Found footage films have an implicit,
structural principle that basically works like this: A disaster or otherwise horrible event has
been captured on shaky hand-held cameras by ‘real’ people who just happened to
be there and had the insight to capture what was happening for clarity for the
people who weren’t there. Then sometime
after the event, someone finds the footage (hence the genre name) and collates
it for public viewing. The audience then
watches the film and it all feels very authentic and scary.
The problem however, is that for this
central conceit to work, the footage that is ‘found’ needs to be of sufficient
interest to be worth collating and releasing for audiences. In The
Blair Witch Project, the main
characters had supposedly disappeared so the footage acts as a missing persons
document. In Cloverfield the footage
is ‘left exactly as recorded out of respect for the dead’ and there is a
massive alien involved – this makes the footage worth preserving.
Into
The Storm is the
narrative of a super-storm hitting a small town in Colorado told through the
actions of three equally banal groups of people: A team of storm chasers
comprised of tired clichés; a high-school principal and his sons preparing for
graduation day and a group of rednecks undertaking crazy stunts. All three therefore have a reason to be
filming themselves throughout the day, but the problem is that the events of
the day are simply not exciting enough to be collected together.
Too many people survive the storm for it
to act as a visual memorial of the characters final days (as in the films
mentioned above), and the event itself (a storm) is not unusual enough for an
unseen editor to bother collecting this footage and releasing it to
cinemas. The found-footage contract
between filmmaker and audience completely falls apart as the footage is just
too boring (and laughably fake) to believe anyone would turn it into a film.
Also, the filmmakers show a stunning
lack of creativity when using the found footage genre conventions. At one point there are two characters holding
cameras having an argument, so the footage is cut back and forth as you would
expect in a gonzo/documentary style, so far so good, but then the shot cuts to
a random 2-shot from the side completely breaking the ‘found footage’
illusion. This happens numerous times
and completely spoils what measly tensions there is.
Inconsistent technical conventions
aside, the even bigger problems of Into
The Storm are the horrible characters and embarrassing narrative
exposition. All of the characters are
completely expendable, to the point where even as an emotional father is trying
to save his drowning son I simply couldn’t bring myself to want him to survive. This felt more like a SyFy made-for-TV movie
than a cinema release distributed by Warner Brothers. The dialogue is so predictable that I often resorted
to giggling, before I realised that other people had simply chosen to leave the
cinema – an increasingly costly financial decision these days…
Conventional wisdom amongst film
commentators tends to suggest that the found footage format is overused and has
run its course. But recent film The
Borderlands proved that if you play by the rules, then you can still
make a decent genre film with tension and atmosphere. Into
The Storm broke all of the rules and was simply too boring – It deserves to
sink to the bottom of the if-all-else-fails Netflix playlist and make space in
cinemas for something that doesn’t insult its audiences…
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