Supercell: Sturmjäger

Here's The 4K Lowedown on "Supercell" (PG-13 - 2023 - Blu) Genre: Thriller/Disaster

My Score: 6.6 Cast=7 Acting=5 Plot=7 Ending=7 Story=7 Intense=7 Pace=6 Suspense=7 Disaster=8 Epic=5

A teenage boy runs away to follow his fathers footsteps as a legendary storm chaser despite his mother's wishes.

"Rule number one...always make sure you got at least a half a tank of gas." This is a low rent version of Twister, but they showed real tornado footage from a storm chaser and put it on a green screen. I loved the homage to Bill Paxton in the easter eggs and there were a couple good scenes, but you have to be a sucker for disaster movies to make this worth a watch. I am that sucker...I enjoyed the movie. RIP Anne Heche.

There's not really much to it but high school melodrama.

Most of the time I can't hear what the kid's saying and the rest of the time it's obnoxious characters yelling at each other while making stupid decisions and pointless statements.

None of the characters are remotely likable and they all drift from scene to scene without any momentum or clear plot development.

Some of the green screen effects are very poor, and in one particular scene you can see a bank of star shaped LED light strips which are supposed to be lightning and it's reflecting off every object in the scene to the point of distraction.

It's amateurish through and through.

Give it a miss, go watch some 4k Tornado videos on YouTube.

This was Anne Heche's last film before her tragic death in a car accident, so what a great pity for her it couldn't have been better.

Alec Baldwin plays Alec Baldwin, what happened to him - he used to be such a Leading Man, think Hunt for Red October and even 3rd Rock from the Sun and ... this. I guess he needs to feed all those kids that he can't seem to stop producing. Someone should tell him about birth control.

However, the guy who played the kid was the absolute worst thing about this movie. Supposedly highly intelligent, he just looked and acted like a dumb idiot all the way through. Such bad casting.

I liked Skeet Ulrich though even though I hardly recognised him.

Almost everything about this movie reminded me of adventure movies from the late 70s to early 90s:

• A classical score as if it was E. T.

• Cinematography as if it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• Production design as if it was Back To the Future

• Even the characters and the dialogs

It was like a magical nostalgic trip. And while the superficial topic was not really important to me personally, they used it as a vehicle to provide all the above mentioned qualities and to distract from the underlying light family drama.

Will I watch it again? Most probably not because there are many other productions to watch instead, and I would rather watch the original movies from the 80s again. (Hence no 8 points.)

Do I regret it to have seen it? No because I enjoyed the relaxing mood it got me into. (Hence at at least 6 points.)

Would I recommend it to others? Yes if I knew that the person could relate to the nostalgia, I tried to describe in this review. (Hence 7 points.)

But I would not recommend it to people who expect a tornado disaster movie.

Well, I have to say that I was expecting a tad more from this 2023 disaster movie titled "Supercell", especially since it was a brand new movie and having a cast ensemble with some fairly established names on it.

All I knew about "Supercell", when I sat down to watch it was that it was about what the title of movie indicates. So I figured that chances were that it would be a good movie at least. So of course I opted to watch what director Herbert James Winterstern had to offer.

Writers and Anna Elizabeth James and Herbert James Winterstern delivered a watchable enough script for the movie. However, I have to say that it was a fairly generic plot, and in terms of excitement and thrills, then "Supercell" just didn't have what it took. It might have huffed and puffed, but it was not with much force.

And I am rather surprised at how generic and nondescript "Supercell" turned out to be, especially with the likes of Skeet Ulrich, Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche on the cast list. The acting performances in the movie were fair enough, but the character gallery was somewhat monotonous, and I didn't really care if something were to befell the characters or not.

Visually then "Supercell" was okay. The special effects were bland actually, and I wasn't impressed.

If you enjoy movies about tornadoes, then the 1996 movie "Twister" is still the best choice.

My rating of "Supercell" lands on a four out of ten stars.