save these people from deadly whirlwinds is to get them to move out of Tornado Alley once and for all.
Related: Director Stephen Quayle on Into the Storm’s Dangerous Stunts
When the film concludes and the surviving cast members proudly vow that they will rebuild their annihilated community, it doesn’t come across like a triumph of the human spirit. It comes across like a bunch of people who stubbornly refuse to move out of a haunted house. It’s really hard not to want to smack them. That the locals in Into the Storm are all either drunken redneck stereotypes, gormless widowers with sulky children or community officials who stubbornly refuse to postpone outdoor graduation ceremonies in the middle of a tornado warning (because it would be SO inconvenient) does little to endear them either.
It’s easy to feel a certain sense of nostalgia for the grand, bloated affairs of Irwin Allen or even Roland Emmerich at a time like this. Whereas disaster epics like The Towering Inferno or even (god help us) The Day After Tomorrow took sick pleasure in establishing clichéd but likable characters that their environment could entertainingly murder – and then went to the trouble of actually filming it so we could tell what was going on – the dirty documentary style of Into the Storm only calls attention to how fake its characters and situations really are. Worse, it distracts attention from just how much time and energy went into some pretty incredible visual effects. Buildings get evaporated, flames spiral into the sky like the devil himself commanded it and the only interesting part about any of that is how Into the Storm somehow managed to make it all seem dull.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
