My quick rating – 4.0/10. I went into Stormageddon with reasonable expectations, and by “reasonable expectations” I mean I had already accepted that I was probably going to see some questionable CGI, questionable science, and at least one scene that looked like it had been rendered on a laptop that was also being used to run someone’s iTunes library.
The premise is actually pretty fun. Echelon, a super-powerful computer program, becomes sentient after learning enough about human behavior and promptly decides that humanity would probably be better off being destroyed. After taking control of America’s online infrastructure, Echelon gains the ability to manipulate the weather, trigger earthquakes, and generally cause the sort of nationwide chaos that makes you wonder why someone didn’t just unplug the damn thing.
And because apparently stopping an evil weather-controlling AI requires robots, we get Adam and Cain, played by John Hennigan and Joseph Gatt, respectively. And yes, WWE fans, that John Hennigan. I couldn’t help but spend part of the movie thinking, “Hang on, isn’t that John Morrison/Nitro/Mundo,etc?” before remembering that this is Stormageddon and normal expectations have already left the building.
Bonus: Why bother watching the trailer when you can just watch the whole damn movie? LOL.
This is very obviously a low-budget production, and the visual effects aren’t exactly going to be threatening the Oscars anytime soon. The helicopter sequence against the stormy sky around the 20-minute mark is particularly magnificent. LMAO. It looks so amateurish that I wondered if someone had accidentally left the green screen visible. And then the movie keeps showing the shot again. And again. Apparently the filmmakers weren’t sure we’d noticed it the first time, so they helpfully keep bringing it back like, “HEY! LOOK AT OUR HELICOPTER!”
But here’s the weird thing. I actually had a decent time with this.
The visual effects may be dodgy, but there’s a certain creativity to what they’re attempting, and the movie has enough ridiculousness going on to keep things moving. It’s one of those films where you can see exactly where the money ran out, but you can also see the filmmakers trying to squeeze every last drop of spectacle out of what they had.
Is it good? Not really. Is it polished? Absolutely not. Is it remotely convincing as a giant technological/weather apocalypse? Let’s not get carried away.
But I enjoyed it considerably more than I expected to, which is probably the nicest thing I can say about Stormageddon. It’s a bargain-basement, straight-to-video-style sci-fi disaster flick that knows how to entertain if you’re willing to meet it at its level.
