Customer Reviews

National Geographic - Tornado Intercept

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I managed to catch this on the National Geographic channel recently. It has lots of great tornado footage with some science thrown in for fun. Anyone fascinated by the beauty and destructive power of tornadoes (like me) would enjoy this DVD. Also, watching an armored car drive directly into a vortex is definitely worth a look.

My son loves all kinds of bad weather, but tornadoes are his all-time favorite. He got this DVD from my brother for a gift, and we watch it at least 3 times a week. It's great for the kids yet interesting enough to hold the adult audience's attention. The contrast between Josh and Sean is a fantastic way to show how widespread the fascination with lousy weather can be.

This show is a good one to watch if you wanna see the inside of a twister. I enjoyed it all the way through. Brilliant!

For those who are interested in a lot of tornado footage this is not the film for them though there is some dramatic footage. Primarily its a human interest story about a guy who slaps together a welded nightmare of an unpolished vehicle that actually functions. Its kind of like a Jimmy Stewart everyman story that the average person can identify with and in the end he's victorious. Interesting to see the 2 primary characters in a symbiotic relationship of differing technologies, one with ultra professional polished machinery and vehicles staying at the edge of tornados and the other with a heap of homemade scrap metal diving right in to the heart of the rampage. Well worth watching.

Full of suspense. Held my sixth-grade class' attention. It made me hungry to see the next episode of the Intercepter.

It's all about this guy who mortgaged his house to build this Back to the Future car. Although it was a cool idea, he didn't really get in any tornados and I was looking for more of a documentary on torndaos and storms. This was a disappointment.

If you like people standing around and being bored, then your in luck. This is what Tornado Intercept is all about. I made the mistake of buying this dumb film. The name itself would indicate a fast and on the edge of your seat type of film loaded with all kinds of real life tornado footage. Oh well, not the case here. I'm still trying to think of someone that I might give this film to, so that they may get something out of it. I couldn,t.

Lots of us are fascinated by tornadoes; some are even compelled to experience the rush of chasing tornadoes; but few indeed are those who pursue the reckless dream of seeing a tornado from the inside out. Meet Sean Casey, a documentary filmmaker who set out to realize his dream of filming inside a tornado's most destructive and least understood zone. Having mortgaged his house to design and build his own Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV), we watch as he leaves his pregnant wife to spend six weeks in Tornado Alley just hoping for a chance to drive the ugliest vehicle known to man directly into the path of a twister. With 8000 pounds of steel plating and a bulletproof glass dome for his IMAX camera, the TIV is also equipped with sensors to help measure different aspects of any tornado it encounters - but Casey is no scientist. That is why he teams up with meteorologist and storm chaser Josh Wurman. With his mobile Doppler radar vehicles, Wurman can help guide him where he wants to be, while Casey can supply him with scientific readings and information he cannot obtain himself.

The setup sounds pretty exciting, but I found this documentary surprisingly dull, for the most part. May and June of 2005 turned out to be a slow season for tornadoes, and Casey and the TIV miss out on the few chances they have of going where no armored vehicle has gone before. Then, as if it had been written in the stars, the team finally gets the chance they've been waiting for on Casey's very last day. If the filmmakers hadn't told me that the TIV finally met a tornado head-on, though, I would not have known it because the event is surprisingly anticlimactic. The only excitement we get comes in the form of another vehicle that gets closer to the storm than the crew intended and some great shots of the rare occurrence of two different types of tornadoes being generated simultaneously by a single storm.

This is an interesting little documentary, but it's not very exciting at all. That being the case, I would only recommend it to those with a true passion for tornadoes and storm chasing. There are much more exciting videos out there for those with only a casual interest in the subject.

Our whole family likes this video. The photography is great and very exciting, but not too scary for my super sensitve 6-year-old. The main actors are fun and engaging. Good that we all like it because my two boys (the other one is 3) want to watch it every day.