2) Sharknado
Sharknado is one of those movies that is so extremely bad that it’s good. I personally love the film, because it basks in the awfulness of everything. I haven’t seen Sharknado 2: The Second One yet due to time and cable restrictions, but I’ve heard it’s just as ridiculously hilarious as the first. While a hurricane hasn’t actually ever struck Los Angeles, the premise itself isn’t exactly unusual. Hurricanes can and do form in the Eastern Pacific ocean and have travelled up the coast of the Baja Peninsula. It would be a little unusual to see a hurricane get all the way to LA without at least dissipating to a tropical storm, but it’s not completely unheard of. What I can’t figure out is where the hurricane is through the entire movie. They show maps and charts on the television of this epic hurricane, but where is the wind? Where is the torrential rain? WHERE ARE THE TORNADOES? Oh… wait. There are plenty of tornadoes. Tornadoes with sharks, even! But let’s back up to those other two questions. In order for a storm to be considered a category 1 hurricane, winds have to be sustained at 74 mph or greater. There should have been at least a little destruction from the wind alone.
And the tornadoes. Don’t get me wrong. Tornadoes do occur in hurricanes. That is not the issue here. But how realistic is the tornado picking up sharks? There have actually been reported instances of small fish, frogs, and crayfish falling from the sky in areas where tornadoes occurred near the Gulf Coast. But those are all relatively small fish. It would take a lot more wind power to lift a shark—let alone thousands of them. And if the storm is strong enough to lift sharks, why isn’t it lifting other heavy objects as well? Considering there are three separate tornadoes occurring over LA at the exact time time, the entire town should be suffering from destructive winds from both the tornadoes and the hurricanes. Yet the buildings sit there looking relatively unharmed.
And don’t even get me started on dissipating a tornado with a bomb…
1) Into the Storm
All of these other films were bad, but I definitely think that the new movie Into the Storm takes the cake. This movie is so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to enjoy it. I have never heard the term “hook echo” so abused. But ignoring the fact that the film itself is terrible, let’s get started with the science. Again we encounter debris magically flying around the people and not hitting them. Even small debris can be deadly when you’re as close to the tornadoes as these people are. Pete (Matt Walsh), the videographer, even gets hit with debris at one point and manages to get up and into his vehicle without any problems. With the speed at which the debris was moving, he should have at least broken his leg. The tornado hunters’ armored vehicle, though, was fairly accurately portrayed. Sean Casey, a well-known filmmaker and star of Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers, is clearly the basis for this character and the car. Casey’s tornado intercept vehicle (TIV) is almost copied exactly for the design of Pete’s “Titus.”
One of the first things I noticed, though, was Allison’s (Sarah Wayne Callies) tricked out van. I openly laughed every time they showed her meteorological set-up. Yes, it would be awesome to have a van like that, but what in the world did they even have on the screens? Where was the Storm Prediction Center page? Why was the radar looping backwards? Where were all of the other meteorological programs that my storm chaser friends use? Why was she relying on other meteorologists’ forecasts? It seemed like they just filled the screens with a bunch of mumbo jumbo to make it look like she knew what was going on. The radar images really bugged me, though. It’s not hard to find old radar data from scans. I’ve done it before. I even know a meteorologist who can take old radar data and overlay it over different maps of the US to make it appear that the storm happened elsewhere. It’s not hard. And why does she keep using paper maps? It is 2014, Allison. GPS is a thing. Pete goes into detail about the instruments included on his armored vehicle and mentions a potentiometer. While that may not seem like that big of a deal, a potentiometer has literally nothing to do with weather. It’s essentially an adjustable voltage divider. Sorry, Pete. That’s not going to help you get any data. And for crying out loud, storm drains and underpasses are just about the worst possible place to take shelter from a tornado. Just about the only truly entertaining thing about this film was laughing at Richard Armitage attempting an American accent.
As a meteorologist, I love watching movies about severe weather. I myself have done a little storm chasing, so I know what it’s like. Is it really that hard to simply hire a scientist in the correct field to help verify things? I’d happily be a consulting meteorologist for films! That’s why it bugs me so much when films like these get it so, so wrong. That’s not to say that a film with bad science is necessarily going to be a bad film. Twister and Sharknado both have their inaccuracies, but they are two of my favorite films. So don’t let me or the science dictate whether you should like a film. Enjoy it for what it is. Or have a little fun like I did, and chainsaw the science in half Sharknado-style!
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