And a Huff…and a Puff…and I’ll Blooooow Your Movie Down!!!!!

Twisters may be a mirror image of the original one but it lacks some of the fun

It was too good to be true.

The night before the Chicago press/word-of-mouth screening of Twisters, the sequel to the 1996 disaster flick Twister, the city and suburbs were hit by 11 tornadoes, including an EF-1 on the city’s Near West Side. Sirens were blaring all over Chicago and local meteorologists were asking Chicagoans to shelter in place. Mother Nature couldn’t have given Universal Studios and Warner Brothers a better marketing ploy. Which raised the question: given that the number of tornadoes hitting the entire United States has increased in frequency and power, how could the studios justify a sequel to what was essentially a fun rollercoaster ride? The images of whole towns wiped out, houses flattened to the ground, trees toppled, roofs torn apart, families crying at the loss of memories, and more importantly, dear ones who perished in the storms, are now ingrained in most of us. We all know the causes: climate change. But would a studio film be daring enough to acknowledge it?

Twisters does not do so directly. As director Lee Isaac Chung told CNN, he wanted to show “the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing.” And it does a good job of showing the sheer destructive power of this phenomena. But Twisters also needs to address and satisfy the demands of a sequel to a traditional disaster movie and an audience that wants to be awed. Twisters does occasionally deliver the goods; but there were times where I felt WGN Chief Meteorologist Demetrius Ivory’s blow-by-blow account of Monday’s storm as the radar behind him showed its slow progression towards the city was far more suspenseful and nerve wracking than most of the storm sequences in this film.

Twisters follows the same narrative beats of its predecessor: both feature a female scientist who, for personal reasons, has devoted her career to studying tornadoes; two competing teams of tornado chasers; and a final encounter with a major tornado that provides our female protagonist the perfect opportunity to prove her theories; and both films are, in the end, one long chase sequence. In Twister, that female scientist is played by Helen Hunt who, as a child, saw how her father was sucked away by a tornado; in Twisters that scientist, Kate (played by a really dull Daisy Edgar-Jones), sees how her entire team of fellow college meteorology students are sucked away by a massive EF-5 tornado after they try to test her idea for trying to destabilize a tornado. Fast forward to five years later: Kate now works for the National Weather Service New York offices, trying to put that tragic event aside. But as is the norm for this sort of film, the past won’t leave her alone and comes roaring back in the form of Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only surviving member of that team who now wants her to come back to Oklahoma and help him test a new military-grade radar system as the state is hit by the worst tornado wave in its history.

It doesn’ take Kate that long to fly back to Oklahoma and join Javi’s team even though she has yet to find out that a slimy real estate developer is financing his enterprise (an obvious stand-in for the anonymous corporation that finances Helen Hunt’s and Bill Paxton’s antagonists in the original film). They may be there for science (and profit) but their rivals in the storm chasing game, Tyler “The Tornado Wrangler” Owens (Glen Powell) and his team of misfits, are in for the social media engagement game. Tyler not only chases tornadoes but drives right into them, firing fireworks at its heart, all captured live on YouTube. Tyler, though, is more than a self-made celebrity who oozes charm; he's also a meteorologist! His team, in a way, are kindred souls to Hunt’s storm chasing team in the original which included Alan Ruck and a scene-stealing Philip Seymour Hoffman. Unfortunately, Mark L. Smith’s script (from a story by Joseph Kosinski) doesn’t give them much to do. You don’t get a sense of that camaraderie, of that devil may care attitude that Hoffman, Ruck and the rest of the actors brought to Twister.

Twisters doesn’t have that much of a plot…or a story for that matter. Between each tornado strike, we are submitted to a series of play cute scenes between Tyler and Kate as the script tries to build a romantic relationship out of this chemistry-lacking couple; we also get potential conflicts between our characters that are immediately resolved with an apology; and tons of stock characters that serve no purpose but to move the minimal plot along. Even some of the tornado strikes lack the punch they had in the original film. Two stand-outs: the night time strike at a rodeo, where you can feel the sheer panic and desperation of folks fleeing the storm and the idiocy of those who prefer to ignore the danger that’s upon them; and the final strike against a small Oklahoma town featuring a tip of the hat to the drive-in scene in the original Twister.

I was really hard on that film when it came out in 1996. In my review for ¡Exito!, I described its characters as “made of cardboard” and lambasted its rather repetitive structure. Now, whenever I run into it on cable TV or network TV, I find myself enjoying it far more than I did the first time; the excitement of chasing after this uncontrollable force of nature and the sheer gusto in which the destruction was shot and edited, leaving in our memories such memorable images as the flying cow, the screen of the Drive-In showing Kubrick’s The Shining coming apart and Hunt and Paxton holding for dear life as an EF-5 blows around them.

If anything, Twisters is another example of how studio movies can suck the talent out of those indie filmmakers they are so keen to hire for their franchises to give them a certain caché, a certain prestige. Lee Isaac Chung’s previous film, Minari (2020), the story of a Korean-American family who moves to an small Arkansas town to pursue their dream of working on their own in a farm and of how their two culturally assimilated children try to deal with this move, was a sharply observed, poignant, delicate film that took pains in portraying the complexities of human nature and which showed a deep appreciation for American heartland. Visually, Twisters shares some of that awe at these vast, beautiful farmlands and at nature’s destructive power. It definitely shows far more empathy towards the victims of these natural disasters, albeit in way too brief scenes, than Twister ever did. Chung is on far more solid ground when he introduces Kate’s mother (played by Maura Tierney), a no-nonsense woman who tends the family farm on her own. But even then we don’t get enough of her the way we did with Helen Hunt’s aunt in the first film. Chung is burdened by the need to move on to the grand finale and a post-credits sequence that’s supposed to make you feel good about the protagonists’ fate.

Then there’s the decision to not address the big, white elephant in the room: climate change. Chung’s quote feels like a cop-out, like a way of saying without saying, look, we need this film to play well in the red states. And the fact that the story includes a rodeo, a charming Texan actor with an equally charming smile and charisma to boot, that it takes place in Oklahoma, and that Kate is sneeringly nicknamed by Tyler as “city girl” makes it obvious that both Universal and Warner wanted a commercial film with which more conservative audiences would identify with and even endorse with their hard earned bucks. And they certainly got one. But compromises such as this can ruin a film.