"We are the opposite of a summer superhero movie," Sarah Wayne Callies told UPI about the ordinary characters she and co-star Richard Armitage play in the disaster movie.
By Karen Butler | Aug. 4, 2014 at 11:29 PM | 0 Comments (Leave a comment)


In the movie, Callies plays Allison, a professional storm-chaser who -- along with her team -- crosses paths with Armitage's Gary, a high school vice principal searching for his teen-age son and his friend, as a massive tornado roars through their mid-western town.

"We all kind of have a background in different sort of effects-heavy [projects.] This is what [Quale] does and The Walking Dead was kind of high concept and The Hobbit and everything, and I think maybe we all recognized, through the course of those experiences, that the effects don't matter if they are not grounded in something human. And, so, when I first got to the set, you know, Steve and I had dinner and it was this great collaboration of sort of me saying: 'These are the three moments I need. I don't care where they come in the movie and I don't care how we get there, but if I have these three moments, I can build you a person and then you can do everything else; you can do the rest of that world.' It was a great collaboration because we were on the same page about it and Steve was really open to it," Callies told UPI in New York Monday.

"It's something that is quite hard to write in a script, as well. So, the script was a good framework, but it wasn't until the actors came around that the real relationships started to form. And, even on the day of shooting, something might have happened in a moment that you couldn't necessarily put into a script, which [Quale] facilitated, and I think it was being open to all of those things that kept it feeling really real," Armitage added.

"Also, because we had a lot of long takes in the film, we spent a lot more time rehearsing scenes before we actually starting shooting them. And that was when we had this great collaborative effort with everybody, including the camera operator, myself, the actors and we really got a sense of what felt real for the characters because -- as silly as it may sound to an outsider -- blocking and staging are so important to understand the realities because anything that makes something seem false... You want to make it feel real, not like a cinematic movie, and so that was great.

"I also liked casting Richard sort of against type. With The Hobbit, you play such a strong, powerful, small person," Quale addressed Armitage, who was sitting beside him. "And, here, you can play somebody who is just at the mercy of a person who is in charge of this bureaucracy and all that, and trying to work all those details in. You're not the guy who has the final say, but, yet, you have to rise up and try to help these people and I just think that reluctant hero aspect was very intriguing. The everyday, ordinary person."

"We are the opposite of a summer superhero movie," Callies quipped.

The trio went on to say they were never seriously tempted to do any real-life storm-chasing to prepare for the film.

"Those guys are crazy in the sense of risking their lives in getting so close to that," Quale noted. "I'm one that likes to have an adrenaline rush and have fun, but, at the same time, I know my boundaries."

"If you had phoned and gone: 'Rich, there's a storm coming. We're going to chase it, would you come?' Of course, I would have been there," Armitage said. "And that must be what it's like. The phone goes in the middle of the night and there's a storm coming and we're going to go photograph it. Of course, you go."

So, they understand the psychology that drives some scientists and TV personalities to chase storms?

"It's like looking into the Medusa," Callies observed. "You can't take your eyes off them. They are so beautiful. They are deadly, but they are absolutely gorgeous. Maybe part of it is we live in a world that is so controlled. Our climate inside and our phones and everything, then along comes something that can level a 200-year-old city in 11 seconds. I think there is something primal in us that you just fall on your knees in front of it."

"It's plagues and pestilence. It is biblical," Armitage offered.

Quale also acknowledged that the popularity of the film Twister -- and even the more recent Sharknado TV movies -- suggests people love a good disaster movie.

"Of course, they are going to compare it to Twister, because Twister was a seminal film. But our film is a little different in the sense that it is a group of townspeople, a father and a storm chaser, and it's all these people getting together that have no common interest or no common connection and they just sort of bond and survive and live through it. So, it's more of this survival aspect as opposed to the just -- we're chasing it to try to capture the tornado [on film.] It's what they do and how they respond to live through it."

