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Excellent but underrated film

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This film starts off strong and manages to keep its strength to the end. For a TV movie it does impress, the tornadoes looks surprisingly realistic and the characters are developed enough to where you can easily sympathize with them during their conflict.On a technical standpoint the film stumbles due to the inaccurate depiction of a nuclear power plant. If tornadoes were to hit a nuclear power plant in real life a meltdown would be extremely unlikely due to the multiple fail-safes, a good example of this is when the Davis- Besse Nuclear Power Station was struck by an F2 tornado in 1998, the reactor core automatically shutting down after external power was disabled when the switchyard was damaged, power was restored without incident. Interestingly enough, this incident inspired the movie, though very loosely.Atomic Twister is an enjoyable film with suspense and humor here and there, I recommend you check it out.

While the premise of the movie - that a tornado can cause a nuclear reactor to go into a near meltdown - is a bit far fetched, I find it funny that so many of the reviewers (including some who confidently claimed they worked in the industry) thought the possibility of a reactor going unstable due to a natural disaster was "impossible".I wonder what they would say today, with FOUR of Japan's nuclear reactors going hot. Obviously, cascading failures ARE not only possible, but under the right circumstances (or the most horrific collection of bad luck), probable.Granted, it wasn't a tornado. Heck, it wasn't even the earthquake itself that caused Japan's nukes to go hot. It was the tsunami that followed the quake that led to the disastrous failure of not one, not two, but FOUR reactors. So far the Japanese are barely keeping the rods covered with water - sea water, because they have no pumps to pump in the fresh water that should be used (JUST like in the movie). Even so, 3 of the 4 plants have now suffered major explosions that blew the roof off - literally - and all are emitting unacceptable radiation levels just from the steam releases alone.Turns out the writer of this script was a lot more prescient than anyone gave them credit for when the movie came out! Let's just hope that the ending of Japan's very real nuclear crisis is as good as the ending of the movie - or else it is not just Japan that will pay the price for our foolish arrogance.

This movie is a real stinker. I studied nuclear engineering in college and if they would have had me on the set I would have slapped the writer of this screenplay. Some of the major problems as I remember them:The plant seems to have been built in the last few years, with a new computerized control room and satellite phones and all this silliness - no new nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. in 25 years (sadly).A tornado would do absolutely no damage to a nuclear power plant, or at least no damage to any of the critical components. The critical components of a nuclear power plant (the core itself, coolant pumps, the primary coolant loop (in a PWR), backup generators) are located inside a containment dome that is METERS thick - even an F5 wouldn't touch them - in fact, the people inside would have no idea they had been hit. The control room and the important components of the plant are run on the power the plant produces and in the event of a shutdown by backup diesel generators. The backups have backups which have backups. The possibility of a strong enough tornado hitting the backup gens and knocking them out is nil. The plant did not shut down as it would have done automatically. Whenever a nuclear power plant is damaged in any way the computer shuts it down with absolutely no operator input required in a matter of seconds. In the movie the lines that took power from the plant to homes were knocked down - this would have resulted in a load rejection to the generators which would have "tripped" (automatically shutdown) the turbines and the reactor. There is never any need to communicate with the NRC while running a reactor and the NRC has no remote control room. They don't control reactors at all - the companies that own them control them. The NRC licenses and inspects for safety.At the end of the movie the spent fuel pool is being uncovered and the firefighters have to pump water into it to save the town. Bull. Spent fuel just isn't hot enough to continually boil away water. And the pumps that cool the reactor also cool the pool (in most cases). In any case, the spent fuel pool and it's entire cooling apparatus are INSIDE the enormous containment dome and could never have been damaged by a twister - much less have had a gaggle of firefighters standing over it with a door to the outside just a few yards away. IF the pool would have gotten as close as it did to being uncovered (I believe a few inches) the firefighters would have received a lethal dose of radiation from the spent fuel because there would not be enough of a water barrier to stop the gamma rays produced by decaying Uranium and other "nuclear ash".Running a nuclear reactor with four people is impossible. Period. Reactors don't run on "skeleton crews".Things like electric cooling pumps just can't be turned off willy-nilly. No reactors use diesel cooling pumps as their primary system.

I knew when I saw the description in the TV guide that this was a winner, then I forgot it was on. Luckily my friend sent me a text to say "This is SO 'so bad its good', I may pee"What higher praise can there be!This movie was nearly as funny as Speed 2 (we were nearly thrown out of the cinema for that one - did no-one else know it was a comedy?)All that was missing here was George Kennedy. Although it did have Carl Lewis!!and did anyone else pick up on the irony/symbolism of the kids playing 'Twister'? Fantastic.Get in some pizza and plenty of alcohol, you won't have a better evening's entertainment!!