Review of Into the Storm (2014) by Daniel V — 28 Aug 2015

This one surprised me! I saw the bad ratings, but had a few hours and wanted to at least see part of "Into the Storm" before deleting if off my DVR to make room -- and I'm glad I did! Some qualifiers: You need to like Disaster Porn to like this movie, because there is death and destruction throughout (at least it was small-town America, as opposed to the usual watching-national-monuments-fall stuff).

The effects are, in fact, VERY good. And the found-footage aspect of this film *does* make it harder to connect with the characters as quickly as I would like. But after a half hour, I was fists-to-my-mouth, edge-of-my-seat committed! The best characters were the workaholic father (Richard Armitage) and his two teenage sons, long distanced by the death of their mom, and Sarah Wayne Callies as Allison, the under-appreciated brains behind a storm-chasing operation run by the obsessive (and obnoxious) Pete, played by Matt Walsh.

What, for me, raised the rating from 3 stars to 4 was the sense of human-decency-in-the-face-of-peril, one of my favorite disaster-porn staples. A scene in which two teenagers on the verge of death use what could be their last breaths to record messages of love and forgiveness to their families, reassuring said families that at least they aren't alone in these final moments, really moved me.

Is this great art? Nah. You can see some plot points approaching as clearly as the storm-chasers can see the tornadoes. But if you want to spend a couple of hours rooting for humanity to survive a level of disasters Mother Nature has never yet dreamed of? You could do a lot worse than going "Into the Storm.

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