‘Twisters’ Review
Wrangling tornadoes and hearts in the heartland.
BEFORE TWISTERS STARTED at my press preview, the audience sat in front of a screen displaying a poster for the film; this is pretty typical for an early promo screening. What wasn’t normal was the soft background of rain noise piped in over the speakers, which grew to a trembling roar before the figures on the screen were blown away by a tornado. It was cute and clever and set the mood, though I’m not sure I like the precedent here: I don’t need Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds lecturing us through the screen ahead of Deadpool and Wolverine next week.
That said, this little promotional vignette did kind of emphasize the wrong thing about Lee Isaac Chung’s 30-years-in-the-making legacy sequel. While there are, undoubtedly, some big action sequences involving twisters sucking people off the ground and into the sky, the heart of the film is much more grounded, more personal. As David Poland noted in his negative review, this is a movie mostly shot in close-ups. And while that’s largely true, I didn’t really mind it because I like looking at Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, the two stars of this picture, in close-up.
Twisters is a boy-meets-girl-meets-disaster movie: part romcom, part slice of Midwestern life, part big-budget spectacle. At the film’s opening, Kate Carter (Edgar-Jones) leads her team of storm chasers after a possible tornado in the hopes of proving that her magic powder made from baby diapers can destroy the stability of a tornado, thus potentially saving dozens of lives and billions in home damage every year. Her powder fails, her team is killed, and she flees Oklahoma.
Fast-forward five years; Kate is living in the relative safety of Manhattan when she’s approached by the only other surviving member of her team, Javi (Anthony Ramos). After getting out of the storm-chasing business, he joined the military, where he worked with a fancy type of radar that, when made portable, could be used to scan the inside of a tornado to give researchers 3D models of the sort needed to figure out how to make Kate’s miracle powder work. She agrees to follow him back to Oklahoma, where the pair runs into Tyler Owens (Powell), YouTube’s most famous “tornado wrangler.” His motto is “If you feel it, chase it,” and if you think that motto’s only going to apply to tornadoes, I’ve got some screenwriting books for you to read.
Tyler’s a fascinating character, something like Mr. Beast by way of Bill Nye, with a McConaughey-esque twangy charm and Tom Cruise’s grin and haircut. He’s smart, he’s showy, he’s got the juice, and he knows it. Kate can’t help but fall for him, particularly after she sees he’s not just a YouTube monkey shooting fireworks into tornadoes for views: He also cares about the people who have suffered and sticks around in town afterward to dispense emergency vittles and help them find lost puppies. Literally: lost puppies.
Their relationship grows under the strain of looming tornado death. Twister was one of the first disaster films to really take advantage of photorealistic CGI to convey the scale and scope of widespread natural destruction, but it’s kind of been done to death in the years since; Roland Emmerich practically built an empire out of the idea, from The Day After Tomorrow to 2012 to Moonfall. Twisters occasionally has those big moments, but it does keep things a little tighter, and that tightness really does help convey the sense of terror that comes from a tornado: Sheltering in place often means sitting in a cramped interior room with two or three relatives, everyone just hunkering down in each other’s personal space until the noise stops. It’s a movie told in close-ups, sure, but tornadoes are big disasters felt in close-ups.
Kate’s and Tyler’s decency brings them into conflict with the dastardly doofuses Javi has aligned himself with. Whereas Tyler’s team is ragtag in the way the original Twisters team was ragtag—just a bunch of goofs dressed in denim and vests, sporting tats and dreads, though all smarter and kinder than they look—Javi’s team is clean-cut, well-funded, and up to no good. The ultimate villain here is less nature than a real estate developer, swooping into tornado-struck towns and buying up land at a discount. Why this real estate developer needs Javi and his team to get 3D scans of the tornadoes remains a mystery to me. One almost imagines screenwriter Mark L. Smith initially wrote the evil developer as hoping to discover a way to make tornadoes more powerful in order to buy up even more land at even cheaper rates, but Chung had to scrap that plan when he couldn’t find an actor with a mustache sufficiently large to maliciously twirl.
Twisters is fun and charming and a little silly propelled by the strength of its leads who are themselves charming and a little silly. It’s a perfectly fine summer popcorn movie.