"There is no twist in our twister. There are no sharks in it," Armitage joked, referring to the Sharknado movies. "Although we've got a few ideas."

"Zombie-nados," Callies said, giving a nod to her former series The Walking Dead.

"And I just thought, maybe, orc-nados," chimed in Armitage, referencing the villains in his Hobbit trilogy. "There are infinite possibilities."

Co-starring Matt Walsh, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Arlen Escarpeta, Max Deacon, Jeremy Sumpter, Kyle Davis and Jon Reep, Into the Storm opens nationwide Friday.

Philippinisches Film-/Kinomagazin:

http://movies.inquirer.net/15023/the-ho ... -the-storm

Annie S. Alejo_MB ‏@TheAAList 2 Std.

@RAnetdotcom @IntoTheStormWB here's how it looks like in print (cropped)

Typischer Daily Hate Mail Fail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... Storm.html

‘Into the Storm’ Stars Recall Wet, Adrenaline-Filled Shoot at New York Premiere
August 5, 2014 | 03:22PM PT
Freja Dam

New York City couldn’t muster as much as a breeze at the world premiere of New Line Cinema’s cli-fi action thriller “Into the Storm” at the AMC Lincoln Square on Monday night. This was probably good for the attendance, since several of the movie’s stars made it clear they would drop everything and run after a tornado, should one come by.

“It would be a thrill. I’m definitely a chaser,” said Jeremy Sumpter, who plays Jacob, a cameraman in a team of stormchasers pursuing a deadly cyclone in the small town of Littleton to capture footage for a documentary.

Which is exactly what director Steven Quale would do. “I’d be right out there in the thick of things wanting to get the shot,” he told Variety. Shooting the movie was intense and adrenaline provoking, he said. He recalled filming a scene from a sinking platform while water rose to his head.

For Richard Armitage, who plays a high school vice-principal on a quest to save his teenage son, the most challenging moment was diving upside down into a tank of water to free his son. “I’m terrified of water,” he said.

“It was a lot of rain and a lot of wind,” summed up Alycia Debnam Carey of the two and a half months of shooting in Michigan. Wanting to convey realistic reactions, Quale showered the actors with effects and, at one point, had the production team throw balls of ice at them to simulate a hailstorm.

To heighten the authentic feeling, the movie is seen through the lenses of the storm-chasing cameramen and high school students documenting the tornado. The found footage, or “first person narrative,” as Quale called it, “gave a certain immediacy to it — a first hand experience directly from the actors’ point of views.”

For Matt Walsh, who plays what he characterized as “a jerk stormchaser whose life obsession is to shoot a tornado,” the physical challenges set the mood. “When somebody puts a fan on you that’s blowing 100 miles an hour, you feel like you’re in a tornado. It’s exhausting adrenaline-wise,” said the actor.

“There was very little acting required for a lot of those intense scenes,” added Nathan Kress, who plays Armitage’s youngest son, Trey. “We were encountering it first hand, and that kept the energy up. The whole thing was like a roller coaster.”

But kids, don’t try this at home. As real life stormchaser Ken Cole warned: “There are a lot of easier ways to find adrenaline than chasing storms. These tornadoes are extremely dangerous.”

'Storm' Troupers & Mr. Vengeance
Wednesday, August 6, 2014

By:
Stephen Schaefer

Friday’s INTO THE STORM boasts truly spectacular special effects as its twin tornadoes wreak all sorts of cinematic destruction on a single father, his two sons, a storm chasing video team and the two jolly idiots who follow that truck for cheap thrills. For director Steven Quale it’s a reminder of how nice it is to James Cameron as a friend - the Oscar-winning filmmaker came to see a rough cut of his movie and offered a few suggestions.

