●●○○○
Into the Storm is the latest offering in the disaster film genre, which follows two groups of people whose lives intersect during the most devastating series of tornadoes America has ever seen. A team of eager storm chasers making a documentary and a local family unwittingly caught up in the chaos must work together to have any chance of surviving. But while it has stunning visual effects, Into the Storm is unlikely to blow away audiences given its firm entrenchment in cliché and well-worn tropes.
The one thing that Into the Storm gets absolutely right is, unsurprisingly, its special effects. The film continuously raises the stakes as each successive tornado encounter batters the protagonists. The audience is treated to some visually awing scenes, such as the inception of a firenado and multiple planes being lifted and tossed into the air by a ludicrously big storm. One only needs to rewatch Twister (1996) to see how far this genre has come. Into the Storm also approaches its depiction of disaster effectively by making it equally an aural experience as well as a visual one. Once the tornado hits peak intensity, the screen goes black while only the roaring sound remains, giving the impression that you, like the characters on screen, are trapped in the middle of the disaster.
This tactic is what allows the film to retain any excitement throughout, because the actual crafting of the story and lack of any character development is its decided undoing. Richard Armitage takes the lead role as Gary Morris, a vice-principal of the local high school and widowed father of two angst-ridden sons. Unfortunately, Armitage’s considerable acting talent is wasted as he is given nothing more challenging to do than adopt an American accent. The relationships between the characters are also stale and predictable. The antagonism between Gary and his eldest son is simply too familiar, paralleling that depicted by Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Similarly the alternating tension and camaraderie between the storm chasers has nothing new to offer.
What is most frustrating about Into the Storm is the sense of what might have been. Due to its found footage style of filming, there is an intense focus on the idea of documenting. The film mostly alternates between the storm chasers’ footage and that of the Morris sons’ cameras, originally intended to record time-capsules for the graduating high school students. In the midst of this are two men, who seem well on their way to picking up Darwin Awards, drunkenly chasing after tornados in order to become YouTube famous (they do feature in a genuinely amusing post credits scene that is worth sticking around for.) This emphasis on the act of filming should have prompted certain questions: What makes people chase after tornadoes and record them? How does this relate to the appeal of the disaster genre in the first place, as you in the audience are eating up scenes of destruction? But the film unfortunately barely chooses to acknowledge such questions let alone explore them.
If you like disaster movies and impressive special effects then do venture into the storm as it’s as standard an entry into that genre as you can get. But while one of the staples of disaster movies is the line, “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” the cinema audience increasingly can’t say the same. As more money can be pumped into creating impressive visual effects in a greater number of blockbusters, films like Into the Storm need to learn to treat its story and characters as more than simply ornamentation if they want to have resonance or staying power.
