Now it's back to the ship to get tossed and
turned some more, then back to the helicopter to try to make
it to Cyclone Confab Central and Colonel Chadwick and his team
of concerned cyclone busters to fix the problem before they
cyclone caves in the entire west coast. Now the
adventure is really afoot as Dr. Cavanaugh, Dr. Sparks and
Engineer Verdon get rocked by ice hail, fire hail, flash
floods, killer sinkholes, angry homeowners who don't like to
be carjacked, unreasonable soldiers, and crazy tornadoes that
like to lift cars up into the sky and gently drop them back
down to the ground completely intact, all just to make it to
Cyclone Central to save us all. I think.
So how does one stop a Super Cyclone started by a Super
Volcano? You should probably consider delivering a
payload of hyrdocharged silver iodine nanoflakes into the
storm which will generate a series of controlled lightning
strikes to break up the vortex. Duh. I, like
yourself I'm sure, have seen a bunch of end of days disaster
movies that feature a wealth of fake science prattle, but
writer Liz Adams might've have just taken the fancy fake
science talk crown with her movie 'Super Cyclone'. This
is not a good thing. You see this movie had so much fake
science chatter that it was almost like watching a
Shakespearean play because most of the time I had no idea what
anybody was talking about. Ah… make that all of the
time. To Ming Na's credit, she had no problem reciting
all of the Shakespearean fake science she was reeling off in a
way to make it look like she knew what the hell she was
talking about, but after a while it did become taxing keeping
track of it all.
But it's not the plethora of fake science talk that prevents
'Super Cyclone' from reaching the heights that had been
gloriously set by 'Air Collision'. 'Super Cyclone'
seemed to suffer from a scope that sorely outstripped its
budget, and director Liz Adams didn't have enough workarounds
in her toolbox to fix the majority of these issues. When
your oil rig is literally melting from fire in the long
distance CGI shot and then in the close up shot of two actors
on this rig there's not a hint of fire to be seen… that kind
of takes you away from the cinematic lunacy. Same as
when you are in your auto getting pelted with hail, and then
there's no hail when you get out of your car, just to name a
couple of examples, one can't help but notice these things and
it does take one away from the moment. And while 'Air
Collision' was controlled lunacy, 'Super Cyclone' was sheer
discombobulated lunacy. Yes, we expect and even welcome
some insane nonsense in these movies we watch, but 'Super
Cyclone' left us in a lunacy haze. Almost at no point
did we have any clue what was going on, thanks to the fake
science talk overload and a story I found damn near impossible
to follow along with, which is something I like to do with
movies every once in a while.
Still, there is some Air Collision-esque type magic to
witness, like when a pair of characters, seeing all is lost,
decided to end it all. I can't spoil it for you but that
was damned hilarious. Or another characters complete
inability to jump over what looked like 7 inch crevice in the
ground. We were also happy to see the return of Darrin
Cooper who was completely awesome in Air Collision with his
intensity, and he's still awesome here but he did tone it down
a bit. The overacting chops that Darrin Cooper left on
the table were absorbed by Asylum regular Dylan Vox who
brought the house down with his role as the beleaguered
engineer, and we do hope actress Jamie Burton-Oare becomes the
next Asylum regular partly because she's a pretty good actor
and partly because she's from Flint.
'Super Cyclone' was a bit of a disappointment as we did have
some expectation of more controlled lunacy from director Liz
Adams, but it just didn't come together this time around like
we hoped.
