By Brontë H. Lacsamana, Reporter
Movie ReviewTwistersDirected by Lee Isaac Chung
A MODERN-DAY rehashing of a beloved, campy 1996 disaster blockbuster — this is what people expect from Twisters. Surprisingly, Lee Isaac Chung’s follow-up to the original defies the nostalgia that permeates sequels today, with it being a stand-alone film with no direct narrative connection to the previous one.
Though Twister sets a low bar in terms of plot believability, Twisters fully embraces this and takes what made the first movie successful to up the ante — the spectacle, the overall drama. It delivers a thrilling story about people chasing tornadoes (for the science!) and facing down these destructive vortexes with a mix of glee and horror.
The film begins with storm chaser Kate Carter (played by the phenomenal actress Daisy Edgar-Jones), whose lifelong passion for weather has led her to test out a tornado suppression device of her own design along with a team of colleagues. Things don’t go as planned, with the loss of most of her team to a category EF5 tornado, which is the biggest one there is.
Years later, she has supposedly given up storm chasing for a weather prediction job when her former teammate and the only other survivor of the tragedy, Javi (played by Anthony Ramos), reenters her life. Now backed by a lot of corporate funding, he pulls her back in — to a world of intensifying storms that have never been seen before.
Her path collides with reckless social-media superstar Tyler Owens (played by today’s charming, in-demand leading man, Glen Powell) and his howling troupe of “tornado wranglers.” At first on competing teams, the pair find themselves growing closer as multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma threaten to blow away everything they hold dear.
The film’s star power is notable. Mr. Powell and Ms. Edgar-Jones have a palpable chemistry, the former flashing his signature movie smile that has put him on course toward stardom (Set It Up, Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, Hit Man). Meanwhile, the latter capably takes the reins of the emotionally traumatized meteorologist that Helen Hunt played in the original film.
Ms. Edgar-Jones also believably plays the character “with an uncanny knack for predicting when and where a tornado is brewing” that Bill Paxton played in Twister. Again, none of the characters in the new film are related to the ones in Twister, but it keeps a lot of the same beats albeit switching the roles around somewhat. The only common name is Dorothy, the name of a machine developed by Ms. Hunt and Mr. Paxton’s characters in the first film in an effort to study storms.
As with many disaster or nature-related films today, there is often an expectation that global warming or climate change be mentioned. There is definitely a reason storms are much worse in the 21st century than before, but no one in Twisters surprisingly ever mentions it.
On the flip side, there are many scenes that pay tribute to tornado victims and acknowledge how they can be taken advantage of by big corporations after their losses, something the 1996 movie didn’t touch on. What the two movies do share is how cheesy the outright villainy of its selfish corporate antagonists can be, though the original does it in more fun and funny ways (“He’s in it for the money, not the science!”).
With that in mind, this new film just doesn’t embrace the level of silly and wonder that the old one does, but perhaps that is a testament to how seriously blockbusters take themselves these days. Perhaps, to a 1990s-born kid like this writer, Twister will always be more interesting, as it represents a bygone era of campy banter and wacky humor as cars speed down a two-lane road amid cornfields (note Philip Seymour-Hoffman in one of his great, small roles, among others in the lovable, ragtag storm-chasing crew).
The biggest thing Twisters has going for it is an improvement on visuals. The 1990s had its (admittedly endearing) mixture of budgeted practical effects with barely passable digital effects, but at least now the new movie showcases the updated potential of action blockbusters. In 30 years, will it feel like a quintessential 2020s movie the same way its original feels like a quintessential 1990s movie today? Only time will tell.
Watching Twisters on the big screen enraptures as Mr. Powell, with his cowboy ways (“If you feel it, chase it!”), drives fearlessly into the tornado, an experience sucking us in at least for a little while. Nature’s divine authority casts aside man’s urge to control and master the world as storms devastate the land, and the computerized form of it is demonic, surreal, terrifying.
It was fun in the first movie when the screen of an outdoor drive-in theater showing The Shining was ripped away and sucked into the storm — in the new film an old moviehouse showing Frankenstein suffers the same fate. It’s an on-the-nose way to continue the narrative of how the increasingly monstrous capabilities of digital cinema are gradually able to generate bigger and bigger spectacles that can reel us all in, in ways analog couldn’t. With phenomena like artificial intelligence and algorithmic content up ahead, perhaps Twisters is us taking a breather within the calm eye of the storm, waiting to see what comes next.
