Alien Tornado (2012)

Simply Perfect

It is a performances centric movie

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This film could have been good. Instead we got another SYFY movie. The whole idea of Aliens is always great and having Aliens control our weather (and tornadoes) is a really fun concept to play with. Aliens controlling tornadoes to say destroy big areas to lay foot for a bigger plan. Like the city destroyers in independence day, the tornadoes could level whole cities and towns and then the real aliens could land.

Giving a bad review to a SyFy movie is not really a challenge. It's so blatantly obvious thing to do that one has to think twice if it is even worth the time to type the bashing these films more often than not deserve. I'm beginning to feel like this is SyFy's strategy: keep churning out junk under the guise of light entertainment, because there are enough people that kinda enjoy passing their time watching these films and then there are those, like myself, who end up watching these in hopes something has changed.Nothing has changed here. The images and the characters both are flat, the CGI is sub-par, and the script would again benefit from proofreading. Not that I don't trust the writers' English skills, but maybe a few more brains in the works would help in creating more passable builds of suspense, more pronounced motivations for characters etc. You know, a bit more oomph than tornadoes that are of alien origin coupled with the stock characters one can expect in such circumstances.I've seen worse acting, and I've spent my time more foolishly, but to say that seeing a certain film is NOT the stupidest thing one can do is not really a compliment, now is it?

The usual silliness from the SyFy Channel. Jeff Fahey - who remains a solid, dependable stalwart of an actor, as always - plays a farmer who has to contend with tornadoes on his land. Except, of course, this being a sci-fi movie after all, these weirdly glowing tornadoes are actually electrified extraterrestrials! Yes, it's as silly and as cheesy as you'd imagine from the title and premise, a film packed full of terrible special effects and worse acting. Aside from the aforementioned Fahey, viewers are treated to Kari Wuhrer (who looks like she's a fan of plastic surgery) as a glamorous stormchaser and David Jensen (complete with whiny voice) as a leader of some nefarious government agents also out hunting the aliens.The action, when it occurs, is invariably disappointing, because the producers just don't have the budget to do justice to the premise. So viewers are left laughing along at the premise and enjoying the mildly diverting adventures. Yes, this is terrible, but also terribly inoffensive with it - just your average B-movie fun.

I saw the previews for this movie on the Syfy channel a few days ago and thought it was going to be a really good movie to watch considering that they viewed all of the action parts. Turns out that this movie was a complete letdown.First of all, let us focus on the good parts of the movie:The design for the alien tornadoes was pretty interesting, emitting a bright green glow. They also have the power to shoot lightning bolts from the spinning vortex and grab running pedestrians with funnel-like tentacles and carry them beyond the clouds.The destruction of the city is pretty cool, especially when the scoreboard from the Chicago baseball stadium flies right into your face before a commercial break.Well, that's pretty much it for the good parts, now onto the bad ones, and trust me there are a lot. I structured them into a few categories.Characters:Most of the characters that we encounter are hardly even learned about. All we know is Judd who possibly lost his wife in a twister four years ago, Kelly is a farm girl who brushes horses and is the first girl in the family to get an opportunity to go to college(she wants to be a scientist and is basically the heroine of the movie), Gail is a scientist who frequently reports daily news on her website and is a storm chaser, Norm who is a county sheriff that is trying to do his job, some woman who rides a moped and is Gail's number one fan, and that's it.Everybody else is just so faint and unrecognizable. These actors ceased to make me feel like some people are important, however I felt that the actor who played the cop and the actress who played Shelly were more credible.Plot:The plot is just ridiculous. After an hour into the movie I had no idea what the hell was happening. There are so many questions that are unanswered. What exactly happened to their mother (yes, it was probably a twister "back in 2008"?) Who are these bosses that Armstrong keeps referring to? Why are the aliens attacking in the first place, and how do they exist in Earth's clouds? After the aliens were sent back, what happened to those who were sent up in the clouds, are they supposed to be raining down? WHERE DID THEY GO?Special effects:As before, this was probably the only thing that made this movie watchable but at the same time it barely shows anything being destroyed, especially during the farm scene in the beginning when it is first revealed.Concept:By using the power of technology to transmit signals in order to communicate with aliens "in the clouds," humanity has the ability to cease utter and apocalyptic destruction from several F5 tornadoes, with winds up to 350 miles per hour, instead of the most humane thing which is hiding inside a house's basement to prevent serious injury (Armstrong even says this in the movie).Lessons:The lessons in this movie are horrible: -leaving your child abandoned near a bridge -promising to save money for your daughter's college fund and instead use it to cover property insurance for a twister that previously hit four years ago, then telling it to her when it's already too late -trusting nobody that can possibly stop the chaos -getting into a car with a stranger (it was even SAID IN THE MOVIE)References:I can't believe the worker for the Channel 37 news station (I think he was Terry) compared the destruction and collapse of buildings to the real-life terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. Are you serious?! Whoever wrote the script for this movie took it a little too far.Conclusion:This movie is horribly confusing and boring. The only remarkable thing that was interesting, like I said before, were the effects but that was just a minor improvement. This movie is as terrible and boring as Triassic Attack, but 2012: Ice Age and Polar Storm on the other hand were slightly better in my opinion. This is the kind of movie one would watch if you want to punish and bore yourself to death. Stick to other movies instead.