TWISTERS Review
“Chung’s impeccable ability to combine scale with true humanity makes Twisters just that much better than the original movie.”
It’s been 28 years since the Jan De Bont-directed “Twister,” which was pretty cutting edge for its time, coming out shortly after the first “Jurassic Park” and just weeks before Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day,” paving the way for the mega-blockbusters to come once the 21st Century arrived. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that “Twisters” is a modern-day thematic semi-sequel with none of the characters from the original 1996 movies but generally a similar plot and characters… and tornadoes.
We meet Daisy Edgar-Jones’ weather scientist Kate as she’s preparing with friends to use a chemical solution to quell a tornado, but it goes sideways, killing some of her team. Five years later, another survivor, Javi (Anthony Ramos), comes to Kate, asking for her help with his new project, 3D mapping some of the largest tornadoes hitting Oklahoma. On this mission, they encounter Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens, a boisterous “tornado wrangler” with a livestream feed and a motley team of similarly boisterous storm chasers. At first, the two teams compete for the big tornadoes, but Kate eventually bonds with Tyler and realizes he can help her achieve her earlier failed goal.
Although we get a small tease of something from the earlier movie in the prologue, this is a new story with new characters, and it uses the advances in science and technology to not feel as dated as these things often tend to be. Helmed by Lee Isaac Chung, this is a big jump in budget and scale for the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Minari, and he does a remarkable job stepping up with a movie that neither skimps on the large action set pieces nor the character work.
Like the original Twister, there are many characters, but this one wisely puts almost all of its focus on the relationship between Powell, Edgar-Jones, and Ramos, which shifts and evolves over the course of the film. There’s no question that Powell and Edgar-Jones have well-paired, the former turning on all the charm and charisma in his role, while Edgar-Jones delivers all the feels. In general, there are some fun characters around the trio – nope, I didn’t realize that was Brandon Perea from Nope noting the “Twins!” – although David Corenswet’s character, Javi’s right-hand man, is just too much of a prick to really get an idea how he might portray Superman.
That character stuff is interspersed with a number of impressive setpieces, although it suffers a bit from so much being revealed in the multitude of trailers that have been replaced. There’s also a ton of science chatter, so if you wanted to learn more about clouds and how tornadoes form and could possibly be destroyed, you should enjoy the more expository sections of the movie, although those moments do slow things down, maybe not always for the better.
It’s a little strange thinking of a movie about disastrous weather conditions that affect millions as entertainment. In the 28 years since the previous movie, we’ve seen so much horrible stuff done to people at the hands of bad weather. Twisters does a great job showing the devastation that’s caused by the most deadly of tornadoes, and most of the members of both teams readily provide help to those who have been affected by the tornadoes they’re trying to quell. The visual effects and production design used to create these scenes are pretty solid.
While I loved Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, which stands up well to what Mark Mancina did for the first movie, I really did not like the Southern rock and country choices for the soundtrack. I accounted it to someone involved with the movie thinking that it needs to cater more towards an audience in the heartland who has plenty of experience with tornadoes without seeing a movie about them.
Twisters never goes out of its way to try to reinvent the tornado movie, but it also doesn’t just rely on nostalgia like other long-awaited sequels. The pleasant rapport between Powell and Edgar-Jones and Chung’s impeccable ability to combine scale with true humanity makes Twisters just that much better than the original movie.
Rating: 7.5/10
Twisters opens nationwide on Friday, July 19 with previews on Thursday night.