“What happened was way back Jim Cameron showed me a rough cut of TITANIC and I had a recommendation for the very end of the movie where the old woman throws the diamond,” said Quale who was a second unit director on that Oscar winning Best Picture and also worked on Cameron’s AVATAR. “Originally it was a group scene with Bill Paxton and half a dozen people joking and I said, ‘Why not have old Rose by herself?’ He thought it was a great idea and reshot the scene. For our film he loved it but he said. ‘It’s a great motif with the knife with Trey becoming a man so that at the very end Gary [Trey’s father] should give him the knife back and that completes his journey.’”

“James Cameron said the tornadoes were flawless visually but had one note with the knife and my dad giving me the knife back,” confirmed Nathan Kress who plays Trey at Manhattan’s London Hotel this past Monday. “We rebuilt the whole set and did it a year later. When you see that, that was coming from Cameron.”

Max Deacon plays Donnie, Trey’s endangered elder brother trapped by the tornado’s destruction in a pit of rising water. “For the scene where I’m saved from the water and my head almost came out of the structure, Cameron suggested they add a layer of water so I’m really submerged. I’d done a 10-hour session recording additional dialogue for it and then Steve comes in with a kiddie pool for me to really be underwater, to make it more realistic. What scared me was when he said to the crew, ‘We need to NOT waterboard him so he can make the sounds [he's just recorded].”

STORM’s troubled Dad, the Silverton High School veep Gary Fuller, is played by HOBBIT star Richard Armitage, the Tolkien series’ dashing Thorin Oakenshield. With the finale THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF FIVE ARMIES arriving Dec. 17, what’s his mood? “This Christmas is going to be a sad time,” he said. “It’s going to be a nostalgic time with six movies [the first three LORD OF THE RINGS] all set alongside each other and the end of 15 years’ work for Peter Jackson. It will be a big hurrah for him.” Does that mean then the rest of his life at HOBBIT fan conventions? “Possibly NOT!” he laughed.

As for INTO THE STORM’s appeal – why would an audience want to see this kind of destruction that’s so realistic? After all STORM is not a zombie thriller or some nonsensical TRANSFORMERS fantasy?

SARAH WAYNE CALLIES (who died so spectacularly on THE WALKING DEAD): “There is something powerful about the possibility of proxy. We’re watching our fellow Americans in the worst hour of their lives. It’s fascinating and you can't look away. A movie like this gives you the chance to look to your fill because it didn’t really happen. It gives you the distance to say it’s not real even though these exact circumstances happen to people.

ARMITAGE: “You need to have that human connection with the special effects and say, 'There but the grace of God go I.' It feels like it's happening to people. I also think we watch these films because we live in weird isolation of our own lives and people go to bed and say, ‘I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do that.’ I remember seeing footage in Christ Church in New Zealand [after a devastating earthquake that left people trapped in buildings turned to rubble] and that moved me to tears and that made me think, I may be that guy.”

QUALE: “It’s not the spectacle of the storm but how people react to it and how a community rises to the occasion and comes to understand what’s important in life. That’s the story I think people will get out of this movie. People love to follow the human story.”



“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”
You know a movie is a classic when it stands the test of time and in Park Chan-wook’s sublime, disturbing 2002 SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (Blu-ray, Palisades Tartan Video). The Korean Park is not nearly as well known as his compatriot Bong Joon-ho (SNOWPIERCER) but he’s a masterful filmmaker whose OLDBOY was recently remade by Spike Lee (to critical derision) and whose SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (2005) has been announced as a Charlize Theron English language vehicle. MR. VENGEANCE hits so many notes that reverberate even more strongly today it seems difficult to believe it was made 12 years ago. But the gore-filled drama --of a young factory worker poisoned by her work environment and in need of a kidney transplant, of her brother who is scammed in an organs for money scheme, of an employer who lays off workers and leaves them so desperate one despairingly attempts hari-kari in front of him -- says loudly that income inequality only gets worse when workers’ rights, when human rights are trampled. Park’s use of a green-haired hero who is a deaf mute adds a layer of grace to the proceedings and his shocking acts of violence never seem exploitative, despite going on for near 40 minutes at the end. The Blu-ray has loads of extras: An audio commentary with the director, critic Jonathan Ross on Park Chan-wook, a trailer, behind the scenes featurette, storyboards, soundtrack and “The Process of Mr. Vengeance.”

