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From a structural standpoint, the single most important part of a movie is its pacing. If a movie is paced poorly, the end result will feel disjointed and messy as it attempts to tell a story that will fail to have meaningful stakes or conflict. Pacing also impacts our sense of time within the movie and allows for the audience to keep up with the events that are transpiring to prevent confusion. It is for this reason that Best Film Editing is a category at the Academy Awards (even if the category is not being broadcast live this year); a fair editing job can fix even a fundamentally flawed movie. Unfortunately, Infinite Storm manages to fall short because the actual plot of the movie is tiresome.
Before going too deeply into the narrative issues, the movie does have a few positives that work to its advantage. The visuals are gorgeous. Infinite Storm is a survival movie set on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and the way that the danger and beauty of the mountain and the forest are shot feel like it is pulled out of a nature documentary. It is unapologetic in portraying and characterizing the wilderness as an antagonistic force onto itself that it really works to the movie’s favor. That said, the plot around all this is not well executed so if someone wants to see beautiful video of a snowy forest, there are no shortage of 4K nature documentaries available on any streaming service or home media to watch without slogging through a boring plot.
The other thing that really works for the movie is the performance of Naomi Watts in the lead. She basically has to carry the movie on her shoulders as the force going against the forces of nature and she manages to do it. Again, had the plot and structure been better, this movie would have been much more memorable and worth the time to watch, however that is not the case here.
The pacing is the key issue that makes the movie unwatchable, which is a shame because the other aspects of the story and the visual medium as a whole make it great. The movie is short, clocking in just over an hour and a half including credits which barely crosses it into the bottom threshold to make it a feature film. Ordinarily that would be fine, but it seems that scenes are added in to pad the run time and make it cross into that length. This leads the audience to wonder if this movie would have been better off as a short film, or a documentary about the events the movie is dramatizing. When a survival adventure movie that clocks in as short as this one does manage to be boring at times, there is a fundamental issue with if the story can carry a feature length narrative.
Infinite Storm is a perfectly serviceable movie to watch on cable where a viewer can tune out when the movie gets boring or change the channel, however to spend an hour and a half (really two hours with previews) in a theater for a movie that’s just going to have the viewer staring at their watch waiting for something to happen is a tall order. Eventually it will be on Netflix or something at it may be worth watching then, and even then it’s probably not worth a revisit.
Final Rating: 5/10
