I’ve been wanting to see this movie ever since I saw its preview, in which a gigantic tornado devastates a small town.  In the preview, and in the film, the tornado hits an airport and lifts huge airliners into the air, tossing them about like toys.  And then I wondered how a small town has an airport large enough to support 747s.

That’s the problem with the movie, which really isn’t very good.  It isn’t consistent. Much of the story is told from video camera perspective, as though the local teens are simply recording everything they see, but then other shots are of the more traditional omnipotent approach.  The story takes place on a high school graduation day in Silverton, Oklahoma, where they ought to be accustomed to big wind.  The locals take everything in stride, but they are about to be sorely tested.  Storm chasers arrive with their fancy equipment and personal issues, and even they have no idea what is about to be unleashed.  And everyone will have to work together to survive.

Let’s face it, anyone who goes to see this movie is going for the special effects. They will not be disappointed.  Several bouts of tornadoes pummel the town, culminating in a massive F-5 that wipes out everything it touches (but, oddly, is less menacing than all the others because it looks like it’s moving in slow motion).  The cardboard characters do whatever they have to in order to survive, and some of them do not. The town is smashed to splinters around them in an orgy of destruction.  The special effects are generally impressive, with some of them being astonishing.  When I left the theater I looked up at the sky and saw clouds; my instinct was to go back inside and hide, so the movie had done its job.

Because of its telefilm level dramatics and insistence that teenagers be the main focus this is not and will never be great cinema.  It is watchable, but sometimes just barely so, as when it focuses on two moronic daredevil-types who follow the storm hunters around.  Occasionally it is jaw-dropping, as when a cameraman is sucked into a fiery tornado and spins, flaming away, to his doom.  The film is an onslaught of the senses, just as real tornadoes are, and its scenes of staged damage are a realistic representation of actual areas destroyed by these whirling prairie monsters.  This is really a guilty pleasure, like most disaster movies, yet one which will remain in my mind for a while, despite its other problems.  ☆ ☆.  14 August 2014.