Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Having spent the last month trying (and failing) to cope with the insufferable heat of the Bahrain summer, my thoughts often stray to those ‘glorious’ summer days in my youth where the northern English rain would hammer down against the window pane and the howling wind would find its way through every crack.
What better way to push my nostalgia senses then, than to take a trip to the cinema to see Into The Storm, the latest Hollywood disaster movie featuring twisters, tornadoes and thunder.
Utilising the ‘found footage’ perspective which seems to be flavour of the month in the disaster genre, the movie establishes itself in Silverton, Oklahoma, where a local high school is preparing for its graduation ceremony.
Vice-principal Gary Fuller (Armitage) is overseeing the ceremony while asking his sons to record various messages from the graduates-to-be on camera.
Far away, unlucky storm chaser Pete Moore (Walsh) hears of a major storm development heading toward Silverton and decides to take one last shot at obtaining incredible first-hand footage of the tornadoes and sets off in his heavily-armoured storm vehicle he has dubbed Titus.
Unfortunately, he is once again disappointed as the storm seems to have dissipated. However, with marvellously convenient timing, the weather suddenly takes a turn for the worse once the graduation ceremony begins and the storm reappears with double the ferocity and the students fight to take cover in the flimsy school building.
What follows is a typically clichéd affair. Of course, since this is by definition a movie and not a Discovery Channel documentary, we have to have some sort of plot shoehorned in rather than wave after wave of awesome stormy close-ups, buildings being demolished and jumbo jets been thrown around like children’s toys.
So naturally, moments before the graduation ceremony starts, Gary’s eldest son decides to wander off with his love interest Kaitlyn to a nearby abandoned paper mill ‘to help her with a project’. Typical groan-worthy stuff, but the scriptwriters needed something to focus on…right?
So the crux of the film is Gary and Pete (whose knowledge and experience from following storms apparently grants him narrative immunity to run through a tornado) teaming up to rescue the two students.
I know the target demographic of a disaster movie isn’t the subtle and understated crowd, but I would have appreciated a bit more nous in the script and a more original way of establishing a coherent chain of events rather than a long line of conveniences and coincidences. The film really disappoints when the most twisted thing on offer is the logic rather than the ferocious weather systems.
Further to its detriment, there is very little atmosphere in the movie. There’s no sense of foreboding or a few false starts, every major disaster is clearly signposted as it works its way towards the camera from the horizon.
If that wasn’t dull enough, the crew has a perpetual doom-mongerer (Callies) whose role seems to consist of being the incongruous female in the group (equal opportunities dictates there must always be one) and spouting repetitive variations of ‘storm’s approaching boys!’
As you may have gathered, I don’t expect Into The Storm to tear up any trees at the box office, never mind the Oscars, but I must give it praise where it’s due. The special effects are stunning, and it’s clear that a pretty hefty slice of the budget went on this rather than a decent scriptwriter or cast.
Tornadoes swirl with ferocity and hail crashes down with meaty bass that had the cinema walls vibrating. Houses disintegrate in milliseconds, and in one stand-out scene, a tornado engulfs a fuel truck and becomes a towering inferno that almost sears you in your seat. If it’s purely a feast for the eyeballs you’re after, there’s almost certainly something for you to enjoy here.
* Showing in Cineco, Seef I, Saar Cineplex
