Universal Pictures-Warner Bros. Twisters is a strange beast of a film. It’s a tentpole American summer release that just so happens to be a prestige natural disaster flick helmed by Oscar nominee director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) that features two leads on the rise, Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing) and Glen Powell (Anyone But You), alongside a wealth of visual and audio effects that demand a cinema viewing. It’s also a decade’s late sequel to the 1996 disaster bonanza Twister.
The nineties were a peak era for tentpole natural disaster films as the decade ushered in releases like competing volcano films Dante’s Peak and Volcano while Armageddon and Deep Impact gave us competing stories of Texas-sized meteors on their way to destroy Earth. Twister arrived before those films, with Jan de Bont’s unchallenged tornado extravaganza coming in second behind Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day at the box office. Twister’s cultural footprint was furthered by being one of the first films released on DVD in America, making it a staple of burgeoning home video libraries.
But that’s not the only reason Twister persists as a cultural landmark. Co-leads Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton shared tangible on screen chemistry as a couple going through a divorce while chasing tornadoes, leading to humanising moments that helped ground their characters and ultimately transformed their climactic treacherous survival through the death zone of a tornado into the surprisingly emotional experience that it is. Unlike many of its cinematic brethren of its time, the visual spectacle of tornadoes doing tornado things in Twister still stands up today with its awe-inspiring acts of destruction. And then, of course, there’s the flying cow.
After this deluge of nineties disaster flicks, Hollywood reacted as only Hollywood does: it started ramping up the absurdity of the action, ripping away the reality and bolstering the implausibility of their spectacle. Natural disaster titan Roland Emmerich lead the charge with films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, with Dean Devlin’s Geostorm acted as the peak example of natural disaster flicks gone bad. While there was the occasional dud entry (Into the Storm take a bow) the genre was sullied out of existence.
While Twister is not a film that screamed for a sequel, it does follow an everyday event that is both visually engaging and easy to contemporise. Twisters opts for a new set of characters, squirrelling in welcome nods to the original here and there by way of some sweet Wizard of Oz references, while a new farmyard animal gets a guernsey instead of a cow.
Twisters opens with Edgar-Jones’ Kate, a PhD hopeful meteorologist who wants to run an experiment to see if she can make a tornado to dissipate before it causes further destruction. Along for the ride is Javi (Anthony Ramos), who wants to release a souped-up version of Dorothy 5.0, the weather sensor machine from the first film, during the same tornado, as well as Kate’s partner and colleagues. The team misjudge the size of the tornado they aim to tame, a mistake which sees Kate losing her partner and friends in a traumatic event.
Five years pass and Javi, now working for a major organisation seeking to track extreme weather events for insurance purposes, reaches out to see if Kate will come on board to help test out a new tracking system the company has been working on. Kate declines at first, but when Javi reminds her of the devastation that a tornado can leave, she agrees to come on board for a week to help with the research.
Kate touches down in rural Oklahoma from New York, stepping into the flurry of a social media driven storm chasing scene, partially led by suave YouTube famous ringleader Tyler Owens (Powell) and his renegade crew of misfits, each with their own reason to throw themselves in the path of a tornado. First impressions of Tyler are that he’s a cocksure, ego driven person who’s only focused on racking up those YouTube views and selling shirts, all the while calling Kate a ‘city girl’ in the process, but naturally, as he’s the leading man, so he’s got a soft spot that we are expected to fall for.
With a loud exclamation of ‘Marge, the nineties are here!’, Mark L. Smith’s script (based on an idea by Joseph Kosinski) is a textbook example of the routine ‘save the cat’ templates found in scripts of the era, with formulaic plotting creating a routine blockbuster experience that transports us back to the highs and the lows of the era (a bit like Kosinski’s overpraised Top Gun: Maverick). Smith’s reductive version of the science field seemingly neglects the work that has been undertaken to increase gender equality in STEM related fields, with Javi’s team exclusively made up of white shirt, generic engineer dudes in trucks who (Javi excluded) act like they’ve never met a woman before. It’s Smith’s way of utilising a shorthand for the situation that Kate finds herself in, but it’s rough and tired and plays like a nineties homage that could have stayed in the past.
Contributing to the general sense of homogeneity are the cookie-cutter trio of lead characters, Kate, Tyler, and Javi. Kate is a woman who manages to overcome the masculine-dominated field she works in to do her job, Tyler is a family-loving dude who just wants to do the right thing, while Javi also wants to do the right thing but is hampered by an Evil Corporation. Credit where credit is due as all three leads deliver genuinely captivating performances, bringing a depth to their characters that clearly isn’t on the page.
Edgar-Jones does a lot with a look, evoking frustration, admiration, and, most importantly, a sense of wonder and awe when confronted with the majesty of the weather. Powell is at his Powell-iest, utilising his now trademark smile in ways that I’ve not seen someone use a smile before; at times he’s jovial, later the same expression shows concern; it’s quite the experience. Ramos is, as always, a delight, bringing a lightness and complexity to Javi that makes him more than just the token good guy doing bad things; with that said, after the last Transformers film, this is yet another action vehicle that wastes Ramos’ talents. The man needs a new agent.
