Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald

INTO THE STORM is a really bad movie in terms of story, characters, and dialogue. Movie and spectacle wise it’s a piece of solid entertainment and is well worth watching. I’m tagging it as a “popcorn” movie and think others might enjoy it as well.

The story isn’t much: a team of storm chasers visits a small Midwestern town at the same time that the local high school is having its outdoor graduation ceremony. Giant tornadoes hit. Who dies? Who survives?

That’s about it as far as the story goes. Technically though the special effects and set design in this movie are about as good as they get. Remember the scene in War of the Worlds where Tom Cruise and kids go into a suburban McMansion’s basement on a sunny day and come out the next after the house and neighborhood have been devastated by crashed Boeing 747 airliner?

Once thing got started in this movie everything is like that. Streets, houses, and buildings get chewed up, vehicles go whirling across the sky, and shelters with cowering terrified people get their roofs torn off.

It’s a real nightmare despite the plastic nature of the characters and their cliché relationships. And the devastation is humanized. This is not just one more big city with skyscrapers being torn apart by Marvel or Transformer characters fighting. This is a human scale small town surrounded by cornfields getting smashed by Mother Nature in scenes that are becoming depressingly more common as our climate continues to change for the worse.

Review copyright (c) 2015 by Dennis D. McDonald