Twisters - Let’s Twist Again

TWISTERS (LEE ISAAC CHUNG) 2024

🌪️🌪️🌪️🌪️

“Cow”

“I’ve got to go, Julie - we’ve got cows!”

“Another cow”

“Actually, I think that was the same one…”

Twister (1996)

Heading into Twisters, the biggest question I had was ‘would this be the same [metaphorical] cow?’. Almost thirty years on, it seemed strange to revisit the world of storm-chasing through Tornado Alley. Was this a reboot, a remake, a sequel, a reimagining? What had actually changed in almost three decades, beyond Glen Powell being propelled to stardom in a way the backup airmen in the original Top Gun never were, and better CGI/visual effects? Admittedly there was a new audience which would not have experienced the fairground-ride original on the big screen so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea IF it could trap the same lightning in a bottle. But for people like me who unironically love the original, the trailer felt like dėjà vu all over again. 

The whole point of the original Twister was to create a (mostly) non-stop thrill ride, where the experience - rather than the story - was the key, with effects that, at the time, pushed the limits of what was possible. Even so, the script was far smarter than it was given credit for despite the mostly bare-bones approach to get us from dramatic incident, to chaotic incident, to cataclysmic incident-packed finale. Unfortunately, critics at the time broadly filed this away in the ‘Empty Summer Blockbuster’ folder, failing to recognise there was a space for this type of event movie. Not all cinema has to be high art. So sitting down in the movie theatre for the early morning screening of Twisters, I wasn’t asking for much. I wanted a crowd-pleaser, not a critics’ darling. 

That’s exactly what I got. 

Weirdly though, describing it in that way feels harsh, because, critically speaking, the things it sets out to deliver, it does, with maybe one well-publicised omission (which I’m not going to spoil here, even with a link elsewhere, because every article on the topic reveals too much about the movie). It also offers something the original didn’t - genuine sex appeal. Yes, at times the movie is ridiculous. Sometimes it tries to dazzle us with the most basic science. Other times it’s just Glen Powell walking towards the camera in a tight white top (sigh…). It’s oh so loud, and dramatic and it absolutely checks the boxes you want for a disaster movie, even if it’s the non-traditional type where people are actively putting themselves in harm’s way.

I’m still not clear where it sits alongside the 1996 ‘original’. It certainly borrows heavily from Jan De Bont’s second directing gig, which was sadly followed by his rapid decline as a film-maker. Reading the stories about problems on set that have surfaced to coincide with the new movie, maybe the difficulties in bringing it together played a part in that downward trajectory, though critical reception may have also had a role. It would be hugely disappointing for a similar fate to befall Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung, but I see no reason it should, even if Stephen Spielberg has returned as one of the executive producers. There is certainly plenty of crossover with the 1996 movie in the story structure, even if elements of it are subtly subverted here. There’s also a piece of tech central to Twister that’s still around in the form of ‘Dorothy’, a dispenser of little sensors that get sucked up into the storm like metal and microprocessor helicopter seeds to map the tornado from the inside. Here it’s marked as incarnation V, though its role is secondary to the main thrust of the story. 

It’s perhaps no surprise to find that Joseph Kosinski is responsible for the story here. Top Gun: Maverick pretty much reset the blueprint for blockbuster action-driven movies, itself offering just enough connecting tissue for the bare-bones story, and here it’s obvious he knows where the focus should be. With Top Gun: Maverick, he had a ready-made backstory to build the character element around. With no returning characters, Kosinski recognises the need to introduce an origin, to anchor us to the central character who, it turns out, is Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Cooper and not Glen Powell as Tyler Owens. Perhaps the order of the cast list should have given us a clue. This is not to say that Powell takes quite the same back seat (while still making his mark) as he did as H_NGM_N and fans will certainly not be disappointed. But the script is clever enough to refocus our attention to its heart whenever we drift away - however briefly -  sometimes literally, when the Brit reporter embedded with Tyler’s ‘tornado-wranglers’, who also serves to deliver most of the laughs, begins to sense the team he is following is not the real story.    

Kate’s origin story is a tremendous scene-setter, as a group of college grads set out to chase a twister and attempt to tame it through the use of a chemical compound released into its funnel. Off the bat, the movie quickly establishes Kate’s smarts and instincts for reading weather patterns on-the-fly and ability to process information. But it also shows her connection to other people. Both of these qualities are equally important as they allow us to more fully understand her later trauma. Chung does not hold back from releasing the fury from the get-go, as a sedate EF1 tornado unmasks itself as an EF5 (the Enhanced Fujita Scale being an improved way to measure the destructiveness of tornadoes introduced between movies) highlighting a key element - the unpredictability of twisters and the requirement for the damage to be done before they can be properly classified. The chaos that ensues is captured through top-notch editing from Terilyn A. Shropshire and tight framing and dynamic movement from Tony Scott favourite Dan Mindel, who has some serious action movie credentials as a cinematographer, and the whole cast give it their all in the reaction shots.  

