A Documentary by Sean C. Casey, Narrated by Bill Paxton

My family and I made a trip to Union Station in Kansas City for a Spider-Man Exhibition this past weekend. Usually, when I go to Union Station, I try to do a few different activities to make the drive “worth it” (which is my style for any day trip), largely because it’s fairly inexpensive to do a lot of their educational programming. Rather than visiting the Gottlieb Planetarium (as usual), we opted for their huge movie theater for a documentary. Aside from your standard Hollywood films, Union Station cycles a few films in and out at a time, and it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s showing. On this day, a 2011 film about tornado chasers was showing, so we opted for that over a film about trains that aired really early in the morning. Directed by Sean C. Casey, and Narrated by Bill Paxton, Tornado Alley is notable for being one of the first films to actually record the inside of a tornado as it passes over. Chronicling two VERY different groups of tornado chasers, the film does a good job of showing what the scientific community is doing to try to minimize alert time to hopefully save lives if one of the ferocious storms decides to hot a city.

“Traversing the “severe weather capital of the world,” Tornado Alley documents two unprecedented missions seeking to encounter one of Earth’s most awe-inspiring events—the birth of a tornado.  Filmmaker Sean Casey’s personal quest to capture the birth of a tornado with a 70mm camera takes viewers on a breathtaking journey into the heart of the storm.  A team of equally driven scientists, the VORTEX2 researchers, experience the relentless strength of nature’s elemental forces as they literally surround tornadoes and the supercell storms that form them, gathering the most comprehensive severe weather data ever collected.  This science adventure reveals the beauty and the power of some of our planet’s most extreme—and least understood—weather phenomena.”

The two teams that participated in the film were Vortex2 and the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) team. Vortex2 was a tornado research team manning numerous cars and specialized tornado tracking equipment. Their goal was to basically surround a tornado and use radar and other sensitive instruments to map a tornado as it passes through an area from a safe distance. On the flipside, the film spotlighted the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) team. Headed by this film’s own director, the TIV itself was a “tank” more-or-less, fitted with a 70 mm IMAX camera. The goal of the TIV team was to get in front of a tornado, anchor the tank to the ground, and film a tornado as it crashes through the tank. The director stated it was a dream of his to be able to secure this footage, something that is supposedly the first of its kind.

While Tornado Alley is not too different than films that might be aired on cable channels like National Geographic or Discovery Channel, the use of the huge camera system gives a unique look at what extreme weather looks like from the inside. We see a number of tornadoes, the aftermath of a hit on a small town, the fear of being so close to a deadly storm, and the coup de grâce, the footage of the inside of a tornado. This film is a tightly constructed film that doesn’t overstay its welcome and keeps the audience on the edge of their seats for the near one hour duration.

Overall, this was an interesting film that harkens back to the sorts of films I used to absolutely love seeing on IMAX screens. Despite being over ten years old, the film is not dated and stands on its own in 2023. I definitely need to try to see more of these films offered by this theater as there’s just something different about how these large format films are made on how they look. I was sad to learn that not too long after this was the director’s last ride in his TIV tank. According to Wikipedia, “On May 27, 2013, TIV 2 intercepted a large tornado near Smith Center, Kansas. The vehicle was struck by large debris from a nearby farm and suffered damage to the roof-mounted anemometer and at least two breaches of the crew compartment when the roof hatch and one of the doors were blown open. Before the anemometer was disabled, it recorded winds of 150 to 175 mph (241 to 282 km/h), placing the tornado in the EF3 to EF4 range.” It has since been sold on Craigslist to another storm chaser.