One of the more humorous aspects of Twisters, a very silly movie in what is now apparently a very silly franchise, is the relationship between its title and that of its predecessor, the 1996 cornpone disaster film Twister. The 2024 update presumes that while there was just one gnarly tornado being chased by the original film’s gaggle of thrill-seeking protagonists, now there are multiple—a whole mess of them! However, this was also the case in the original, whose title was a misnomer. In this deeply unconvincing universe, there are seemingly tornados happening every 45 minutes or so for days on end. Granted, both films are set in that heartland of extreme weather, Oklahoma, but it’s still pretty amusing how, just when the characters in either picture have settled down for a meal or to watch TV, another swarm of energy pops up on the radar and sends them back out on the road.
Besides their shared setting and absurdities, there doesn’t appear to be much linkage at first between Jan de Bont’s first entry and Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel/reboot/whatsit. No characters from (or those bearing familial ties to) the subjects of Twister appear here. And the breathless ostentatiousness of the tone has seemingly been subdued (there is no airborne cow, for one), as has the earlier movie’s love of cinema, which encompassed mostly film school 101 titles like The Shining and the Judy Garland A Star Is Born. But Chung gradually teases if-you-know-you-know references to his film’s predecessor in a sly and efficient way and then builds to a climax that ends up paying tribute to The Movies in grand fashion while also maybe casually pondering the nature of our exhibitionist inclinations as a culture. (The most notable of his callbacks is The Wizard of Oz-themed tornado-sensing technology that Bill Paxton’s character pioneered in the first movie; Dorothy now has GPS capabilities.)
Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a PhD student whose work focuses on disrupting tornado dynamics and mitigating their impacts. When she makes a miscalculation in the field, she loses three friends, including her boyfriend, to a treacherous storm. Five years later, the other remaining survivor of the incident, Javi (Anthony Ramos), visits her in New York City, where she’s decamped, to entice her back into the storm chasing life. She agrees to spend one week with him and his crew — “I’m not back!” she insists, quoting Paxton’s charming bit from the first film. As she wearily surrenders herself to her old obsession, she meets the boy-howdy, self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” Tyler (it-guy Glen Powell), whose attention-seeking methods she scrutinizes next to Javi’s head-down, science-first approach.
It turns out, people in Twisters, specifically these two potential love interests, are not who they first seem to be, which ends up being one of the main ways Chung and screenwriter Mark L. Smith (scribe of, unfortunately, The Revenant) self-sabotage. At first, Powell is fun and a little dangerous as a reckless, showboating cowboy who shoots fireworks right into the center of tornados and whose counterparts capture it all for their YouTube channel. But the reveal of his true nature should’ve come later in the movie or not at all, because it immediately deflates the tension of his performance and his relationship with Kate. All three of the films leads, no matter their ever-so-slight dips into morally suspect behavior, are deeply noble people and that unwavering admirability is kind of a snooze to watch. Where are the conflicted motivations, secret desires or contradictions that reside within all of us? These bland do-gooders wouldn’t even be able to get into a convenience store quickly, because they’d all be pulling the “no, after you” routine (a deference that’s infuriatingly evident in Ramos’ last line in the movie).
Authenticity also eludes the film’s depiction of rural, midwestern life, which it broadly signals with radio-country music cues and vistas shot on 35mm film. These choices are good in theory, as the artists featured on the soundtrack are generally talented — they include Charley Crockett, Miranda Lambert and Kane Brown — and celluloid is a dependably beautiful format. But in practice, the songs are mostly bland and a limp effort at evoking a place this Hollywood cast clearly has no history with, and the movie’s visual palette is paradoxically all steely grays and blues and smudgy CGI — the hallmarks of digital photography, not film. Part of this latter point is that the movie inevitably often takes place in overcast weather, but even in the sunnier scenes, there’s little visual immersion, grain or texture of any kind.
Twisters is a movie you can nitpick to death, but in spite of it all, it’s fairly effective spectacle and a decent hang. It has a colorful supporting cast (American Honey’s Sasha Lane! TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe! Nope’s Brandon Perea! Paul Scheer!), builds to a moving finale and means well. Appreciating it is a bit of a backhanded exercise, especially for those of us who have followed Chung’s career since his promising microbudget indie days, but as far as IP entertainment is concerned, you could do a lot worse and a lot more cynical. Lean into the inanity and you’ll have fun, even if the film would’ve been better off doing that more itself.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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