While visual effects have improved dramatically since the 1990s, it’s perhaps less obvious in the wide shots of the twisters themselves. Where there is a truly dramatic change is in the ability to show the utter devastation left in a tornado’s wake, with dramatic recreations throughout the movie.Though it’s true that this element might be overshadowed by the kinetic drama of flying cars and exploding wind turbines, it’s arguably this element that reminds us how significant the impact of these weather phenomena is, and represents the hook for the entire movie, where Kate finds herself back in the field to help out an old friend using new technology to better map these killer storms. What follows is the classic ‘face your fears’.’learn from your mistakes’ tale with all the requisite beats. 

With added Glen Powell.

Taking the same idea as de Bont’s movie of two rival groups of storm chasers to build the story upon was a smart move, capturing a key element of what made the original work. Here things seem somewhat reversed, with Kate working for the well-financed, identically-uniformed team and with the rival team built around brash, arrogant YouTuber Tyler Owens played by Powell, who leans into the loose-cannon role of the self-anointed ‘Tornado Wrangler’, taking risks for clicks and selling t-shirts and mugs, while channelling a lot of the good energy of Bill Paxton. As the film progresses we see that first impressions aren’t everything as the movie reveals that there’s more here than meets the eye, but he provides the fun element for much of the film. The filming style for the YouTube sequences is a neat touch too, offering a different kind of immersion in events.  

Powell offers buckets of charm and looks good in a cowboy hat, and it feels a bit like he’s on the Bradley Cooper career trajectory of unassuming supporting and incidental roles, snowballing into something bigger almost overnight right now. Probably more a ‘star’ than a particularly gifted actor at this stage of his career (though Richard Lintlaker’s Hit Man showed he’s got some range) he’s got charm in spades and the role plays to most of his strengths as his first meeting and ongoing friendly rivalry with Kate becomes almost an extended meet-cute.       

Both Edgar-Jones and Powell are extremely watchable and, importantly, have great chemistry. We walk through the usual growing pains you might expect and enjoy some (mostly) good-natured one-upmanship, but even when they’re verbally sparring you get a sense of a spark there which grows as they become thrust together by the series of storms taking place. However, unlike both Twister and Top Gun: Maverick, there’s not a lot of character behind this pair, with the exception of perhaps Harry Hadden-Patten as Ben the reporter from just between Streatham Hill and West Norwood. There’s colour amongst the supporting cast - they just don’t get a lot of opportunity to make an impression, or are a little flat. The latter description applies to Anthony Ramos as Javi, Kate’s friend who gets her back in the field. 

Ramos and Edgar-Jones also appear in the film’s most embarrassingly written scene, one which filled me with dread for what was to come. In it, Javi explains his plan for mapping twisters using new radar technology as though Kate is in elementary school, complete with props, and Kate reacts as though the idea of triangulation is some deep scientific eureka! moment. Fortunately, after this brief diversion into Science 101, Kosinski mostly avoids getting into the nuts and bolts of physics and meteorology beyond what’s necessary. I have no idea if all the science actually holds up, though I was surprised to find cloud-seeding does work as rapidly as portrayed in one scene, so maybe it does. Either way, I don’t think that’s the key thing here. A film like this needs some licence, and while one or two scenes stretch the realms of possibility (in particular an overturned SUV on its side conveniently being righted by flying debris, which is somewhat lazy writing) there’s nothing egregious. 

Given what goes before, there is perhaps a sense of the final storm sequence being less dramatic than it might have been, though the levels of peril are high. Here, where live destruction of a town happens before our eyes, the visual effects are somewhat less impressive and more obvious, and there’s not the same physical recreation of chaos to match building an entire house to drive a pickup through from the first movie. But it’s hard to feel short-changed as our protagonists’ stories reach their conclusion (though there is a post-film epilogue as part of the credit sequence that you should stick around for). 

Overall, Twisters is buckets of fun, drama and excitement in a way not enough movies are, with two very watchable leads. Given that this is not my first rodeo, and my love for Twister, was this in any way anticlima(c)tic? Not a bit of it. Hold onto your popcorn. It’s quite a ride