Disaster strikes out

Into the Storm, the new disaster movie directed by Steven Quale from a script by John Swetnam, has many of the attributes that money can buy and all of the clichés that Quale and Swetnam could dredge up. At least I hope it’s all they could dredge up; I’d hate to think they’re saving any for later.

The movie is essentially a rehash of Twister. When I first saw the preview trailer a couple of months back, I remember thinking, “Already?” But actually, Twister came out 18 years ago. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Seems like only a couple of summers since we watched that cow mooing her way around the funnel cloud. After 18 years, something like Into the Storm was probably overdue, especially with the advances in computer-generated imagery since ’96.

Those effects, in fact, are what Into the Storm spends most of its time on. Most of its money, too. Anyhow, there wasn’t much left over for big-name stars. Don’t expect to see the 2014 equivalent of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt— or Cary Elwes and Jami Gertz—here. The cast is made up entirely of earnest no-names with pretty, vaguely familiar faces—the kind you feel sure you’ve seen before but can’t quite remember where. On a soap opera? A guest spot on NCIS? A Prius commercial? Everybody speaks their lines clearly in a distinct voice and with a straight face. None of them needs to start working up an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award speech just yet, but nobody has anything to apologize for, either.

As for Swetnam’s script—well, some apologies may be in order there. Back in 1996 for Twister, Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin at least had the wit to crib their story from the 1940 newspaper comedy His Girl Friday. Into the Storm has to make do with what Swetnam is able to come up with, and all he seems to know is YouTube.

Has anything in screen history become a tired cliché faster than the conceit of presenting a movie as if it were made up of found video? I think the idea behind this kind of yank-me-around-again cinematography used to be that it somehow made a movie look more “realistic”—sort of the way old-school moviemakers used to regard black-and-white photography. But the more movies that adopt the style, the more it begins to look like the lazy way out, as if the people behind it are thinking they might as well make the movie look like it was shot with handheld iPad, because that’s where it’s going to end up, anyway.

It’s definitely the lazy way out when it comes to that bane of all screenwriters, exposition. You don’t have to bother working it into credible dialogue; you don’t even have to resort to a voice-over or an opening screen crawl like an episode of Star Wars. Just have an actor turn to the camera, clear his throat and say, “Let’s see, what should you know about me?” Or he can train the camera on someone else and tell you all about them. The beauty of this is that the more awkward it is, the more “real” it looks. Swetnam pulls this ploy time and again. It’s how we meet most of the personages in Into the Storm (it would be stretching a point to call them characters).

There are the storm chasers, Pete the hunch-player (Matt Walsh) and Allison the data-cruncher (Sarah Wayne Callies), cruising the highways of Tornado Alley in an armored monstrosity they call Titus. (Titus, Pete says, has an anchor system that can withstand winds up to 170 mph—which tells us that we’re going to see winds a lot faster than that.) Then, in the town where the tornado convention is about to meet, there are Gary, the vice principal at the high school (Richard Armitage), his two teenage sons (Max Deacon, Nathan Kress), and the older boy’s secret crush (Alycia Debnam Carey). Plus two “amateur daredevil” cretins, Donk (Kyle Davis) and Reevis (Jon Reep)—or, as I couldn’t resist dubbing them, Reevis and Rutthead. There are others, but most of them are simply corpses in waiting who make no particular impression.

As for the storm itself—or storms, really—well, you’ve seen the trailer, haven’t you? That’s all here and more. The destructive effects, despite occasional flashes of cheese, are generally good and sometimes quite impressive. After all, that’s the part money could buy.