Mark Reviews Movies: SUPERCELL

Supercell, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 16, 2023

The low-budget nature of Supercell might seem like a detriment on paper, but how much of that comes down to expectations? Movies have taught us that stories about natural disasters require big-scale spectacle and plenty of visual effects-based mayhem, but here's a movie about some very bad weather that actually seems to have an appreciation for nature and other considerations of storytelling.

Co-writer/director Herbert James Winterstern clearly doesn't care about giving us computer-generated tornadoes and lots of digital debris. The filmmaker, making his debut feature, knows the sight of a massive storm system cutting a jagged line across the sky is damn well impressive enough.

Plus, the movie isn't so much about storms as it is about the people whose lives revolve around chasing them. The movie's tone is one of wonder for nature and nostalgia for some romantic sense of familial bonds, the pursuit of science, and going on an adventure. Winterstern is attempting to channel a particular kind of filmmaking here, from the surprisingly rich look of Andrew Jeric's cinematography, to the shots of faces looking up in awe at some awesome sight, and to the way Corey Wallace's score intrudes with as many emotional cues as possible.

This is obviously an homage to a particular brand of movie from the 1980s. While it doesn't fully pay off, it is refreshing to see a filmmaker care so much about how the look and tone of some high-concept disaster movie function.

The story is as hackneyed and sentimental—or sincere, depending on one's own sentiments for and sentimentality about such movies—as one might expect from that description. It follows a teenage boy named William (Daniel Diemer), whose father Bill (Richard Gunn) was a rock star among storm chasers. The prologue lets us know how much the younger kid looked up to his dad, as they sit on the roof watching a storm, and how the father's reckless passion for chasing tornadoes led to his end.

Ten years later, William lives with his mother Quinn (the late Anne Heche), a scientist whose promising career came to an end when she had to raise her son on her own. Since then, she doesn't talk much about storms or her late husband with William, but the teen is curious about the man and the passion for weather that he never really had a chance to know.

It's a solid foundation, despite the eventual turns of the screenplay (written by the director and Anna Elizabeth James) away from the characters and toward the limited spectacle they can afford. To be fair, the characters remain a major concern here, but they're simply a bit too thin and far too focused on the chase to really make much of an impact.

The plot has William receiving his father's old notebook from the dad's best friend and former storm-chasing partner Roy (Skeet Ulrich). William, lugging around his mother's prototype device that's kind of like sonar for tornadoes before they form, makes a trip from Florida to West Texas, his family's old home, to join Roy and follow in his old man's footsteps. Obviously, Quinn doesn't like the idea, so she takes a cross-country car trip with William's not-quite-girlfriend Harper (Jordan Kristine Seamón) to stop the teen before he gets himself hurt or killed.

Beyond the excited tone and the feeling of nostalgia, the selling point here, obviously, is the movie's portrayal of destructive storms and the process of tracking them. As for the former, Winterstern and Jeric seem adamant about showing nature as it is, not as visual effects can replicate or exaggerate it. While there are effects here, they seem limited to (mostly ineffective) instances of green screen to put actors in front of weather conditions that they shouldn't be and to provide moments of the danger of these storms (hail pounding the roof and windows of a van, someone being launched into the air by a massive tornado, the devastation of town that finds itself in a twister's path). Most of this, including enormous clouds filled with lightning and the formation of a tornado shot from a considerable distance, looks real—likely because it actually is.

The story incorporates those scenes well enough, although the story and its characters become far less compelling against the natural spectacle on display, too. The performances are generally serviceable, but we're mostly talking about stock characters—the wide-eyed kid, the haunted mentor, the worried mother, the concerned girlfriend, a business-minded storm chaser played by Alec Baldwin, whose fate seem preordained as soon as he dares to insult our protagonist. Some receive a moment or two of development, such as a spiritual conversation with Roy and Baldwin's character confessing his deep admiration for who William's father was and what the man accomplished. Winterstern, though, clearly hopes the underlying feeling of wonder and the increasing spectacle will carry the movie.

Admittedly, it almost does. As a first-time filmmaker, Winterstern understands his limitations, only biting off more than the budget can accommodate during the third act, and shows a degree of confidence, as well as consistency, when it comes to maintaining a specific kind of tone for this story. Supercell finds some ways to create an intriguing story and sense of spectacle without the alleged benefits of being a visual effects-heavy blockbuster, but ultimately, it's just as shallow an endeavor as those can be.

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