Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
Tom (Esai Morales), a chemist of some sort, is engaged to Emma (Ona Grauer) who is some kind of high ranking super solider or something. Tom’s teenage son Wyatt (Jared Abrahamson) is a muscle car loving gear head, and Emma’s daughter Chloe (Mackenzie Porter) is an eco loving advanced chemistry high school student. Out of the things that the people do in this SyFy original ‘Seattle Superstorm’, the fact that Chloe pays attention in chemistry class is BY FAR the most important. And on a biological side note, it doesn’t seem as if the decidedly brown Esai Morales could actually sire a ghostly pale Jared Abrahamson, but we are just going to assume that his former wife was an albino. All of this is just to prepare you for the terrible Super Storm that’s about to completely wreck stuff in Seattle.
On this dreary day in Seattle, something has entered the Seattle airspace, and if you make the mistake of flying into the Seattle airspace without authorization, crazed DMA director Jacob Stinson (Martin Cummins) will blow it up. Unfortunately this probably wasn’t the best course of action. Whatever that was in the sky has split in two, one part plunging into the ocean close to the pier, and the other part wrecking a Stop and Go. The chunk in the water is billowing an evil black smoke which has gone all up into the atmosphere and has caused all kinds of seismic disturbances, the Stop and Go chunk isn’t active yet, but if you touch it, like that one dummy did, it will completely mummify your ass. Don’t touch it.
So what’s the deal? We’re thinking it’s something alien in nature so Emma the super soldier has to rush to DMA headquarters to get verbally abused by her boss Stinson because he’s a psycho. Tom sees an old NASA colleague, Carolyn (Michelle Harrison) working the chemical angle so he jumps on board to help out. Note that Carolyn is good looking which will elicit all kinds of completely inappropriate responses from various cast members that has nothing to do with Superstorms destroying Seattle. The kids, for their part, will jump in the Explorer and try to avoid certain death from the Space Needle.
Whatever is going on is really bad as storms and tornadoes and all kinds of mayhem is wrecking everything and it’s growing exponentially. Director Stinson thinks we should
nuke it because nuking a storm makes total sense. Fortunately the old Russian Dude Sergei has shown up on the scene, navigating past the horrible security at the DMA, and he knows exactly what’s going on. Cold War baby. The Russians had a plan to kill us all, and while they thought they had gotten rid of this uncontrollable tech, in the dumbest way possible, clearly they didn’t and there’s no way to stop it and nobody is coming up with any ideas.
Except the high school chick. Thank God for Chloe and the fact that she stays awake in chemistry class because all of the NASA chemist, Russian scientist, DMA braniacs and psycho directors were stuck in the mud until Chloe jumped in and started solving problems. Now we have to put Chloe’s plan in play or in about four days the Earth as we know it will no longer exist. Godspeed.
Directed by veteran Sci-Fi Channel director Jason Bourque, we have a SyFy original that features some mailed in performances, a shaky narrative and a few suspect effects here and there… but that’s like complaining about water being wet when it comes to these movies and that’s not what we’re about here at the FCU. In fact, all things considered, ‘Seattle Superstorm’ was pretty entertaining for the most part, and a standing testament to the awesomeness of Grrl Power! The chicks in this movie were no joke man, not a single damsel in distress to be found. There was Emily the badass commander who would pull her heat out on you for the most benign reasons, like when she whipped out her piece on Sergei who was holding that menacing Geiger counter. There was Carolyn the hot NASA scientist, who admittedly didn’t do much of anything scientific in this movie, but when we needed somebody to fly a helicopter to save the planet Earth, there she was. Admittedly flying a copter in the middle of triple tornado lightning storm tsunami hurricane has us questioning Carolyn’s intelligence, but we don’t question her hotness or her bravery. And of course we have little Chloe, and if the planet is to be saved in this movie, it’s all up to her and only her because she’s the only person with the ability process a coherent thought in this movie. The men in this movie were either psycho, inert, or whining bitches.
There was plenty of action, yes… some of the special effects were suspect… but we can say the primo effect of collapsing the Space Needle wasn’t one of those suspect effects, but for the genre and the venue that it showed up, that being Saturday Night on SyFy, it was better than expected. Much better than Mr. Bourque’s last SyFy effort ‘Doomsday Prophecy’, though I don’t think it reached the lofty heights set by his ‘Termination Point’.
We do have one niggling issue. Actually, there a lot of issues in regards to logic, not the least of these being that the only scientist who can figure anything out is a high school chick in Advanced Chemistry class, who’s not even a senior, but in ‘Seattle’ apparently if the automated computerized water pump breaks, it has to be turned on manually. And turning on the water pump manually means you have to sacrifice yourself to do it. I’m no engineer, but that’s a real bad design right there.
Bad engineering aside ‘Seattle Superstorm’ was one of the better Sci-Fi Originals with its overload on action, a minimum of people sitting in closed rooms looking at computers, and Grrl Power. And the added bonus of family melodrama. If you really want to call that a bonus.
