Movie Review: Twisters
Twisters is a classic summer blockbuster. It’s a big, loud, silly, entertaining spectacle that features action, drama, comedy, and romantic tension. It features scenes that will have your jaw on the floor in amazement and scenes that will have your eyes rolling to the back of your head because of its corniness or stupidity. It’s the kind of summer blockbuster we don’t see much of anymore.
Twisters opens with a harrowing sequence that finds tornado chaser and meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her team attempting a new experiment that might help reduce the power of a tornado. The tornado is bigger than anyone expected and proves tragic for several members of Kate’s team. Five years later, Kate has hung up her tornado-chasing boots and is now working in meteorology in New York City. When she is visited by her former friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), he convinces her to come back into the field and work for his company as an unusual string of tornadoes starts to pop up in Oklahoma. Kate, Javi, and his company of scientists must compete with YouTube storm chaser Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his rambunctious team.
Twisters is a sequel the Jan De Bont’s 1996 smash Twister, but only references the first film briefly at the beginning of the film. None of the characters from the first film return or are even mentioned and they never mention anything that had to do with the plot. But the plot beats and characters of Twisters feel very similar to Twister, making the film feel like part sequel, part remake. Kate Carter is essentially Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s characters from the first film combined into one person, as she is a brilliant stormchaser haunted by guilt and trauma who is unexpectedly thrust back into chasing. There’s Javi’s group of scientific storm chasers battling with the free-wheeling, fun-riding group that Tyler Owens for position dominance during the storms. There is a lot of science talk in the film about how tornadoes are formed and destroyed and Kate’s main mission in the film is to find out how to neutralize a tornado before it does extreme damage and this is all perfectly fine exposition in that it helps move the film along during its quieter times and that I don’t know or care if it is scientifically accurate.
And of course, there are huge tornadoes that are incredible to watch on screen. Director Lee Isaac Chung knows that we as the audience are there to see the tornadoes in action. He elevates the scale and destruction of the tornadoes while showing an appreciation for how amazing these creations are. The opening sequence is terrifying and sets the tone that these tornadoes are bigger and meaner than the ones we saw back in 1996. Try and see this on the biggest, loudest screen you can so you can feel the theater shake and your eardrums rattle and immerse yourself in the chaos and mayhem of these twisters as Tyler Owens parks his tricked-out truck in the middle of a cyclone.
But Twisters isn’t all tornadoes and action and that’s where the movie fell short for me. What elevated Twister to its status as an iconic movie of the 90s was not just the thrilling action, but the slew of interesting characters played by excellent character actors. Twisters has a lot of good actors in it, but none of them are developed even in the slightest. The film’s main focus is on Kate, Tyler, and Javi and they get the bulk of the dialog and story and the three of them are charming enough actors to carry the movie, though Powell shoulders most of the movie’s star power, as is the case with most movies starring Glen Powell. But every other character gets nothing to do. Javi’s crew is just a bunch of rude scientists and everyone in Tyler’s crew, an interesting crew with some good actors in it like Sasha Lane and Katy O’Brian, is one-note. They’re smart, they’re wild, and they love storm chasing. None of them have any distinguishing features or anything interesting about them. I would have loved maybe one or two more scenes fleshing out their personalities more to make them just a little more interesting so that we cared about them in these frightening storms.
Twisters doesn’t compare to its predecessor, but it’s a summer movie at its finest. You don’t have to think very hard, the characters and plot don’t really matter, and you’ll get plenty of what you came for in the gigantic tornadoes. What more could you want from a movie in the middle of July?
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