Tornado Alley
A storm builds slowly in the distance. Bill Paxton’s time-weathered voice gropes its way lazily into hearing distance as the dark clouds come ever closer. Finally, the blue skies overhead turn brown as an enormous twister overtakes you.
What’s going on?
It may be a drama, you decide. There’s certainly enough evidence for that. Our heroes, the researchers of the storm-chasing mission Vortex 2, have all the cheeriness that naturally comes before a horrific but stoic fall from the very behemoths they pursue. Sean Casey (who also acts as the director and 1st unit cinematographer), building his gargantuan Tornado Intercept Vehicle—a 10-ton Dodge with bulletproof windows and armor plating—accepts his burden bravely, claiming, “This is my life now.” But no, it can’t be. After all, you can hear Paxton echoing out over the theater like some gritty cowboy’s ghost. You can hear what’s going on. This film, approached so clearly like something akin to the beginnings of a Titanic of tornado obsession, is a documentary.
While visually astounding, Tornado Alley (the film’s title and setting) provides little in the way of information, leaving you instead to watch in amazement as Casey dons a motorcycle helmet and makes his way, with his trusty TIV (short for the mentioned Vehicle), into the abyss. You must view with great hope the Vortex 2 (or V2) team goes forth to discover new ways to find earlier warning times for cyclones. However, there is no great, dramatic ending, just repeated disappointment. V2 never gets up to much of anything at all. They sit around and hope they’ve captured something useful while far, far away from any danger, but you never find out if they have. The film ends with hope, hope, hope, cross your fingers for the team, and that’s disappointing for any film, even a nonfiction one.
Meanwhile, Casey is planning to get video footage from inside a tornado with the help of a driver/scientist and a Navy medic. The fact that he’s doing this solely for thrill somehow takes away any connection between you and the filmmaker. He fails in his mission repeatedly, and when he finally succeeds (anchoring the TIV to the ground and crouching at its skylight with a camera), it’s not very impressive. The storm he chose was small and passed over him in under a minute. The footage itself was nowhere near as spectacular as the rest of the film.
And yes, the film is spectacular, optically, that is. Because the tornado in itself is so majestic, one is willing to sit in the LeFrak Theater for 45 minutes solely to be taken in by the breathtaking view. (Tornado Alley is also playing in New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center and other museums around the country—check online for show times near you.) Occasionally you can watch storms approach in time-lapse, and that’s the most beautiful of all. To view the clouds advance like a wave, floating slowly toward the screen is a good time in itself. No one can fault Sean Casey; he is, after all, a great cinematographer, and he can’t help it if his personal story isn’t significantly filmic.
All in all, Tornado Alley is not an informative film, simply a mildly enjoyable one if you go by sight. And while the storm-chasers may not seem to care about the damage the monstrous beings they love do, Casey is compassionate enough to show the aftermath of a horrible squall in a Texas town. This moment is the one in the film where it is shown that perhaps these characters, appearing so flat and emotionless, are empathetic after all. And somehow, to the viewer, that is deeply satisfying.
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