Twisters is very fun, because it’s very fun when people drive into tornadoes. It would be boring if there were already seven Twister sequels. But the first movie happened, then Daisy Edgar-Jones was born, and now she’s driving into tornadoes.
I liked the original when I was young enough to think they filmed inside actual twisters. Rewatching it recently, I still dug it. So many wonderful character actors screaming pseudo-science into wind machines. Helen Hunt’s storm-chasers were this traveling intellectual garage band, all Slackers and Hackers. The bad guy was Cary Elwes, a cad with, ugh, “corporate sponsors.” The makers of Twister were, of course, about to film Speed 2 and Jurassic Park 2. Back then, though, even sellouts didn’t sell out all the time. Twister made half a billion dollars, and everyone involved was done.
The sequel could be endearingly retro if it were just recreating old thrills. When we meet Kate Carter (Edgar-Jones), she’s van-lifing with her own cyclone crew. They’re younger and prettier than the original cast — so it’s playful, in a nasty way, when they get massacred right off. The message could be Generation X saying you kids can’t hack it, or maybe it’s Gen Z protesting look how much harder it is for us! The new twisters, we learn, snatch individual people into the stratosphere while their friends scream just a few feet away. These tornadoes are mean. Kate ends up battered and bloody, wandering a ruined neighborhood.
Five years later, she’s in New York with a desk job. Her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) asks her back to Oklahoma for a week in the Suck Zone. He has a new business model. He will point three cameras at one tornado and create an ultra-density geo-thermal whatever-man map of the storm’s interior. Thus: Profit. His team has competition. The most popular streamer on StormTok is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). He films himself riding a truck into a whirlwind, and is handsome. Thus: Profit.
This is the fun part, sweetheart. Director Lee Isaac Chung keeps it simple: Storm comes, they chase. Javi’s a charming guy leading a bland bunch of uniforms. Tyler’s YouTubers are wilder, but I live in fear of accidentally wandering into an influencer’s livestream, so they are also annoying. Kate’s caught in the middle of these two forces. Like she’s trapped between two emotional tornadoes!
Edgar-Jones, it must be said, gets a raw deal. Mark L. Smith’s script makes her the Genius Who Doesn’t Want To Chase Anymore, like Bill Paxton, but also the Grieving Survivor Who Lost A Loved One, like Helen Hunt. By comparison, it was badass and kinda metal how Hunt’s Jo kept symbolically running into the storm that killed her dad. She wanted vengeance slash she wanted to die. Kate wants neither thing, which is logical and boring.
Meanwhile, Tyler is Elwes’ snarky Jonas reincarnated, except now leading the hipster-outcast crew on suicide runs. I didn’t really get Powell before. (Hit Man: A movie about a handsome man learning to use hair product and wear contact lenses.) Here, though, I understood. Cowboy hat; shit-eating grin; truck with drill-anchors. Every other Twister person has a scientific purpose. Tyler’s mission is Certain Death For Clicks. He has a catchphrase: “If you feel it, chase it!”
Kate wants to help people. Javi does, too, but also needs money. Tyler only wants money, maybe, which could make him less nice yet more honest. For a hot second, this compelling clash of philosophies is almost a love triangle. Cynical smart woman, nice friend with issues, hot charming idiot: Very Broadcast News. The 1996 Twister was, arguably, an action romcom about exes falling back in love while launching computer balls into cyclones. Without romance, what’s this all about?
Deep sigh: Saving The World. Kate believes she can stop tornadoes. Tyler decides to pitch in, because —turns out — he also only wants to help people. His whole thing is community activism. He’s selling t-shirts to finance disaster relief. Powell is very fun as a jerk, kinda fun as a nice jerk. Still, it’s a leap to believe that Tornado Jackass was privatized FEMA all along.
Chung gets what made the first movie unique. He films on location in Oklahoma, and fills the cast with memorable faces. He knows the tornadoes have to be palpable characters; there’s a genuine laugh-gasp when one storm turns smoke-black after swallowing a power plant. But you have to remember, in the 1996 film, nobody was really doing anything. Natural disaster was, well, natural. The script by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin claimed the heroes’ findings might increase warning systems from three minutes to fifteen minutes. A big silly movie about Incremental Research.
Twisters ignores ensuing decades of climate change, minus one easy-to-censor line about the increasing rate of bad weather events. You sense new anxiety, though, in how badly it wants to make its characters into weather superheroes. Note the particulars of the final setpiece. While Kate tries to defeat the biggest tornado yet, everyone in a nearby town seeks shelter in the same building: A place big enough to hold dozens, a business already weathering bad economic trends. Saving the world is boring. But — on the big screen, with a big crowd, on the one date night this month — I did believe Twisters could save a movie theater.