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Alien Tornado (2012 TV Movie)
2/10
Alien Tornado Literally and Metaphorically Sucks
22 April 2012
Warning: Spoilers
I saw the previews for this movie on the Syfy channel a few days ago and thought it was going to be a really good movie to watch considering that they viewed all of the action parts. Turns out that this movie was a complete letdown.

First of all, let us focus on the good parts of the movie:

The design for the alien tornadoes was pretty interesting, emitting a bright green glow. They also have the power to shoot lightning bolts from the spinning vortex and grab running pedestrians with funnel-like tentacles and carry them beyond the clouds.

The destruction of the city is pretty cool, especially when the scoreboard from the Chicago baseball stadium flies right into your face before a commercial break.

Well, that's pretty much it for the good parts, now onto the bad ones, and trust me there are a lot. I structured them into a few categories.

Characters:

Most of the characters that we encounter are hardly even learned about. All we know is Judd who possibly lost his wife in a twister four years ago, Kelly is a farm girl who brushes horses and is the first girl in the family to get an opportunity to go to college(she wants to be a scientist and is basically the heroine of the movie), Gail is a scientist who frequently reports daily news on her website and is a storm chaser, Norm who is a county sheriff that is trying to do his job, some woman who rides a moped and is Gail's number one fan, and that's it.

Everybody else is just so faint and unrecognizable. These actors ceased to make me feel like some people are important, however I felt that the actor who played the cop and the actress who played Shelly were more credible.

Plot:

The plot is just ridiculous. After an hour into the movie I had no idea what the hell was happening. There are so many questions that are unanswered. What exactly happened to their mother (yes, it was probably a twister "back in 2008"?) Who are these bosses that Armstrong keeps referring to? Why are the aliens attacking in the first place, and how do they exist in Earth's clouds? After the aliens were sent back, what happened to those who were sent up in the clouds, are they supposed to be raining down? WHERE DID THEY GO?

Special effects:

As before, this was probably the only thing that made this movie watchable but at the same time it barely shows anything being destroyed, especially during the farm scene in the beginning when it is first revealed.

Concept:

By using the power of technology to transmit signals in order to communicate with aliens "in the clouds," humanity has the ability to cease utter and apocalyptic destruction from several F5 tornadoes, with winds up to 350 miles per hour, instead of the most humane thing which is hiding inside a house's basement to prevent serious injury (Armstrong even says this in the movie).

Lessons:

The lessons in this movie are horrible: -leaving your child abandoned near a bridge -promising to save money for your daughter's college fund and instead use it to cover property insurance for a twister that previously hit four years ago, then telling it to her when it's already too late -trusting nobody that can possibly stop the chaos -getting into a car with a stranger (it was even SAID IN THE MOVIE)

References:

I can't believe the worker for the Channel 37 news station (I think he was Terry) compared the destruction and collapse of buildings to the real-life terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. Are you serious?! Whoever wrote the script for this movie took it a little too far.

Conclusion:

This movie is horribly confusing and boring. The only remarkable thing that was interesting, like I said before, were the effects but that was just a minor improvement. This movie is as terrible and boring as Triassic Attack, but 2012: Ice Age and Polar Storm on the other hand were slightly better in my opinion. This is the kind of movie one would watch if you want to punish and bore yourself to death. Stick to other movies instead.
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Triassic Attack (2010 TV Movie)
2/10
This movie should have been a fossil that was never dug up or discovered.
27 November 2010
I was expecting a great Syfy movie; my family would sit down, watch it, enjoy it, and laugh at the guilty pleasure with it's clever effects throughout. However, this just made me feel like fast-forwarding the entire show with my DVR remote. Here's why:

The story was just boring; it felt like that it could have sped up a little bit. At least they did a flashback to show how the events came about, but mostly, the writers used all these unnecessary pauses and dialog for filler that just made the movie seem longer. If they were to cut out those certain scenes or shorten them, the movie could have made a solid hour and I would have enjoyed it much better.

The characters, mostly between the main characters--Jake and Emma--were just irritating and painstakingly annoying. As before, the writers just used filler techniques in situations with dialog or pauses. Surprisingly, the other characters that were further introduced were slightly better, but the pacing felt unbalanced. The acting was off- balance; some scenes looked like they were a complete joke--not funny, some were so overdone that they seemed to last too long.

The effects were okay some of the time, but mostly, they were the cheapest graphics ever put into a Syfy movie--more cheap than the other movies. In fact, they were so cheap that it made the other effects from other Syfy movies, as well as low-rated universal productions, appear ten times as good.

Lastly, the concepts of the movie: dull and unrealistic. In fact, one scene actually felt uncomfortable and very unusual and it lasted for about a minute. Another one was a ritual ceremony that caused it to magically rain from the sky. The fact that dinosaur skeletons are able to roar without the required organs, and fly without any muscles, is beyond ridiculous.

As for consistency, Syfy premiered the movie Jurassic Park, a more successful spin-off of realistic dinosaurs, directed by Steven Spielberg, before this movie aired. I assume that it tried to keep us interested in dinosaurs, just without the whole body structure, but that plan failed miserably.

Overall, this is one of the worst Syfy movies that was ever made in the history of this channel.
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