[...]

BM: While filming, you were with other amazing actors like Richard Armitage and Sarah Wayne Callies…what was that like for you?

NK: Honestly, at least in the beginning, it was very intimidating. “The Walking Dead” is one of my favorite shows so when I found out that I was working with Sarah I was freaking out. Then I learned that my character’s dad was going to be played by the “Dwarf King“ from “The Hobbit”, I had another little freak out because The Lord of the Rings is my favorite movie franchise. While I felt very under-equipped working with these great actors and actresses, they were so welcoming and helpful and really wanted to make a good project so everyone teamed up together to make something cool. I absolutely learned a lot from them and have recently gone on auditions where I would think to myself, ‘how would Richard say that?’ and it has affected the way that I’ve approached something. I definitely think that I’ve absorbed a bit of their styles and techniques, which has proven very beneficial.

[...]

A friend to help weather Storm
Sarah Wayne Callies was thrilled that her Into The Storm co-star Richard Armitage knows Walking Dead friend Andrew Lincoln


PUBLISHED ON AUG 10, 2014 1:35 PM





BY YIP WAI YEE
American actress Sarah Wayne Callies assumes all English actors know one other, she says.

She is being facetious, of course, but she hit the nail on the head when she discovered that her latest co-star, Richard Armitage, is in fact friends with her former The Walking Dead leading man, Andrew Lincoln.

Speaking to Life! in a telephone interview this week to promote her new movie, Into The Storm, in which she stars with Armitage, she says with a chuckle: "After Richard was cast, I called Andy (Lincoln) to ask about him and it turns out they really knew each other from when they did Strike Back (2010) together.

"Andy told me that Richard is such a gentleman and he's so talented and all that. Unbeknown to me, Richard had done the exact same thing about me to Andy."

Into the Storm

by Rick Kisonak | August 13, 2014
storm and drang: If you're in the mood for state-of-the-art destruction porn and nothing more, this Twister rip-off forecasts film fun.
storm and drang: If you're in the mood for state-of-the-art destruction porn and nothing more, this Twister rip-off forecasts film fun.
Let's be honest: They should've just called the thing Twisters. Because that's pretty much what this is — a rehash of the 1996 Bill Paxton-Helen Hunt effects-fest with fewer flying cows and more tornadoes. Way more.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some of the most enduring movies are about bad weather. I'm a total sucker for pictures like Twister, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Take Shelter and The Perfect Storm.

It's been almost 20 years since Philip Seymour Hoffman helped introduce audiences to the culture of storm chasing in Twister. Since then, CGI has gotten better, and global warming has gotten worse. So it probably was as good a time as any for Into the Storm.

Directed by Steven Quale (Final Destination 5) and scripted by John Swetnam, the film offers yet another example of the found-footage gimmick adding nothing to a movie besides forced situations in which someone has to be recording something so there can even be a movie. Can we all agree the whole found-footage thing is over? Thank you.

The story concerns the fateful intersection of two groups. The first is a team of storm trackers shooting a documentary about tornadoes. It's led by the mismatched pair of Pete (Matt Walsh from HBO's "Veep"), a guy who operates "on instinct"; and Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies from AMC's "The Walking Dead"), a meteorologist who prefers to rely on data and Dopplers.

When a freakishly strong front approaches a midwestern county, the pair bickers like an old married couple about where it's likely to make landfall. She wins, if you can call finding yourself in the middle of the deadliest weather pattern ever "winning."

The other group consists of no-fun father Gary (Richard Armitage from the Hobbit movies) and his two resentful sons. When the F5 shit hits the fan, one kid winds up trapped in a building reduced to rubble and rapidly filling with water, and the old man races the clock to save him à la Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow.

