baathist wavily: Documentary Review: Tornado Alley

: Tornado Alley presents a realistic journey following two separate groups as they chase and investigate tornadoes and their genesis. - Tornado Alley

With its dull driving sequences & abrupt ending, Tornado Alley's potentially interesting investigation into tornado genesis ultimately seems a bit pointless

In the documentary Tornado Alley we are introduced to two separate groups of storm chasers. The first is led by the documentary's director, Sean Casey, an IMAX film maker, who for the past 8-years has been following his dream of filming the inside of a tornado.

The second group consist of scientists from the The Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 (VORTEX2) research project, led by Joshua Wurman, Karen Kosiba and Don Burgess. They aim to obtain more information on how a tornado is born so as to increase tornado warning times and save lives by giving locals more time to evacuate.

The documentary begins with both groups sharing the same road on the way to a forming tornado, but they soon go their separate ways across Tornado Alley, an area in the U.S where up to three quarters of the world's tornadoes occur. This area is generally considered to include Oklahoma, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, Nebraska, eastern South Dakota, and eastern Colorado.

Casey's objective sees him driving around Tornado Alley in his 14,000 tonne homemade tank known as the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV), which has an armoured steel shell, bullet proof windows and a maximum speed of 100mph. On top of the vehicle is a military-style filming turret, which allows Casey to shoot footage in a 360 degree angle. The TIV is truly an impressive sight and is arguably the most interesting element in the documentary.

Compared to Casey's one vehicle and three-man team, the VORTEX 2 team appear vastly different, showing possibly hundreds of team members and using a massive fleet of vehicles. VORTEX 2's Doppeler on Wheels (DOW) ? a truck mounted with a massive Doppler weather radar ? is the vehicle that appears most prominently throughout the documentary after Casey's TIV, and allows the scientists to scan tornadoes and create 3-D maps of wind and debris.

The feature is narrated by actor Bill Paxton, who does a fairly good job, though he does often sound bored by the events taking place in the documentary.

The Storm Chasers Take You on a Ride

From the beginning to the the end of the documentary, the audience follows the storm chasers while they're on the road. We're given basic information on the technology they're using but there's no explanation or interpretation of the images appearing on their computer screens that appear regularly throughout the feature.

We receive a little information on Casey and his back story, but the documentary doesn't do the same for the head VORTEX2 scientists, who spend a lot of time on screen but other than their job titles, we know nothing about their backgrounds, experiences or personal stories.

Rather than providing information on the science or history of tornado genesis, the audience are instead treated to constant footage of the VORTEX 2 lead scientists instructing their team members, followed by plenty of scenes of vehicles driving. While this may give an accurate picture of what storm chasing involves, it doesn't really make for an interesting watch.

About two or three tornadoes appear throughout the documentary and there is some pretty shocking, imagery of the devastation that a twister can cause in an urban area. Though this footage appears rarely and doesn't last long, it does make for a nice break from all the vehicle sequences. The documentary also does a nice job of showing us how bad weather conditions can be when in the vicinity of a tornado, as researchers approaching tornadoes are required to drive with almost no visibility and are impeded by roads that have totally flooded.

The Presentation

In Melbourne the documentary screened exclusively at IMAX. Seeing the documentary on the world's third largest screen however added nothing to the experience of viewing Tornado Alley, as there's very rarely awe inspiring footage that would be a ?must see? on the big screen.

3-D effects in recent documentaries such as Born to Be Wild and Hubble 3-D worked well, because there was always the perception of people, animals, planets etc. coming off the screen. However in Tornado Alley there's no real 3-D effects, despite audience members being required to wear 3-D glasses throughout the feature. There's no part of Tornado Alley where the audience may perceive gimmicky 3-D effects, such as the people in the documentary reaching into the audience or debris from the tornado flying out of the screen into the cinema.

In fact it didn't take long for me to forget that the movie was actually in 3-D, and I only remembered this after the documentary's end when I was required to take off the 3-D glasses while leaving the cinema.

The Payoff

Towards the end of this 45 minute feature we see Casey drive the TIV into a tornado. Unfortunately what the documentary has largely been leading up to, ends up being lackluster as the footage only lasts for about a minute and the tornado's interior appears as little more than fierce winds blowing.

The tornado scanned by VORTEX2 in the documentary provided them with data on its entire life cycle, including data captured 20 minutes before the tornado formed. It is said to be the most intensely examined tornado in human history but will take years until the results become evident. Unfortunately this means that after 45 minutes of following VORTEX2's expedition, the audience are not really given any information about their findings on tornado genesis. All we're told was that the mission was successful.

Conclusion

Tornado Alley has an interesting concept, following two separate groups' expeditions to get to the heart of the tornado, either by driving into the middle of one or by investigating its formation. It succeeds in presenting a realistic journey of these two separate groups and showing how they operate, but this is also were it becomes a little dull. Thanks to Hollywood the general public have associated storm chasing with suspense when in reality it usually consists more of experts surrounding it with sensors and scanning the twister from a safe distance as is represented in the documentary. There's very little suspense within the feature, with the only memorable exception being where the TIV team are chased down the road by a tornado.

The documentary may have been a little more interesting if they had further discussed theories and research on tornado genesis or given us more insight into the personal stories of the lead researchers, rather than solely relying on continuous footage of vehicles driving towards tornadoes.

It's definitely not a bad documentary as it seems to provide a fairly good insight into the journeys of thrill-seeking and scientific storm chasers. However Tornado Alley's biggest problems are that it can be consistently dull and fails to educate the audience with any new information on tornadoes and their genesis, even though half the documentary follows VORTEX2's mission to capture data and increase understanding on these issues. As the results of the TIV expedition were visually lackluster and the findings of VORTEX2 team were inconclusive by the end of the feature, it all ends on sort of a sour note.

Paul Campobasso - I live in Melbourne, Australia and recently graduated from university completing a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Politics and a ...