Atomic Twister (2002)

Really Surprised!

Overrated

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It's only meant to be just another TV fast food disaster of the week; made even cheaper than a Big Mac. But, come on. There's a whirl wind of plot contrivances, and all scientific accuracy gets swept up into the funnel cloud in the opening scene."It'll make Chernobyl look like a fire-cracker!" This is one of many woeful utterings by the hamburger cooks--I mean: power plant operators trying to prevent a melt-down. The supervisor can't decide if she wants to save the world, or find her dumb kid who wanders off (yes that tired routine). Fire hoses fill a melt-down pool or something. A trucker with needed supplies drives the wrong way. Tornadoes. And a cop who seems to be everywhere. The old diesel machine bit: comical.The cast try, but the script makes Chernobyl look like a fire-cracker. Still, good for some laughs.

Since this film was a product made for the Science Fiction channel you would expect to have all kinds of unearthly creatures from space or newly rediscovered earth monsters in it. For Atomic Twister you would be wrong.The title is terribly misleading. No monsters arise from a tornado. A tornado is the cause of things, in fact a couple of them hit a nuclear power plant creating all kinds of problems for acting director of the facility Sharon Lawrence.The plot is completely ripped off from both The China Syndrome and the real life Three Mile Island near disaster from 1979. In many ways Atomic Twister is a throwback to the disaster films of the Seventies.Stars Sharon Lawrence, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Corbin Bernson give decent performances in a disaster film that has all the standard clichés of same. Still it's an unusual product from the Science Fiction network and easy to take.

I thought it might be from the 'Airplane' stable and expected Leslie Nielson to suddenly appear to check out the reactor with his stethoscope. Admittedly, it was made for TV so we don't expect Hitchcock or Spielberg, nor do we expect quality performances but this film was sunk by cliché, incoherent direction, wooden acting and afternoon soap-opera production values. At every crisis, when we are told everything will go critical in three minutes, we are diverted to another lengthy scene with sloppy, sentimental kids and policemen overcoming their past personality disorders, termagant truckers and 'authority' being challenged. The three minutes must have been up twelve times and counting in the second reel - but this director managed to remove any potential for tension by flabby timing, irrelevant digressions and unintentional humour arising, I suspect, out of a complete lack of empathy with the subject. The cast run about like hysterical hens - even Homer Simpson makes a more convincing safety officer - the technology is plain daft - the dialogue and action is drenched in the sort of syrupy saccharine emotion which seems to dominate the American film industry - and, of course they all 'lurve' each other at the end- The house collapses but the corpse's makeup is intact and the little boy finds his crash helmet before he takes his bicycle out on the freeway! One of the cast prays at the end and so, I suspect, does the producer!

This movie is a real stinker. I studied nuclear engineering in college and if they would have had me on the set I would have slapped the writer of this screenplay. Some of the major problems as I remember them:The plant seems to have been built in the last few years, with a new computerized control room and satellite phones and all this silliness - no new nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. in 25 years (sadly).A tornado would do absolutely no damage to a nuclear power plant, or at least no damage to any of the critical components. The critical components of a nuclear power plant (the core itself, coolant pumps, the primary coolant loop (in a PWR), backup generators) are located inside a containment dome that is METERS thick - even an F5 wouldn't touch them - in fact, the people inside would have no idea they had been hit. The control room and the important components of the plant are run on the power the plant produces and in the event of a shutdown by backup diesel generators. The backups have backups which have backups. The possibility of a strong enough tornado hitting the backup gens and knocking them out is nil. The plant did not shut down as it would have done automatically. Whenever a nuclear power plant is damaged in any way the computer shuts it down with absolutely no operator input required in a matter of seconds. In the movie the lines that took power from the plant to homes were knocked down - this would have resulted in a load rejection to the generators which would have "tripped" (automatically shutdown) the turbines and the reactor. There is never any need to communicate with the NRC while running a reactor and the NRC has no remote control room. They don't control reactors at all - the companies that own them control them. The NRC licenses and inspects for safety.At the end of the movie the spent fuel pool is being uncovered and the firefighters have to pump water into it to save the town. Bull. Spent fuel just isn't hot enough to continually boil away water. And the pumps that cool the reactor also cool the pool (in most cases). In any case, the spent fuel pool and it's entire cooling apparatus are INSIDE the enormous containment dome and could never have been damaged by a twister - much less have had a gaggle of firefighters standing over it with a door to the outside just a few yards away. IF the pool would have gotten as close as it did to being uncovered (I believe a few inches) the firefighters would have received a lethal dose of radiation from the spent fuel because there would not be enough of a water barrier to stop the gamma rays produced by decaying Uranium and other "nuclear ash".Running a nuclear reactor with four people is impossible. Period. Reactors don't run on "skeleton crews".Things like electric cooling pumps just can't be turned off willy-nilly. No reactors use diesel cooling pumps as their primary system.