If a massive tornado was to pick up your house Wizard of Oz-style, spin it through space and time, and drop it into a mall parking lot in 1996, there’s a good chance that you’d see a line of folks waiting to see a disaster flick. Specifically, one in which Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and a deep bench of character actors dodged flying cows and debris while CGI vortexes tear up the Sooner State. Go back to Twister if you haven’t watched it in a while, and you’ll see a multilayered time capsule of past multiplex thrills, an odd remake of His Girl Friday in which storm chasing subs in for journalism (shout-out to Jami Gertz for adding a brittle Southern-belle edge to the Ralph Bellamy role), and a manic Philip Seymour Hoffman chew on whatever scenery isn’t being flung around. Director Jan de Bont directs all of the digital sound and fury like he’s still buzzing off of Speed‘s bus fumes. Everything about it screams successful late ’90s update of late ’70s Irwin Allen movies. Nothing about it reads as “recognizable intellectual property that really demands a belated 2024 sequel.”
And yet here we are, once more unto the breach, with a new generation of rival storm chasers jockeying for position on rural backroads and the same old dizzying whirlwinds ripping apart whatever lies in their path. Twisters has its share of nods and winks to the ’96 film, mostly in the form of the gamechanging anti-tornado apparatus Dorothy V and a familiar handshake. There is indeed more than one twister to contend with, thus earning the title’s pluralization. Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones step into the lead roles and prove that they look as comfortable pretending to stare at incoming natural disasters as they do gazing in each other’s eyes. Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) helps conjure up realistic-looking spirals of destruction without letting the narrative spiral out of control. Unlike most revisits of previous box-office hits, it doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the original. It does, however, display a serious soft spot for a bygone era of moviegoing, when two photogenic stars, a simple high-concept premise and the promise of digitally rendered chaos was enough to put millions of asses in seats.
In fact, the key shot — the giveaway as to what’s actually being chased here — doesn’t even involve bleeding-edge technology or gargantuan galestorms leveling entire towns. It’s a nod to another director who’s perfected a certain strain of summer-movie wizardry. By this point, we’ve met Edgar-Jones’ Kate Cooper, an enterprising meteorologist who thinks she and her team have figured out how to “tame” a tornado. One twister in particular has other ideas. Goodbye, Cooper’s colleagues. We’ve also heard Javi (Anthony Ramos), a fellow extreme-weather fanatic, pitch her on new military technology that can gather enough data to help them see light at the end of those funnels. And we’ve been introduced to Powell’s Tyler Owens, a good ol’ boy YouTuber who posts videos from inside twisters courtesy of a truck that can drill itself into place. The “Tornado Wrangler’s” daredevil persona is tight. His branding and merchandising game is even tighter.
There’s flirting and bantering and the sort of love-hate chemistry that you know will end in a lustful clinch. The whole thing is telegraphed from the jump as a rom-com smuggled under the cover of an action movie, or maybe it’s the other way around. And then Edgar-Jones goes to see which way the literal wind blows via a dandelion, and Chung swing the camera around her, looking up at the actor from a low angle. Most folks will recognize this as the “Spielberg shot,” used to denote heroism and grace under pressure. It’s not a huge surprise, given that the Jaws-to-Jurassic Park filmmaker is one of the producers on this sequel. For a split second, however, you’re transported back to an age where wonder and awe was part of your regularly scheduled blockbuster programming, almost like hearing a sample of a song you once loved used as a hook for a new pop hit. Forget pursuing storms. This is a hunt for the old magic of the big-screen, big-tent movies themselves.
There are enough moments like that in Twisters, some blink-and-miss brief and some serving as centerpieces for rip-’em-up set pieces, to justify the movie’s existence beyond milking an old catalogue title. It helps that Chung has a great feel for regional Americana, and as with the Arkansas of Minari, there’s zero condescension, romanticization or sentimentality regarding small-town Oklahoma — it’s simply part of the landscape that’s in danger of suffering natural and man-made disasters, and gets back on its feet after a catastrophe. (The words “climate change” are never uttered in regards to an uptick of twisters ravaging the area, but like Kate Cooper’s uncanny ability to sniff out far-away storms, you can sixth-sense the subtext burbling below the surface.) You wouldn’t think spectacle would be in his wheelhouse, but Chung knows how to build tension and pace exponentially developing danger. Most filmmakers would treat a sequence of survivors finding sanctuary in a movie theater as a symbolic statement. He lets a tornado tear the place to shreds. Your big screen can’t save you now!
And not surprisingly, Twisters knows that it has a not-so-secret weapon at its disposal, a Category 5 charm offensive in human form. Daisy Edgar-Jones has been tasked with the emotional and dramatic heavy lifting, determined to sell a tragic backstory, a reluctance to return to the field, and the mix of pride and PTSD that her character experiences when she’s back on the beat. She earns the right to that Spielberg shot. It’s Glen Powell, however, that whips everything into a frenzy. You actually see his grin gleaming through a dirty windshield before the Tornado Wrangler shows his face, stepping out of his truck to greet adoring fans and hawk t-shirts with his dimpled mug on them. Nothing chameleonic is required. No one’s asking him to do a quirky British accent. It’s just Powell projecting a thousand-watt screen presence, seducing the camera in a way we’ve seen him do many times before and will likely see many times again. Not that he’s solely relying on his audience-friendly confidence and aw-shucks demeanor to get from one super-gusty close call to the next; Powell is just adding velocity to all the big movie-movie bits of business. You wonder if certain portions of the script say, “And then Glen does that whole Glen thing he does….”
Put him next to Edgar-Jones, who gets lost among Mother Nature’s pixelated temper tantrums but comes alive playing against a real human being, and you can feel Twisters edge toward something more interesting than disposable-spectacle content. Even the formidable supporting cast — an eclectic bunch that includes future Superman David Corenswet, Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brien, TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe, Sasha Lane and Kiernan Shipka — seem to stop what they’re doing and simply observe the crackling energy being generated by the above-the-title names. No amount of falling water towers, flying tree trunks or cars and humans being briskly tossed into the maelstrom can compete with the sight of two actors connecting even when surrounded by bad weather VFX. You’ll probably forget all the hot air that’s supposed to be the 21st century sizzle of this sequel before you’ve gone past the popcorn machine near the exit. It’s the calm before and after the storms that makes you feel like it’s 1996 all over again.