Twisters presents a decidedly apolitical view of Midwest America, with minimal focus on the people whose houses and livelihoods are about to be whisked away by a seemingly unstoppable force. Community events like a rodeo, a baseball game, or a street market gives us a glimpse into the livelihood at stake, but these a presented like set dressings rather than active, living hubs. What’s missing at the core of Twisters are substantial moments that humanise the peripheral characters to ensure that the acts of devastation are more than just a visual spectacle to behold with the plentiful array of extras given the sole character trait of ‘duck and run for cover’.
The reason why a filmmaker like Lee Isaac Chung would take on a film like Twisters is found in the Midwest of it all. He’s clearly a filmmaker who finds resonance with that region of America, with the semi-autobiographical Minari being set in Arkansas. He peppers Twisters with that Lee Isaac Chung touch, intersplicing brief moments of Kate’s lingering grief amidst the chaos and destruction, which in turn is contrasted with shots that embrace the magnificence of nature. A late shot sees Kate standing atop a hill, looking out over a vista and taking in the wonder of the majesty of the weather system at play in front of her. But that touch is dwarfed by the necessity of spectacle that comes with a summer blockbuster.
The conundrum of a film like Twisters is that it’s a big budget spectacle that, at one time, would have dominated the summer box office for months on end, but now it needs to make its money back in the opening weekends before shuffling onto on demand streaming services. As a modern effects driven blockbuster, it simply cannot present explicit societal issues as its core narrative (see how well that worked for Furiosa). The words ‘climate change’ are never mentioned, even though the text of the film explicitly explores its impact and when faced with the question of how to make our current climate reality a source of popcorn entertainment, Lee Isaac Chung comes up with a muddled answer. Much like Top Gun Maverick, where the villains are anonymised and the hero is an all-American dude, Twisters is a straight down the middle, please them all flick; and on that surface level, it works.
Now, in an act of critical contradiction, on a purely visceral level, this is the exact reason why Twisters is an entertaining experience that demands a cinematic viewing. For a film that’s focused on extreme weather events and the destruction left in their wake, by putting minimal focus on the humans impacted by their devastation, it makes it easier to appreciate the ferocity on display. In other words, Twisters firmly plants you in the front seat of what it feels like to be a storm chaser giddy with excitement as they get closer and closer to the mammoth force of a tornado.
For those who want their blockbuster fare to contain more bite than they currently do, like I do, it would have been nice to see a film about the impact of increasingly turbulent meteorological events bite into more than it does. There’s a whiff of a narrative thread about predatory insurance agencies seeking to buy up land after a tornado has touched down, but it’s so minimal that it feels like Twisters is afraid it’s going to scare off the Midwest states that it is depicting on screen.
While Twisters shuns away from touching on climate change, it does manage to squirrel in a welcome allegory that emerges as a meta-commentary on the state of modern Hollywood blockbusters. A weathered old picture house replaces the drive-in theatre of the first film, acting as the focal point of the climax which sees a massive tornado tear apart the fabric of fiction, tearing the screen asunder and presenting the occupants of the cinema with the reality of the world. On one level, it’s as if Lee Isaac Chung is saying to the audience, ‘you came here for entertainment, but is the destruction of the world as a result of climate change really entertainment?’
But with Javi’s fateful line, “This theatre wasn’t built to withstand what’s coming,” it also can be read that Twisters is stating that with the dominance of streaming services and digital projection that it’s cinemas as a whole that haven’t been built to withstand what it has evolved into. Rural towns struggle to afford upgrading their cinema systems to digital formats or find themselves shuttering due to at home competition. We’re a long way from the era where Twister dominated the box office and audiences would return week after week to get that ‘only in cinemas’ experience. They’ve become accustomed to getting a similar experience at home for a much more affordable price, and while I might say ‘rush out and see this film on the big screen’, the response might be, ‘when I can just turn on the daily news and get the real deal, why would I?’
Ultimately, even though Twisters is a filmic oddity – a decades late sequel that precious few asked for – and is saddled with all of its nineties-era artefacts and script-level character issues, Twisters is the exact kind of film that demands a cinematic viewing. It acts as a disaster film by way of a monster movie as the titular tornadoes transform in terrifying ways. At one point a tornado splits in two, birthing twins of destruction, later, a twister consumes a power grid, conjuring a fire tornado in its wake. The same guttural lions’ roars and tiger growls carry over from the first film, blended with an array of nature sounds to nauseating effect, giving the twisters a sonic presence that resonates in your guts in a distressing manner. This culminates in Twisters becoming a spectacle for the senses, with the film boasting some of the finest digital weather events creations on screen alongside sound design that pushes your cinemas sound system to its limits, culminating in a film that aesthetically overwhelms the senses and smooths over its many blemishes. At its most cacophonous and chaotic, Twisters stands as one of the finest nineties throwback experiences around.
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos
Writer: Mark L. Smith (based on a story by Joseph Kosinski and characters created by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin)
Producers: Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley
Cinematography: Dan Mindel
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch
