Into the Storm

Into the storm is a 2014 film about a team of tornado chasers/documentary filmmakers who are about to come across the storm of the century. It's a lot like 1996's Twister except with none of the charm, a bad script, and worse actors.

The film takes place out in Silverton, Oklahoma. The first characters introduced are a single father named Gary and his two sons Trey and Donnie. The sons are supposed to be filming a "video time capsule" as a school project, which is a lazy way to make sure some of the characters have cameras on them for the found-footage sections of the movie. The second group of characters are the storm chasers. They consist of a meteorologist, a documentary filmmaker and some camera operators. It may seem like I'm breezing past all of the characters but, the film doesn't seem too concerned with giving them any depth so there isn't much to say. 

The first 25 minutes of this movie is a slog to get through, but once some tornadoes start touching down it does pick up the pace. Of course the Silverton High School graduation happens to fall on the same day that massive F5 tornadoes hit the small Oklahoma town, thus bringing all of the actors to the same location. After that, it hits all of the usual disaster movie beats you'd expect. Before the first twister had even touched down I had correctly predicted every character who was going to live to the end of the film. That's not to say many other disaster flicks aren't predictable but, nothing in this one felt original. As for some positives, despite the stilted acting and formulaic plot, the visual effects were a bit better than I expected. The CGI wasn't amazing but it was good enough that I could still get drawn into the latter half of the film.

Overall, I didn't really like this movie but it wasn't frustratingly bad either. 

I'll give Into the Storm a 1.5 out of 5.