The filmmakers squeeze in perfunctory allusions to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. But they get the obligatory Look what man's done to the planet! stuff out of the way fast so they can devote as much of the film's 89-minute running time as possible to its real message: Wow, state-of-the-art funnel clouds wreaking state-of-the-art havoc look pretty freaking cool!

The dialogue may be laughable (I lost count of how many times somebody yelled, "We've got to get out of here!"), but, as meteorological monsters go, the movie's twisters are serious fun. As the picture progresses, they increase both in size and in all-out weirdness.

The third act is a natural-disaster jackpot that pays off with everything from a giant storm cell moving spiderlike through town on limblike vortices, to a gasoline-fueled column of swirling fire swallowing everything (and everyone) in its path, to a sequence at an airport where jumbo jets are lifted and hurled by 300-mph winds like paper planes.

As cinema, Into the Storm has minimal redeeming value. Its characters are generic, the direction is undistinguished and the acting is not about to earn anyone an invitation from James Lipton.

The tornadoes, by contrast, have star power to match their wind power. They are the Sir Laurence Olivier of twisters. The Marlon Brando of bad weather. The Errol Flynn of funnel clouds. The Elizabeth Taylor of typhoons. The Leo DiCaprio of inclement conditions.

This is a storm that's far from perfect. But adjust your expectations sufficiently and you just may have an experience that doesn't blow.

Into the Storm and the changing face of the disaster movie
By Simon Reynolds
Friday, Aug 15 2014, 09:30 BST


The disaster movie hits the next level a week from now with the release of Into the Storm, a drama that sees a tornado rip through a small American town on the day of high school graduation. Directed by James Cameron protégé Steven Quale, the film introduces the found footage aesthetic to a story of a father (Richard Armitage) desperately trying to save his son (Max Deacon). There are multiple perspectives juggled, too, notably a pair of redneck daredevils getting close to the action in a bid to make a viral video and a professional storm-chasing outfit led by Matt Walsh's documentary maker. Think of it as Twister turned up to 11.

"The journey all these characters go through, I was hoping to do that in a more intimate way to show a disaster as opposed to the wide, epic, sweeping shots that a cinematic movie would traditionally do," Quale tells Digital Spy.

Still, even on this smaller scale Into the Storm gives the audience something awe-inspiring to look at. Big things can have small beginnings, and truer words have never been spoken when it comes to this particular genre. In order to understand where it is now, you have to cast your eyes back to the very beginning and James Williamson's 1901 release Fire!. The short ran just under 5 minutes and showed firemen rescuing residents of a Hove home engulfed in flames. Since then, on-screen disasters - be they man-made or natural – have only gotten grander.

The sinking of the Titanic proved to be of particular interest to filmmakers - German film In Nacht und Eis opened in 1912, the year of the boat's sinking, and - moving out of the silent era - A Night to Remember captured the public's imagination in 1958.

The '50s and '60s also saw a genre surge, with films like Godzilla and The Day the Earth Caught Fire leaning on social anxieties of the time. Post-World War II and in the heart of the Cold War, the threat of global Armageddon felt all too real – this naturally fed back into the creative minds of Hollywood's finest, who pushed the disaster movie forward into the next two decades, with 1970's Airport leading the charge.

Irwin Allen earned the nickname the 'Master of Disaster' thanks to his early '70s hits The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, which brought marquee names into multiplex crowd-pleasers to lend a 'B' genre an air of credibility it'd lacked in years past. Producers even bent over backwards on Inferno to give both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman top billing. The poster credits have McQueen's name lower left and Newman's top right, giving the impression that both held equal movie star weight.

Quale has fond recollections of this particular film, it was one of his earliest cinema-going experiences and left a lasting impression. "One of the first movies I ever saw was The Towering Inferno and you see it now and it seems so corny and cheesy," he says. "Back in the day, it took me into this world, and I'll never forget seeing it.

