Susan Granger’s review of “ATOMIC TWISTER” (TBS Superstation TV movie: June 9)
This original, made-for-television natural disaster movie is a low-rent take on Jan DeBont’s harrowing “Twister” with some “The China Syndrome” cautionary suspense thrown in. Sharon Lawrence (“NYPD Blue”) plays a nuclear power plant supervisor who battles a mega-meltdown when a series of tornadoes strikes a small Southern town, endangering the safeguards that are built into the nuclear regulatory system. She’s a single mom who has to leave her son with a dim-bulb teenage baby-sitter so she can work and, when disaster threatens, she must choose whether to save the plant or rush home to save her child. Mark-Paul Gosselaar (“NYPD Blue”) plays the deputy sheriff who lives next-door and has become a sort of role model for the boy. For adrenaline junkies, there’s plenty of action when the wind starts to blow and ordinary people are caught in extraordinary circumstances. Dirt and debris fly, and the first casualty is a gate-guard played by athlete Carl Lewis, who can outrun Ben Johnson, but he can’t outrun a tornado. Perhaps it’s Ron McGee’s by-the-numbers script or maybe Bill Corcoran’s direction, but the acting’s wooden and the dialogue’s predictable: “This is not going to happen on my watch!” “We have three minutes to manually shut down the reactor and contain the waste pool!” “We’re not out of this yet, not by a long shot!” On the Granger Made-for-TV Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Atomic Twister” is a formulaic, frightening 5 – but what’s significant is that if you lay down a map of where Tornado Alley is located in the United States and then you trace where most of the nuclear power plants have been built – you’ll find they do coincide. That’s the truth. And that’s very scary. “Atomic Twister” premieres on Sunday, June 9, at 8 p.m. on the TBS Superstation.
