The 1996 mega-blockbuster “Twister” is pleasing in its almost childlike simplicity. It’s a monster movie where the monster is a tornado, which neither knows nor cares about the people chasing it down. A tornado does not have a vendetta. It’s not even hungry, like a zombie is. Its path is erratic but its behavior is predictable: It forms, it destroys and then it simply collapses.
That means the real intrigue comes from the human side of things, and on that point “Twister,” with a healthy dose of mid-90s style tropes and an absurdly stacked secondary cast (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz and Todd Field, the future director of “Tár”), delivers mightily. The movie’s enduring status as a classic is due in no small part to its continual appearance on cable TV — and it works so well in that medium because you can flick it on at virtually any moment and know basically what’s going on. The estranged lovers Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton chase a tornado, hoping to deploy a device cheekily named “Dorothy” that will help them understand it better and save lives. No complicated back stories, no lore necessary.
Nearly 30 years later, “Twisters,” billed as a stand-alone sequel to “Twister,” has a bit of a tougher hill to climb. For one, the era of straightforward original blockbusters ended a long time ago, swallowed up by superheroes and franchises. “Twister” has its fans, but the only character “Twisters” shares with its predecessor is the tornado.
And tornadoes aren’t what they used to be either. When I left my screening of “Twisters” and turned on my phone, I saw a text from my mother, who lives in a region known more for its blizzards than tornadoes. The National Weather Service, as it turned out, was warning residents to look out for thunderstorms, flash flooding and … tornadoes.
The words “climate change” are never uttered in “Twisters,” but as anyone in the path of extreme weather knows, things have been getting worse. This hurricane season is predicted to be an unusually bad one. If you tried to travel over Memorial Day weekend, you felt the real effects. And tornadoes now tend to rove in packs. There’s a reason the title of this movie is plural.
Weather-driven inconvenience is one thing. But tornadoes and other extreme weather events can devastate the lives of survivors — something that “Twisters” is far more interested in than its predecessor is. This is a movie about whole towns losing their homes, lives and livelihoods thanks to highly unpredictable and relentless weather. It’s also about the people who profit off that increased liability, from speculators to social media stars. In trying to appeal to a broad audience, “Twisters” takes on a tough challenge. It mostly pulls it off.
At the center of “Twisters” is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist who, like Helen Hunt’s character in the previous film, is living with the lingering trauma of a tornado run-in years earlier. Now she works for the National Weather Service in New York City as a kind of storm whisperer. Kate grew up in Tornado Alley and seems to have a preternatural sense for how tornadoes will behave: where they’re going, when they’ll intensify and, most important, whether it might be possible to fight back.
When her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) shows up, begging her to come track tornadoes with him for a new, potentially lifesaving project, she reluctantly decides to go west. (Javi is from Florida, but went to college with Kate; he has obvious reasons for caring about the human effects of extreme weather.) Having arrived in Oklahoma, Kate discovers that the crowd gathered for the new and particularly active tornado season resembles a circus. There are tornado chasers everywhere. The cockiest and worst of them is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). He travels with a ragtag band of chasers who fly drones and shoot fireworks into the tornadoes, the better to get the shot for YouTube. Tyler calls himself the “tornado wrangler,” sells branded T-shirts and styles himself as a cowboy. Kate hates him on sight.
You can roughly guess where this is going — “Twisters,” with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, is based on a story by the “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski and feels modeled on a 1990s blockbuster. (Kosinski was originally slated to direct the film as a reboot of “Twister.”) The old-school formula feels refreshing: This is an action-adventure-disaster film filled with ordinary people trying to accomplish extraordinary things.
But it’s also distinctly contemporary. This is in part because of the direction of Lee Isaac Chung, whose previous film “Minari” was a quiet tale of a Korean immigrant family that garnered six Oscar nominations. “Minari” and “Twisters” are in very different genres, but they share in common a knowledge of the American Midwest — and in particular, the experience of living through its terrible storms — that’s rooted in Chung’s own upbringing in rural Arkansas. It’s hard to imagine a director more suited to this material, and more capable of training our attention on the survivors without losing the fun of the adventure.
That fun comes from the other most 2024 part of “Twisters.” I speak, of course, of Glen Powell, the actor whom everyone seems to be talking about this year. No wonder: This is his third big movie of the year (after the megahit rom-com “Anyone but You,” which picked up box office steam just after the new year, and the Netflix winner “Hit Man”). Powell often looks like he’s having a blast, but in “Twisters” it sometimes feels as though he’s in an entirely different movie than everyone else. His tornado wrangler is a modern-day cowboy crossed with a romance hero: He starts off as a jerk and then you slowly learn he’s got a heart of gold.
Next to Powell, Edgar-Jones seems profoundly lackluster, all eyes and no personality. The pair’s chemistry is hard to get excited about, which seems even more obvious once Maura Tierney shows up as Kate’s mother. (It’s worth noting that Ramos, in his limited screen time, exudes plenty of his own charisma.) Edgar-Jones’s performance seems more withholding than necessary, and we’re left mostly wondering when Powell will return.
That mismatch hampers “Twisters,” and the movie lags as a result. You can imagine a very different sort of actress in the role of Kate — one with some spark and comedic chops who might bounce against Powell more fruitfully. But that doesn’t mean “Twisters” fails. It’s loaded with fun and sometimes funny set pieces and enough danger to keep you on your toes.
There’s a deeper significance, too. A late scene makes it clear that this is meant to be a monster movie, the story of a menace whose creation is both predictable and mysterious and whom we need a hero to fight. In “Twister,” the storm’s existence was taken for granted, something to chase around and, the heroes hoped, be able to predict with science. In “Twisters,” however, the goal isn’t just to predict the path the monster will take — science has mostly figured that one out. Instead, the aim is to fight it, deflate it, defang it. The futility of such a quest is what’s in question.
And that is genuinely frightening, even if you’re not getting tornado warning texts while you watch the movie. If we can’t fix climate change, can we fight it? And if so, who benefits? Who will take advantage of our weather in the future, and who will suffer from it? The apocalyptic element of “Twisters” hits a little closer to home. The idea of a tornado as a monster is a metaphor. But the tornado itself, and the havoc it wreaks, is very, very literal.
Twisters
Rated PG-13 for a little bit of bad language, but mostly intense scenes of storms and destruction. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters.
Read More: ‘Twisters’ Review: When the Monster Is Real
