Into the Storm: A Decently Bad Disaster Movie

The recipe for Steven Quale's Into the Storm (2014) is simple. First, organize a group of fairly ordinary people. Second, place them within the city limits of the quaint Silverton, Oklahoma. And lastly, throw tornadoes at them until they've learned a few pithy lessons about what it means to appreciate life. At least that's the stated recipe, because in practice, this movie is little more than an excuse to grandstand the sum of what would happen if some hyperactive children with unispiring ideas of what good direction looks like stole daddy's credit card to buy a collection of green-screen effects off the internet.

I'm tempted to think they tried to buy life lessons, too, because the obligatory come-together-as-a-team message of Into the Storm will be propped up as magnificent by those who like and defend it. In reality, it's roughly as profound and creative as a high school public relations speech. There's little to comment on here beyond the movie's vague ideals of being brave in the face of an angry Mother Nature, but don't hear me say this and then immediately conclude that the entire ordeal is a complete waste; that's not entirely accurate. In fact, this movie does what it does relatively well. It's just that it aims to repeatedly play the same uninspiring note, though for the most part, it actually hits it.

The cast of Into the Storm isn't particularly exciting, either, a slow-burning death knell for any flames of meaningful character drama Quale and Co. were hoping to fan. Their performances range from barely passable to bland to frustratingly stereotypical, with one major exception: Matt Walsh's Pete. Pete's a jaded veteran of storm chasing with both a big armored car and a fun, absolutely justified orneriness; watching him isn't unlike the guilty pleasure of overhearing that one eccentric uncle of yours in a bad mood in the other room. As for his counterpart, Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies, The Walking Dead), she lacks any real screen presence, an odd and hard-to-ignore imbalance between these two leads. Adding insult to developing injury, the rest of the cast falls prey to fates worse than indifference.

Donk and Reevis, two thrill-seeking rednecks straight out of an episode of Jackass, are as irritating as neighbors setting off illegally-modified fireworks right as you're trying to go to bed, and not on the Fourth of July. They're the decided low point of this movie's already unimpressive cast, because while they're rarely particularly boring, they're never nuanced either, and there's no particularly about it. The acting quality of Into the Storm ranges widely, but at its worst, it delves deeply into some bad habits akin to the acting equivalent of stock photos, and on the other end, it hits an artificial ceiling and plateaus. The cast is limited by a heavy load of clichés thrown their way by an ungainly screenplay, the 'guy wants girl' tropes being the most effective at reminding me that what I was watching was just a movie, and not a very deep one. Being a movie about tornadoes tearing apart a town, some consistent level of sobriety may have helped it.

Into the Storm makes fleeting attempts to evoke emotion, and its rawer moments would have hit harder than they actually did if the filmmakers had made any consistent effort to explore their characters. However, because I was never given the chance to so much as sit with any of them as people, I never learned how to see them as such when they walked the line between life and death. Some of the more sentimental scenes in this movie work just fine on paper, but fall apart when they're forced to work with a paper-thin cast. Into the Storm works best as a special effects reel, but I was confused by its efforts to be more when the depth wasn't there to justify it. This is less Twisters, more embellished real-life news footage with a tacked-on emotional appeal, though a "time capsule" element featured at both the beginning and end of the movie serves it well as far as showcasing the changing attitudes of the students attending the local high school; it's a good-faith effort to evoke empathy.

You see, not all is gloom and doom in the land of cheap CGI tornadoes, as the dialogue of Into the Storm, while relatively run-of-the-mill, features some amusing quips that you admittedly have to get through a lot of meaningless banter to appreciate. The musical score is also surprisingly and appreciably sparse, serving the main auditory attraction: the menacing roar of the tornadoes. Though they may look cheap, they sound outstanding, not unlike an angry predator that just had its prey snatched away from it every time a character in this movie doesn't die. Eric Sears's editing is also surprisingly restrained, and I appreciate him for not cutting to a different shot every single second, as a hyperactive toddler with access to Adobe products might. While the visuals of this movie may not amount to much, the editing grounds the chaos in surprising coherence.

The cinematography of Into the Storm is stuck somewhere between found footage and traditional camerawork, sometimes leaning all the way into one or the other like a fad from 2014, which it is. It's a really disorienting effect, in good ways whenever tornadoes are present, but bad ones whenever they're not. The movie looks its best when working with lower lighting conditions, but it becomes bland really quickly whenever the sun pops out, as if the colorist didn't create more than one color grade for different levels of light. The visual effects, though a lot of fun, sometimes look like someone bought a twenty-dollar pack of green-screen tornado models on the internet and pasted them into the movie; boring cast titles and character intro titles add insult to injury. Even though the audio-visual combination of this movie sometimes captures the violence of the tornadoes adequately, the makers of Into the Storm would have been better off making a different type of movie with less demanding financial considerations. After all, none of us has unlimited money, though I'm not sure Quale and those working with him acknowledged this in the slightest.

Into the Storm succeeds at what it does as a movie in the same sense that one might succeed in breathing when they wake up in the morning. Perhaps it's unfair of me to want it to have the emotional depth of even a superior disaster movie such as Greenland, but a shallow movie is still a shallow movie, even if the water is seductively warm. Disaster movie enthusiasts will appreciate the uncomplicated weather action here, but anyone seeking more substance will likely find all of this to be unrewarding schlock with little else to offer outside of some surprisingly genuine thrills. I find myself torn here, because while the critic in me hates the poor attempts at drama, my inner ten-year-old is salivating at the tornadoes. This is a bad movie, but it's sometimes quite good at being a bad movie.

Into the Storm - 4/10

Jeremiah 10:11-16