Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I very keenly remember the teaser publicity for this movie. It may be the first movie I remember being aware of the advertising for as it was happening. Everyone was talking about the flying cow. Some time later, I realized I didn’t actually know what the story was about, because all I’d seen was a scary tornado. The only answer I ever got was “stormchasers”. Even for people who run toward the tornado, I can’t really think how you’d get drama out of that beyond “here we go into the storm again”.

After watching the movie:

When she was a child, Jo’s family farm was destroyed by a tornado powerful enough to sweep her father away. Now she’s a meteorologist heading a team of stormchasers. Bill, her ex-husband, comes out to her team’s base to get her to sign the divorce papers quickly so he can get married to his new fiancée Melissa and get on with his new life as a TV weatherman. Jo claims the reason she never sent the papers back was to get him to come out and see the finished “Dorothy” device based on his idea, a remote weather station pod designed to be left directly in the path of a tornado and release a payload of hundreds of sensors to finally collect crucial data on what happens inside the vortex that could be the basis of vast improvements in early warning systems. As a massive storm system starts up, Jo’s team rushes to catch some data before Jo has a chance to give Bill the signatures he needs, and in chasing after them, he gets swept up in the excitement of his old life, and Melissa is also interested in what’s going on until it gets too real. Meanwhile, also on the scene is Jonas Miller, an ex-colleague and corporate-backed rival eager to announce to the media his unique breakthrough vortex sensor pod DOT-3, but the biggest threat out there is the weather itself.

It seems implausible to me that a storm system can last in the same area for days and generate tornados within a few hours’ drive of each other so someone determined to meet them could run from tornado to tornado, but I don’t really have a big enough picture of how these storm cells work over a large area rather than what they mean for the specific place you are. Much like the Midwest, nobody seems to really agree on where Tornado Alley is. Growing up, I was told that Indiana was definitely part of it, but lately I’ve been seeing definitions that exclude it and do include Texas, which doesn’t seem right at all. Anyway, this is across Oklahoma and Kansas and I’ll certainly grant they have more serious worries about tornados than Indiana did, but I still feel like this “record breaking” storm system is significantly inflated over what can actually happen in service of having four or five good confrontations with the wind (as heavily telegraphed by how many Dorothys the team starts with)

Jonas feels like way too much of an afterthought. His subplot goes nowhere, he’s never really in danger of deploying his flying sensor gear before our heroes, and he’s generally crowded out by the tornado action and relationship drama. The subplot about whether or not Dorothy would work is also underdeveloped. They get maybe one actual good attempt that fails and then figure out what was missing for their last try, which is something I spotted immediately when they introduced the concept.

The story is absolutely trope-heavy, but the plot is just what keeps it interesting between going another round with the tornado. Just because you can see the track the roller coaster is on doesn’t make it less fun. The main disappointment of the writing for me was how much exposition had to be delivered at high speed by pure pipe-laying dialogue in the first ten or fifteen minutes, and mostly by Paxton, who couldn’t manage to save it. It’s also disappointing that after Melissa has served her purpose of being Bill’s reason to come back into this situation and ask all the questions the audience needs explained, she turns on a dime from “I’ll go along, it’s interesting” to “you people are insane and I’m leaving before you get me killed”. But at least she faces her narrative superfluity with a dignity and maturity that I’m not sure is unusually healthy or unusually “we don’t have time in the script for this to blow up like normal so we’ll just cut it off cleanly”.

This is a movie about getting too close to tornados, and it delivers on that very handily. The visuals are very effective. The plot for delivering them maybe less so, but I don’t know how better to build a movie around going five rounds with an angry sky. We’ll always have the flying cow.