"It takes place at night with all the fire, and then the movie's over and I walk out of the matinee with my family to the bright lights outside. I'm like, 'Wait a minute, I'm watching a movie and I thought it was night, but it's not, the movie's over and it's still daytime.' As a kid that made me realise how powerful movies can be."

Rapid strides in technology throughout the '80s and '90s meant that the disaster film hit a new level of visceral authenticity. CGI paved the way for Roland Emmerich (Allen's spiritual successor) to wreak havoc on a global scale in Independence Day, while James Cameron cast his eye back to the genre's formative years with his stunning CGI-aided recreation of the sinking of the Titanic in 1997.

Since the turn of the century, disaster films have gradually become bigger, louder and more intense. It seems like every contemporary blockbuster – be it a superhero epic, space adventure or robot war movie – welds a disaster movie element onto its climactic third act. With the traumatic images of the collapsing World Trade Center towers burned onto the psyche of cinema-goers, it's perhaps no surprise that Man of Steel's city-leveling climax and pretty much every recent Marvel film evoke that imagery for maximum impact.

"I felt that we couldn't compete with that because everything is so amazing and photo-realistic with the destruction of the buildings and all those superheroes," Quale said of going up against bigger-budgeted fare.

"I felt if anything, we toned down the level of destruction in our movie to make it believable in terms of what a real tornado would do. It destroys buildings and levels a path, but that's all based on reality."

With the latest VFX tools at their disposal, directors now have a blank canvas on which to paint mass destruction. This has resulted in bang-for-your-buck spectacle, but character and story have fallen dramatically by the wayside. Nobody remembers any moment of great drama or personal epiphany in a Transformers movie because Michael Bay is too busy playing with the latest digital toys.

This is where Into the Storm tries to do things differently. It returns the characters to the forefront of the action, using the found footage trope to anchor the story to something relatable as extraordinary events unfold. The impact is tangible – Quale's first-person perspective brings the viewer down to ground level for a "you are there" experience. Augmented by ear-ringing Dolby Atmos sound, the impact is felt full-force.

"We live in a digital world where everybody has a camera on their phone, so if there's any natural disaster or phenomenon, somebody's gonna be there to record it," Quale explains, adding that he empowered his cast by letting them shoot some of the action.

"We used every camera on the planet, practically. We had 14 different types of cameras, most of the film was shot with the ARRI Alexa which is a professional cinema camera because we were adding digital effects in the background so we had to use those cameras," he says.

"One of the cool things about the movie is that every actor that had a camera prop in the movie – that was a real camera that was photographing the images, and at least one shot from every actor operating the camera ended up in the film."

And why do we love the disaster movie? Quale has a very simple theory about living vicariously through big-screen entertainment. "I think audiences are fascinated with what terrifies them," he says. "There's a certain part of human nature, you want to see what it would be like to be right there in the eye of the storm.

"Many people are too afraid to go storm chasing and do it for real, so they go see a movie to get that experience and that sensation of living through it."

Into the Storm: The Review
Posted by Lisa-Marie Burrows On August 23, 2014 0 Comment
Richard Armitage and Sarah Wayne Callies star in the disaster movie.
Richard Armitage and Sarah Wayne Callies star in the disaster movie.
Director: Steven Quale

Starring: Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Matt Walsh, Max Deacon, Nathan Kress, Alycia Debnam-Carey

Running Time: 89 minutes.

Certificate: 12A.

What is the plot?

On graduation day at a local high-school, an unprecedented series of tornadoes touch down around the small town of Silverton. As locals like school vice-principal Gary Morris (Armitage) struggle to keep their families safe, storm chasers Pete (Walsh) and Allison (Callies) arrive to document the storm.

Review

Warner Bros., the studio that distributed TWISTER (1996) and THE PERFECT STORM (2000), has now released INTO THE STORM, about the biggest tornado of all time. The movie is directed by Steven Quale, who worked on the James Cameron blockbusters TITANIC and AVATAR and he is back once more putting his technical expertise to the test in this summer’s disaster movie.

