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Parents' Guide to

Into the Storm

By Sandie Angulo Chen, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Disaster pic has intense storm sequences but so-so plot.

Movie PG-13 2014 89 minutes
Into the Storm Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

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age 12+

Based on 5 parent reviews

MarvelDAD
MarvelDAD Parent of 9 and 11-year-old
May 7, 2021
age 8+

good

great

This title has:

Too much violence
Raritysfans
Raritysfans Adult
August 27, 2020
age 12+

Be blown away

Time passes and as summer ends it is hurricane and tornado season, as 2014 was a real life natural disaster for Blockbuster cinema with flop after flop. Disaster movie ahead of it´s time with mindblowing VFX and lots of feelings. No need for an 12 time Oscar just good enough for an watch in the Weekend with the nerds. In consumerism lots of gadgets and violence of course the star the scary tornados.

This title has:

Too much violence
Too much sex
Too much consumerism
See all 5 parent reviews

What's the Story?

INTO THE STORM is a disaster film about filming disasters. Documentarian Pete (Matt Walsh) leads a five-person storm chasing unit: He drives a reinforced "Titus" tank that should withstand 170 mile-per-hour wind gusts, while meteorologist Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies) rides in a van with all of her satellite equipment. Desperate to get footage from right inside a storm, Pete pushes Allison to predict where the next tornado will hit, and she suggests heading to Silverton, Oklahoma. There, high-school junior Donnie (Max Deacon) is filming time capsule footage with his younger brother, Trey (Nathan Kress), as an end-of-the-year project for his emotionally distant dad, Gary (Richard Armitage), the school's assistant principal. When Donnie's long-time crush, Kaitlyn (Alycia Debnam Carey), needs help shooting a video internship application, he sneaks off with her to an old mill at exactly the same time as the first tornado heads to the school. After the first storm, Allison and Pete are astounded to see multiple additional tornadoes headed toward town, while Gary and Trey attempt to find and rescue Donnie and Kaitlyn, who are trapped underneath debris. As the storms keep coming, the storm chasers have to decide between profitable footage and possibly their lives.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (5 ):
Kids say (11 ):

Audiences looking for the most jump-worthy storm sequences since Twister are in for some killer, genuinely gasp-worthy moments with Into the Storm. Because there are multiple tornadoes, there are plenty of harrowing, catastrophic scenes of the twisters touching down, plowing through neighborhoods, and sucking up everything from cars and planes to people (of course). Distracting from all the devastation is comic relief provided by two drunk yokels who think that if they follow the actual storm chasers around recording the storms with their phones, they'll score instant YouTube celebrity. It's not so funny when characters start getting killed, but these disaster movies apparently need all the laughs they can get -- like a throwaway one-liner about the aftermath looking like a zombie apocalypse, a wink-wink joke directed at Callies' devoted Walking Dead fans.

There's not much of a plot here beyond "storm chasers head to a town suffering from a day of awful back-to-back storm systems," but at least the performances are all up to the task. Armitage, best known as the severe dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy, is possibly the fittest high-school assistant principal ever and a believably righteous dad who will stop at nothing to save his sons; Callies is the level-headed foil to Walsh's greedy filmmaker, who seems to care more about tornado footage than possible casualties, and the young actors do their best to seize the moment, however doomed it might be for everyone else. Some laughable plot details might be hard for adults to overlook, but once the storms hit, you'll be too busy oohing and ahhing (or closing your eyes) to care.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the type of violence in a natural disaster movie versus that in war or sci-fi/superhero action movies. Are deaths and devastation scarier when they're caused by weather phenomena than by humans, aliens, or superheroes?

  • There's a lot of language in Into the Storm, but people are in life or death situations; does that make the language more believable or excusable, or is it unnecessary?

  • What makes for a good disaster film? How does this movie compare to similar movies?

Movie Details

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