Twisters (2024)
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Screenwriter: Mark L. Smith
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane
Blockbusters are usually cannon fodder for the film critic, because they’re often stupid, lacking in any kind of brainpower or general enjoyment, and cost such astronomical amounts of money that it borders on offensive. More than that, they tend to not be very good, with a focus on style over substance. Thankfully, Amblin Entertainment’s Twisters (2024), a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 film Twister distributed by Warner Bros and Universal, manages to break most of these trends by being a genuinely fun time at the movies. Who saw that coming?
This new film follows Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Kate Carter, a meteorologist who gave up storm chasing after a PhD project went wrong five years before. She’s called up by Javi (Anthony Ramos), a member of her old team, who’s now working for a company trying to get even more accurate models of tornadoes, and is convinced to join the next expedition. Out in the Oklahoma fields, the twisters are waiting, along with a ragtag group of YouTube stormchasers, led by Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who are seemingly in it only for the kicks and clicks, deriding the scientists every step of the way.
This is a standalone sequel, so you can go into it having never seen the original Twister. The only carryovers can be found in the plot outline and formula, and the initial presence of a version of Dorothy, the stormcatching device from the original. Other than that, the film is a complete remake. The several-years-earlier backstory is there, the second-act destruction of a leisure facility, two teams of rivalling storm ideologies, and so it goes on. It is an updating of ideas, rather than a specific referencing of the earlier film, eschewing fanservice in favour of a similar feeling. Thankfully, this works in the film’s favour and, in deciding not to go in for heavy legacy sequel bait, the writers (The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith as screenwriter and Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski as Story By) and director (Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung) freed themselves to pursue their own plotlines and ideas.
For a big-budget disaster movie, a genre not exactly known for decent characters and characterisation, these plotlines work incredibly well. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell are great as the main duo, bouncing off each other nicely throughout, offering genuine chemistry. Anthony Ramos and the other supporting actors manage to give even some of the more one-dimensional characters moments of heart, contributing to a well-rounded cast that carries the film to an extra level. In Twisters, everyone does what they’re supposed to do. The film might be formula, but it’s decent formula.
When the tornadoes hit, the visuals work wonders. There is an over-reliance on shakycam work, but you can just about make out what’s going on (though it is marginal in places), and it is meant to convey the feeling of being trapped in a storm, so the filmmakers can be forgiven for that creative choice. The mixture of practical and visual effects combine effectively to offer some thrilling sequences and heart-stopping moments during the film’s most aspirational moments. Focusing on the smaller stories – the normal people that get caught up in everything – gives the finale its heft, and a scene involving Kate escorting a mother and daughter to shelter in the hollow of a swimming pool is one of the touches a filmmaker used to smaller films like Lee Isaac Chung brings to a film with a $155m price tag. Where Twisters somehow manages to succeed – more than the big action extravaganzas, more than the thrill of the chase for the tornadoes – is how it balances all of the little emotions, how it flips from epic to heartfelt to suspenseful to humorous. That is down to the skill of the director and the film’s writers for crafting a well-presented story that allows time for nuance.
The handling of the YouTuber crowd seems to flipflop depending on the point in the narrative, both praising and knocking the amateurs for going after monstrous, destructive forces of nature seemingly. Are we meant to get behind these individuals that actively root themselves in the middle of a force of destruction, almost mocking the deaths we’ve seen earlier on in the film? You can see what the script was going for, but most of the time it doesn’t quite match up. There’s a cognitive dissonance there which is admirable, if clunky, but thankfully manages to be just about the only part of the film that is.
The rest of Twisters is what a proper blockbuster should be: pure entertainment for the eyes, the ears, the brain, and the soul. If only they were more movies like Twisters, the world would be a much better place.
Score: 19/24
