Director – Lee Isaac Chung, Screenplay – Mark L. Smith, Story – Joseph Kosinski, Producers – Patrick Crowley & Frank Marshall, Photography – Dan Mindel, Music – Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ben Snow, Visual Effects – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Bill Georgiou, Animation Supervisor – David Crispino), Special Effects Supervisor – Scott R. Fisher, Production Design – Patrick Sullivan. Production Company – Warner Bros. Pictures/Universal/Amblin Entertainment/Domain Entertainment.
Cast
Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate Carter), Glen Powell (Tyler Owens), Anthony Ramos (Javi), Maura Tierney (Cathy), Harry Hadden-Paton (Ben Shropshire III), Brandon Perea (Boone), Sasha Lane (Lily), Daryl McCormack (Jeb), Kiernan Shipka (Addy), David Corenswet (Scott), Tunde Adebimpe (Dexter), Nik Dodani (Praveen), Katy O’Brian (Dani), David Born (Marshall Riggs)
Plot
In Oklahoma, young Kate Carter leads a team of tornado chasers to conduct an experiment releasing a mix of chemicals that she believes will dissipate the tornado. However, this goes wrong and all of the team are killed with the exception of Kate and Javi. Five years later, Kate is working for the National Weather Center in New York City, when she is contacted by Javi. He persuades her to come to Oklahoma and join him and his team at StormPAR testing a new experimental radar system he has developed that can map the inside of a tornado. Kate agrees to spend a week. As soon as she arrives, she finds that the StormPAR are in competition with Tyler Owens, a cocky hotshot tornado chaser who operates a YouTube channel as The Tornado Wrangler. Kate makes a connection with Tyler and he pushes her to reactivate her experiments.
Twister (1996) was a big hit when it came out – the second top grossing film of the year after Independence Day (1996). It was a disaster movie set around tornado chasers with a script from Michael Crichton who was riding on the massive hit of Jurassic Park (1993). Now, in the relentless drive in the late 2010s/2020s to turn almost every property under the sun into an IP that can be leveraged for extruded retellings either as sequels or reboots, Twister gets a sequel with Twisters.
Of course, 28 years after Twister a few things have changed. Both Michael Crichton, who co-wrote the original screenplay, and Bill Paxton, the lead actor from the original, are no longer with us. Original director Jan de Bont has gone AWOL since the early 2000s. Apart from executive producer Steven Spielberg and his Amblin production company, along with Industrial Light and Magic back on effects, nobody associated with the original has returned.
Thus it is that Twisters is a sequel that is not so much a continuation as it is fairly much a rehash of the original plot – the heroine who leads a team of tornado chasers as they try to release a revolutionary new technological advance in dealing with storms; the rival they are constantly having to fight to get to the best storms. Certainly, Twisters places a number of spins on the basics.
Tornado chasers Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones)
One of these spins that killed much of the film for me in the early sections and took me a long way into it to warm up to was that when we are introduced to Daisy Edgar-Jones, she and her compatriots all look about the age of twenty. In the original, Bill Paxton was 41 and Helen Hunt 33 and we had no trouble believing them as a couple and seasoned professionals in their field. This looks like the unappealing idea of Twister having been rewritten to pitch the entire story to the teen/twentysomething crowd. Even when we see Daisy Edgar-Jones supposedly ‘five years later’ at the Weather Center in a business suit, she looks only about the age of eighteen (in real-life, Edgar-Jones is 26). However, when the later sections have her connect up with Glen Powell, who is aged 35 and looks like he is touching fortyish, the film is awfully avoidant about turning this into the romance it keeps seeming like it is going to be, no doubt in awareness of the age gap criticism such a relationship would entail.
While the lead female character suffers an almost fatal miscasting in terms of age believability, the casting of Glen Powell is one of the film’s greatest successes. The way Powell is introduced he seems to be situated to inhabit the Cary Elwes role from Twister – both films seem to champion the more serious-minded scientists over the commercial sell outs and showmen. The smart contemporary updating is that he is now made into the star of a YouTube storm chasing channel and so we get a parody of all the crazed sensation-seeking stunts that go with ‘YouTube influencers’. Powell gives such a cocky and charismatic performance in the role that the great surprise ends up being when this flips over to become the romance-that-isn’t-a-romance between the two and they join sides. At that point, the real villain of the show is seen to be not sensation-seeking cowboy antics but the property developers seeking to exploit the victims of the tornados.
Twisters has been placed in the directorial hands of Lee Isaac Chung, an American of Korean parentage, who gained a great deal of acclaim a couple of years earlier with his autobiographical film Minari (2020), which saw him nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. The story for the sequel also comes from Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron Legacy (2010), Oblivion (2023) and the recent big hit of Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
Tornado on the horizon
The last satisfying aspect of Twisters is actually the aspect of it that worked the best in the original – the Mass Destruction Spectacular. It isn’t that we don’t get that here. Industrial Light and Magic give us plenty of scenes with tornados ominously filling skies, buildings wiped out, of vehicles being whipped up into the maw and of people desperately clinging to what they can to avoid being sucked up. (Talking of which, the film does come with what to me seems the dubious advice that if you are at the bottom of an empty swimming pool clinging to what is there, you are not going to get swept up as opposed to anywhere else).
On the other hand, Twister was driven by the visceral, “holy shit” wildness of its effects – of seeing cows and exploding oil tankers flung into the path of vehicles, whole buildings being lifted up and away and the climax with Paxton and Helen Hunt being cuffed to pipes in the midst of the eye of the hurricane. It may well be that Twisters’ problem in this regard is giving the handling of a major spectacle film like this to a director with no experience of this type of effects-driven film (a problem that the MCU is experiencing with their recruiting ingénue directors who have a single acclaimed arthouse hit). The measure is that while the effects work is good, there is simply not a single “wow” moment among the sequences here that has you dropping your jaw.
(Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Glen Powell) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