The audience may not recognise or be familiar with the cast members, but it does star THE HOBBIT’s Richard Armitage, who is looking very normal after almost three years of seeing him on the big screen looking dwarf-like and hairy and Sarah Wayne Callies from THE WALKING DEAD who are part of a varied ensemble of cast members.

There is certainly no calm before this storm as tension between a local family starts the day off badly for deputy head teacher Gary (Armitage) and his two sons Donnie and Trey (Max Deacon and Nathan Kress) which the story initially centres around in the fictional Midwestern town of Silverton. Gary is a single father struggling to raise his two teenage sons after the tragic death of his wife, who is too preoccupied at work and the sons are rebellious.

Unbeknown to them, a storm is brewing and tornado chasers are in hot pursuit to catch footage of the biggest tornadoes the world has ever seen.

The meteorological team is headed by weather expert Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies) and storm chaser Pete (Matt Walsh). Most of the characters are chasing the storm with handheld cameras and a lot of the action is presented through their lenses. The found footage element of the film helps to create a documentary home video feel, as though the tornadoes are striking in real time.

Only at this point does the movie retain your attention after spending too long introducing many of the characters. Once the funnel clouds drop, Quale and his special effects team create some scarily realistic and frightening scenes. It seems no object is too small to be sucked up the giant beast of tornadoes with cars, trucks and even planes aplenty being thrown around as if they were weightless grains of sand.

From this point on, the action does not stop as the tornado chasers race against time to capture shots of the twisters and get inside the eye of the storm and for Gary, it’s a race against time to save his son, Donnie and his love interest (Alycia Debnam-Carey) who are trapped underground in a mill that begins flooding. As the two teenagers record emotional messages on their camera for their families as the prospect of death looms, the emotional reality of what can happen when a tornado strikes does hit home and no doubt could stir up emotional flashbacks for those who really have witnessed and survived a ferocious tornado or storm in real life.

Despite the multitude of great special effects, it’s good to see realistic situations have been used to create the action. Armitage in particular seems to have faced his fair share of extremities when filming, with a gigantic truck being dropped only feet away from him, he has been tied up to giant wires and blown around the street and jumped into a huge underground mill seeped in water. He definitely deserved his wages when making the film!

The storyline may not blow you away (sorry, I couldn’t help it!), but the realistic special effects are a sight to behold.

What’s great about the film?

There are formidable technical achievements in the film and it’s nice to see less familiar faces take up the roles within the movie.

What’s wrong with it?

It takes too long for the action to start. The movie spends too much time introducing characters for the first twenty minutes or so of the movie.

Verdict

★★★

INTO THE STORM shows off some spectacular and realistic special effects. It does exactly what it says on the tin. If you’re after a movie that focuses on a meteorological disaster that is doused with special effects, then this is the film to watch.

Here is the trailer to tempt you…

Into the Storm
Into the Storm review – an idiotic movie that flips jumbo jets like ninepins
Steven Quale's extreme weather drama sets forth as a found-footage thriller – then decides to lose the plot altogether
2 out of 5

Xan Brooks

The Observer, Sunday 24 August 2014
Jump to comments (3)
into the storm review
Disaster drama Into the Storm: 'Bullish special effects wreak havoc with the narrative.' Photograph: AP
Tornadoes have scant respect for reputations. In Steven Quale's idiotic disaster movie, they come lolloping across the midwest, one after another, scattering meteorologists and meatheads, teenage sweethearts and documentary film-makers alike. The weather is flipping jumbo jets like ninepins, spinning school buses like tops. The one thing it can't ruffle, apparently, is Richard Armitage's foursquare teacher, who toils through the elements to save his son from a flooded industrial park. All around, meanwhile, the film's bullish special effects are wreaking havoc with the narrative.

Into the Storm sets forth as a found-footage thriller before losing its thread and then doubling back on itself in abject disarray. "Are you having fun yet?" shouts a gung-ho cameraman as the first twister rolls in. This is going to get worse before it gets better.