Reed Timmer has spent decades learning enough about tornadoes to know exactly how dangerous they are, then used that knowledge to get closer to them. That contradiction gives Never Stop Chasing its most interesting idea. Ken Cole’s documentary follows Timmer, the meteorologist and longtime storm chaser whose career stretches from his college years in the late 1990s through Tornado Glory, Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers, and the increasingly sophisticated Team Dominator operation.
His armored Dominator vehicles, frantic broadcasts and infectious shouting have made him one of the public faces of storm chasing. His persona even helped inform Glen Powell’s character in Twisters. Fame explains the cameras. It does not explain the compulsion.
One colleague says Timmer simply cannot take time off. His mother remembers a child terrified of thunderstorms until knowledge transformed fear into fascination. Somewhere between those two observations lies the person Cole is trying to understand: a man who converted terror into study, study into profession, and profession into something approaching necessity.
Science at Full Throttle
Cole structures many of the best sequences around a familiar transformation. Team Dominator drives through quiet stretches of Middle America under harmless skies. Clouds thicken. Radar information becomes urgent. Timmer’s voice rises. Soon he is driving at absurd speeds while filming with his phone, demanding directions and trying to position Dominator 3 close enough to capture a tornado without being consumed by it.
The footage is spectacular partly because no visual effect can offer the same moral discomfort. Trees fall across roads. Debris hits vehicles. Wind turbines crumple under forces that make expensive engineering look briefly theoretical. The Dolby Atmos mix gives the storms a physical presence, with wind and impact swallowing the relative calm that preceded them.
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Yet Timmer is not simply collecting dramatic footage. He has a Ph.D. in meteorology, measures storm conditions and has helped develop drones capable of entering spaces even his armored vehicle cannot safely reach. His recordings can provide unusually close observations of tornado formation and behavior.
This creates what might be called the credibility paradox: the traits that make Timmer exceptionally useful in the field are also the traits that encourage parts of academic meteorology to regard him with suspicion. He is loud, famous, television-friendly and visibly exhilarated by danger. Science prefers its authority to look calmer.
The documentary makes a persuasive case that presentation and substance are poor substitutes for one another. Timmer may sound like he is riding the world’s most terrifying roller coaster, but the instruments are real.
Death Changes the Chase
The film becomes considerably heavier whenever history interrupts Timmer’s momentum. The 2013 El Reno tornado represents one such rupture. Three experienced storm researchers Timmer knew were killed when the enormous tornado overtook them. Their deaths shattered one of storm chasing’s comforting assumptions: knowledge and experience could reduce danger, yet neither could guarantee escape.
The death of Timmer’s friend and fellow storm chaser Joel Taylor from a drug overdose introduces another kind of absence. Cole’s long relationship with Timmer gives him archival material stretching across decades, so youth and mortality begin occupying the same frame. The reckless young man remains visible inside the older one, except now there are ghosts riding along.
This is where Never Stop Chasing also exposes its own hesitation. Cole can document Timmer’s losses, his aging and his inability to stop moving, but he rarely presses hard enough on what continued chasing means psychologically. Timmer understands the probability of death better than almost anyone watching him. Why, then, does knowledge fail to moderate desire? Maybe that question has no satisfying answer. Cole occasionally seems content to accept that possibility a little too easily.
The 2024 Greenfield, Iowa chase gives the issue a harsher shape. After tracking the tornado that devastated the town, Timmer’s team stops filming and joins search-and-rescue efforts. They enter the wreckage, looking for survivors and confronting the people who did not survive. The distinction between observer and participant collapses there. Chase a tornado long enough and eventually you arrive at somebody’s ruined home.
Close Enough to See, Too Close to Probe
Cole has worked alongside Timmer for over two decades, and that familiarity buys access few outside filmmakers could reproduce. He captures the casual conversations before storms, the operational chaos inside the vehicles and the way Team Dominator members switch rapidly between excitement and fear. A New York Times Magazine photojournalist joining one chase becomes an effective surrogate for anyone tempted to romanticize the experience from a safe distance. That intimacy has a cost.
Cole rarely challenges Timmer with the same force that the tornado footage does. The camera can show a man aging, grieving and racing toward another violent storm almost simultaneously. Interviews tend to explain those pieces separately. The images connect them.
Perhaps that is why the storms become the documentary’s most revealing psychologists. They expose Timmer’s excitement, expertise, recklessness, usefulness and vulnerability without resolving any of them. His childhood fear disappeared once he understood thunderstorms. The strange part is what understanding left behind. He knows exactly what he is chasing. And he keeps accelerating.
Never Stop Chasing released in select theaters nationwide on August 21, 2026, with North American distribution handled by Abramorama. The adrenaline-fueled documentary follows world-renowned meteorologist and extreme storm chaser Reed Timmer alongside his team as they pursue North America’s most destructive tornadoes inside their custom armored vehicle, examining two decades of personal sacrifice, scientific obsession, and dangerous close encounters with nature.
Where to Watch Never Stop Chasing (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Never Stop Chasing
Distributor: Abramorama
Release date: August 21, 2026
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes
Director: Ken Cole
Writers: Ken Cole
Producers and Executive Producers: Ken Cole, Kam Stocks, Nicole Tao, David Wu, Michael McGrale, Bill Beach, James Groth, Carmel Wood, Jon Wood
Cast: Reed Timmer, Mike Scantlin, Connor McCrorey, Edgar O’Neal, Matt Spatol, Natalie Ivis, Dr. Joshua Wurman, Dr. Howard Bluestein, Tim Marshall
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Brent Meeske, Walter Mather
Editors: Matthew Willard
Composer: Leo Birenberg, Zach Robinson
The Review
Never Stop Chasing
Never Stop Chasing is strongest when Ken Cole lets Reed Timmer’s contradictions sit unresolved. Here is a scientist who has spent decades learning how tornadoes work and still reacts to each funnel with the excitement of someone seeing one for the first time. The Greenfield aftermath and memories of El Reno give that obsession a darker charge, exposing the human price beneath the spectacle. Cole sometimes stays too close to Timmer to interrogate his compulsions fully, yet the astonishing chase footage often supplies the psychological detail the interviews miss.
PROS
- Extraordinary real tornado footage
- Timmer’s contradictions remain fascinating
- Powerful Greenfield rescue sequence
- Strong archival material
- Immersive sound and photography
CONS
- Limited psychological interrogation
- Cole can feel protective of Timmer
- Some biographical passages stay surface-level
