Metal Tornado

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• Canada • 2011 • 90m •

• Directed by: Gordon Yang. • Starring: Lou Diamond Phillips, Nicole de Boer, Greg Evigan, Stephen MacDonald, John Maclaren, Cinthia Burke, Sophie Gendron, Frank Schorpion, Alexis Maitland, Rob Stewart, Jon McLaren, Sean Tucker, Kate Drummond. • Music by: Richard Bowers.

Helios World Inc. aims to solve the world's energy crisis by gathering and transmitting energy from solar flares. Despite warnings of a design flaw from the developing scientist, company head Jonathan Kane pushes the project forward and unknowingly unleashes a free-ranging and self-perpetuating magnetic vortex. Only Michael Edwards, a leading scientist on the company team, thinks something might be amiss when a sizable portion of their harvested energy simply disappears. The general area thereafter discovers itself endangered by a roving and unprecedented problem growing rapidly in strength - unique, unpredictable and potentially unstoppable. As if this isn't bad enough, the Paris branch of Helios World is set to run the same flawed program and thereby birth a second voracious monster in Europe.

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Trailer

1:37

Review:

Trying to find a new, much more powerful way of using solar energy, scientists are setting free a magnetic field which roams across the country, whirling around every kind of metal thing, until the effect is a metal tornado which destroys towns almost like a very big lawnmower. Every time the hero is asked just how scientific the whole thing is, he says something like "No time to explain now", and starts to run. So much for that. Following the clichés of the genre, there is a rebellious genius, warning that a catastrophe is near, and an evil business man who wants to hush the whole thing up even at the cost of some lives. With increasing power of the storm, they have to work together and find a possible solution, though.

Yes, it's a typical genre movie going by the checklist what's got to be in there, but still it was better than I expected. It was wise just to put a town in Pennsylvania in danger, not having to save the whole world this time. A parallel event in Paris is also described, the Eiffel tower being a perfect choice for any catastrophe related to magnetism, but since all the main characters are in the US, this string of the story remains pale.

Even if the special effects are very, very cheap - such as rattling a shelf with tin cans to show the tornado is approaching - it looks okay for a TV production. Always keep in mind we are talking about small budget TV here, comparisons to Hollywood blockbusters with their enormous technical capabilities are therefore neither reasonable nor fair. Taking that into consideration, I vote 6 of 10.

Review by unbrokenmetal from the Internet Movie Database.

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