Twister was a big-budget disaster movie that came out in 1996. It was produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Michael Crichton — alongside Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time — shortly after Spielberg and Crichton redefined blockbuster cinema with Jurassic Park in 1993. Also, Twister was directed by Jan de Bont, coming fresh off his action classic Speed.
The end result was a series of aggressively stupid set pieces punctuating a gossamer plot with annoying paper-thin characters. All sizzle and no steak. The product of a studio chasing trends in the vain hope of rebottling some lightning, without any clue as to what made those prior films such classics in the first place.
The film was about Jo and Bill Harding, but the filmmakers were Jonas.
So here we are with Twisters, a film made and marketed as a legacy sequel to the ’90s guilty pleasure. Even though — except for a few Wizard of Oz shout-outs — the “sequel” has exactly fuck-all to do with the prior movie. But hey, things have changed in the past thirty years and climate change has made the premise of continuous and simultaneous mega-cyclones into something terribly plausible. There’s so much potential for the franchise to comment on… wait, what’s that? The movie doesn’t even mention climate change? What a spineless son of a motherless goat.
Well, now you all know why I kept dragging my feet getting to this one.
Daisy Edgar-Jones headlines as Kate Carter, an Oklahoma farm girl with the preternatural ability to read weather and chase tornadoes. We meet up with her as a Ph.D. student who’s come up with some kind of pseudoscientific magic bullet that should theoretically cause tornadoes to dissipate near-instantly. Unfortunately, Kate goes in with a team of five — including her boyfriend, played by Daryl McCormack — and only two survive the attempted test: Kate and Javi (Anthony Ramos).
Cut to five years later. After some time in the armed forces, Javi started up a new business chasing tornadoes with all the latest tech. Specifically — with help from some rich investors and his connections in the military — Javi got his hands on a new prototype radar system that can image tornadoes with unprecedented clarity. But he needs Kate, who’s now analyzing Doppler data from a desk in NYC. Kate grudgingly agrees to come back to Oklahoma to consult and we’re off to the races.
But wait, there’s more!
Enter Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), ringleader of a motley crew out to chase tornadoes for YouTube views and cheap thrills. Reckless assholes putting themselves in harm’s way, interfering with the scientists working to collect potentially life-saving data, all while selling their own merch.
Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. As with the original movie, we’ve got a romantic pairing between the reluctant tornado whisperer and the reckless tornado chaser, but the genders are swapped. More importantly, Kate’s PTSD and survivor’s guilt are far more thematically potent with regards to overcoming fear and loss. I need hardly add that the Kate/Tyler interplay doesn’t come with the baggage of a failed marriage, so watching the two of them move past their first impressions and drift together feels much more engaging, and the Powell/Edgar-Jones chemistry is strong enough to sell it.
Incidentally — as with the first movie — this is very much a conflict between the scrappy independent tornado chasers versus the corporate drones. Except this time, the corporate drones are the good guys. Well, that’s certainly an interesting moral subversion… oh, wait. No, scratch that — there’s a second-act twist to show that the corporate drones are indeed the villains and our scrappy underdogs aren’t the assholes we’d been led to believe.
Gotta say, I applaud the filmmakers for how well they sold the heel-turn. Sure, the filmmakers ended up with the predictable binary morality, but the path to getting there was much more dynamic and layered. It certainly helps that our Jonas analogue isn’t some smarmy prick, but someone Kate has a shared traumatic history with. Kate and Javi deeply care for each other, despite all their differences. Of course, I need hardly add that if we really were supposed to hate Javi, he wouldn’t have been played by Anthony Ramos. The guy couldn’t play a heel to save his life, that’s not a card in his deck.
Elsewhere, we’ve got the nebbishy fish-out-of-water audience viewpoint character (Ben, played by Harry Haden-Paton), who proves to be far tougher and more useful than the Jami Gertz character who played a similar role in the prequel. We’ve got Maura Tierney on hand to play Kate’s mother, running a quiet farm where our main characters can get some BBQ and catch up on romantic drama, as a counterpart to the previous film’s Lois Smith character. The whole film is like this: All the parts from the previous film are here, but they’re all put together in a different order. And they’re better for it.
We have characters with some legitimate degree of pathos and layering, with genuine development arcs. The central romance isn’t shrill and ungodly annoying to sit through. While it’s never in doubt as to who the good guys and bad guys are, it’s shockingly easy to buy into the first impressions with the understanding of exactly what both sides are trying to do. Even so, when we finally get the big reveal as to the characters’ motivations, it turns out the good guys are trying to make a difference in their own deeply moving way, while the villains are truly evil in a predatory way that goes far beyond “because they’re plagiarist dickheads.”
Unfortunately, the supporting cast is nowhere near on par with that of the first movie. It makes a difference that our charming crew of underdog misfits doesn’t really get a lot of screentime or development until the third act, and their counterparts were easily the best part of the previous film. (RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman.) The best we get is probably Maura Tierney, who turns in a nicely sweet performance without overselling the mother character.
And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention David Corenswet, here playing a greedy and snooty corporate asshole. I honestly appreciate the chance to see Corenswet play a supporting character as a two-dimensional spineless heel before watching him play Superman. It’s a nice reminder that this particular actor has enough range to make you totally forget that he’s a square-jawed Adonis. I’m now more certain than ever he’s going to crush that role. But I digress.
What about the effects sequences? Well, we’ve got more of the same attempts to chase a tornado and get the necessary data before the tornado disappears and/or our characters die. We’ve got more abuses of plot armor, as characters survive the literal wrath of god through laughably insufficient measures. But this movie showed us a tornado on fire, so the sequel definitely cleared that particular bar.
Even so, it’s a major, MAJOR sticking point that this film didn’t even mention climate change. I can’t for the life of me understand why this movie did so much to make the science plausible, working so hard to get people interested in meteorology, without ever once mentioning climate change. It’s like making a scientifically plausible movie to get people interested in biology without ever mentioning evolution. What the fuck are you doing, you cowards?!
That said, if the filmmakers weren’t going to focus on that, at least they focus on the very real human cost of these unpredictable catastrophes. This is very much a movie about the kind of poor rural folk who typically live in Tornado Alley, the kind of people whose entire lives are destroyed by these disasters because they didn’t have much to lose in the first place. Those affected need our sympathy, and the well-being of our fellow human beings matters more than our personal wealth. It may not be a message about climate change, but it’s a potent and highly relevant humanitarian theme nonetheless.
Twisters is absolutely better than its predecessor, but that’s a low bar to clear. This is still ultimately a big dumb disaster movie in which the main characters survive because of plot armor and the central plot device is a machine that can literally kill tornadoes. And again, it’s a film so aggressively simple and non-offensive that climate change was left out entirely.
With all of that said, at least we get a conflict with some degree of nuance and characters with engaging development arcs. We get stronger thematic statements about science and humanitarian aid and how much more we could be doing for our poorest neighbors in the rural red states. Hell, for how awesomely stupid the tornado-killer is, it raises the stakes by a considerable margin over mere data collection. For that matter, the opening prologue — killing off three characters in one stroke — raises the internal stakes of our protagonist in a huge way.
It’s big dumb fun, but there’s a beating heart to it. There’s some actual substance here to go with the spectacle. I don’t think this would’ve been worth an opening weekend ticket, but waiting a couple weekends to go see it on the big screen worked out nicely.