For a sequel no one asked for, it’s alright.
Kate has an uncanny sense of weather prediction, but after disaster strikes she quits “tornado chasing”. But years later an old friend brings her back, hoping to tame the tornado.
Twister was a 1996 film by Jan De Bont, who had come hot off the press with Keanu Reeves with Speed two years earlier. Since the disastrous Speed 2 and Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life he has not been seen in the director’s chair.
Twisters, with a naming convention the same as the Aliens movies, is directed by Lee Isaac Chung. It stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos.
It is a peculiar sequel. Written by director Joseph Kosinski, and writer Mark L. Smith (credits include The Revenant) it is a classic natural disaster movie at a time when the genre is not in vogue. Add to that, a casual indifference to its predecessor.
Indeed, it is refreshing to watch a legacy sequel that doesn’t cater to the original. It doesn’t feel the need to bash us over the head with needless references. No, we don’t know what happened to Helen Hunt’s truck after the storms. No, none of the characters are Cary Elwes’s children, for example.
Instead we get some repeated dialogue (“I’m not back!”) but these are done subtly enough that they only cause a wry smile from the audience that know. Oh, and the weather machine Dorothy shows up, although it feels like an unnecessary reference.
No, our new characters are completely divorced from the 1996 film. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones, War of the Worlds) is a graduate in meteorology who had been working on a PhD in how to destroy tornadoes. Glen Powell (Top Gun Maverick) as rowdy social media influencer who chases tornadoes for a living, and Kate’s friend Javi (Anthony Ramos, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) hopes that new technology can better understand tornadoes.
To get into the negatives, Twisters feels clunkily written. When the film is about the characters, starting with dialogue like: “You’ve changed since you got struck by lightning!” “Yeah, well, it happens.” is not a way of ingratiating the audience to them. The dialogue initially feels very stilted in this way, especially from our protagonists.
The film feels long as well. Too long. There’s at least one tornado scene that is unnecessary and could have been condensed into one (much like merging twisters). Which, for a natural disaster movie, isn’t great. There’s only so many times you can see people looking scared in a car.
There’s also some moments the characters seem ignorant of their surroundings. Not due to strong weather, but due to chasing tornadoes that are dangerously near massive oil refineries. The job is already dangerous, surely you’d know there’s a massive oil refinery that way?
But, for the most part the film acquits itself nicely. By the third act, all of the lead characters have gone through arcs and the audience can feel some chemistry for them. The storm effects are impressive, even while the film overextends itself. There’s only so much you can do with a tornado, but this film does all of them. It does take a moment as well to appreciate the terrible destruction left in their wake, and the human lives lost. For a “blockbuster”, the movie opens with a very intense and grim story. Laying the foundation for decent character growth throughout the story.
