A stand-alone sequel to the second-biggest summer blockbuster of 1996, Lee Isaac Chung’s “Twisters” might belong to a different millennium than Jan de Bont’s original, and it only shares a single character with that cow-flying classic of early Hollywood CGI (a data machine named Dorothy), but each of these spectacles is swept along by the same creative ethos. To quote a character who’s racing to save as many civilians as he can from the massive tornado that rips through an Oklahoma town during the climax of Chung’s film: “We’ve gotta get everyone into the movie theater!”
Much like its predecessor, this rousing and surprisingly romantic gust of multiplex fun spins a strange combination of genres into a conventionally satisfying ride. Where “Twister” spun a vintage screwball comedy into the shape of a cutting-edge disaster movie, “Twisters” effectively flips that script by launching a (very) breezy modern rom-com into the vortex of an old school Amblin adventure.
Glen Powell is here of course, the profoundly dimpled “Anyone but You” star churning pure charisma out of thin air as Tyler, a flashy YouTuber who chases views of tornadoes for tornadoes of views. He’s mismatched with the far more serious Kate (“Normal People” breakout Daisy Edgar-Jones, making the most of a thankless role), a doe-eyed scientist whose teenage dreams of solving the tornado crisis are blown away by the same twister that swallows up all of her friends in the film’s opening sequence.
The pressure differential between these characters would be strong enough to move the plot along on its own, even without the cloud-sized monsters they’re hunting across Oklahoma like greater, whiter land sharks — or without the half-hearted love triangle that threatens to form whenever Kate’s old friend Javi, played by Anthony Ramos, shows up with suspicious motives and military imaging tech. But advances in movie imaging tech allow Chung to muster a measure of Spielbergian wonder that was missing from de Bont’s film.
While Mark L. Smith’s screenplay puts a greater emphasis on the destructive power of these natural disasters (as well as the toll they take on the people and communities that are flattened in their paths), the devastation they wreak is fringed with awe, and that awe allows Kate, Tyler, and his motley crew of storm-chasing renegades to share the visceral high of rescuing hope from catastrophe. Beautiful people, heart-racing action, genuine pathos, and some tactfully underplayed commentary on the predatory capitalism of climate change for good measure… true to its word, “Twisters” does what it can to get everyone into the movie theater, even if there isn’t a ton about it that anyone will hold dear.
Still, it’s always wonderful to see a big summer movie that simply works as well as this one does, let alone a $200 million tentpole that never allows that scale to get away from it. Rooted in a story that’s credited to “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski, “Twisters” was palpably conceived by people smart enough to recognize that, despite the 21st century special effects available to them, this sequel couldn’t rely on raw spectacle to the same degree as the original. The days when audiences could be so easily wowed by computer-generated wind funnels are long, long gone, a fact that presented the film’s creative team with a challenge they embraced as an opportunity.
With its comparatively limited ability to sow large-scale digital, “Twister” had no choice but to rely on its two lead characters, or to surround them with the greatest supporting cast that any studio could hope to assemble at that time. Rather than delude themselves into thinking that modern tools had unburdened them of that old-world obligation, Chung and co. opted to go much the same route. A tornado is a tornado is a tornado (unless it’s actually two tornadoes at once), and while “Twisters” can — and often does — manipulate them with a precision that wasn’t possible in the previous movie, the folks behind this nascent franchise clearly appreciate that they can only push things so far before it might spill into “The Day After Tomorrow” territory.
So while this sequel gives us a dazzling shot of an EF-5 turning into a Dantean inferno as it tears through a power plant, a terrific sequence in which a tornado slurps people up from the bottom of an empty swimming pool as if it’s picking them off on purpose, and any number of scenes in which an almighty vortex forms right on its mark, the emphasis remains squarely on the human cast. Smartly iterating on the semi-ridiculous “Twister” moment in which Helen Hunt stares down a tornado as if it’s the same one that gobbled up her father some 30 years earlier, Smith’s script endeavors to make things personal but not too personal, and “Minari” director Chung — no stranger to intimate stories that are set against the epic backdrop of the American heartland — is similarly well-suited to walk that line with ease.
Kate embodies the pros and cons of that approach in almost equal measure. A chimera who combines both of the previous film’s leads into a single — and often frustratingly recessive — storm-chaser, Kate marries Hunt’s formative trauma with Bill Paxton’s reluctant psychic gifts (she has a sixth sense for knowing what a tornado will do next). Kate may not be the most dynamic character in the world, but it’s easy to buy her as a wounded visionary, and Edgar-Jones sells us on the idea that she might be too hurt to help anybody else.
That makes Tyler a perfect foil for her, as the shit-eating grin that every tornado spreads across his face makes it seem like he’s laughing at the leg scar that Kate’s last tornado left behind, and his content creator schtick — a stark contrast the uniformed professionalism of Javi’s crew — implies an insufferably blithe attitude towards the real world effects of a life-ruining weather phenomenon. Tyler’s motto: “If you feel it, chase it.” It’s a clever inversion of the original movie, where our heroes were the adrenaline junkie outsiders and Cary Elwes was the corporate schmuck who kept trying to steal their thunder.
Of course, Powell is just too damn likable to stay on Kate’s bad side for long (he delivers a line about a missing dog with a nuclear degree of Cruisean flair), and his character’s team is just too damn cool for anyone to root against — Katy O’Brian, Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, and the great Tunde Adebimpe give de Bont’s all-star cast a serious run for their money. Fun as it was to see Hunt and Paxton’s almost-divorced exes rediscover their love for each other, “Twisters” does an even cleaner job of churning palpable emotion from the stuff of pure spectacle, as the movie is at its most engaging during the various setpieces that force Kate to see the altruism behind Tyler’s firework-sized flash (even if Chung will have to answer to God for making YouTubers look so good). It’s rare to see a summer blockbuster where the special effects are so inextricable from the emotion, but it stands to reason that everything in this one should be swirled together like that.
Broadly predictable for a movie about a weather phenomenon so volatile that it can flatten an entire town with only a few seconds’ warning, “Twisters” doesn’t have any interest in re-inventing the wheel, but it never forgets that this isn’t our first “tornadeo” (to quote Tyler’s favorite t-shirt), and it makes the most of its opportunities to put a 21st century spin on a classic formula. That’s especially true once the film is able to free itself from the rusty shackles of Kate’s grief; through its earnest negotiation with a modern world in which mother nature and human nature are both stacked us, “Twisters” urges its characters to fight for a better future in spite of the headwinds that threaten to lay them flat, a plea that Chung commits to with a conviction that’s sometimes missing from his movie’s love story. “If you feel it, chase it.”
And for all of the unearned goodwill that “Twisters” extends to viral content creators, it still makes one of this summer’s most emphatic arguments in favor of the big screen experience. A movie theater may not be the safest place to hide from a tornado, but this winning July blockbuster makes perfectly clear that huddling in the dark with strangers is a hell of a lot better than watching the storm from home.
Grade: B+
Universal Pictures will release “Twisters” in theaters on Friday, July19.
