In our shifting, cynical landscape, with superheroes on the decline, studios are scrambling for the next moneymaker. Will it be videogame adaptations? Will it be… brands? Still, between the cracks, attempts are being made to resurrect older pop forms. We’ve seen the return of the star-studded rom-com, the sports drama, the war epic.
Now, imagine a brave new frontier: an earlier mode of storytelling but without the new title. Did you care for The Lost City? Just think of the dollars if they had only called it Romancing the Stone 2. Maybe Romancing the Stones?
Enter: Twisters. A sequel to that rarest category of film: iconic but not beloved.
The original Twister released in 1996, co-written by the late Michael Crichton on the heels of Jurassic Park, Congo and many more. Starring Hollywood darlings du jour Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, it was a smash at the box office grossing nearly $500 million on its $90 million budget, and more still in the then-burgeoning home video market.
Myself, I watched it on an airplane in 1998 and thought it was fine and never thought about it again. I was not alone. Critically panned as a shallow, effects-centric thriller, Twister has since been leaf-blowered to the musty corridors of cultural memory.
And there it would stay. Until this bright cultural moment.
Twisters is a movie about tornadoes. It’s kind of like the last one. It features none of the same characters. It features no memorable performances, visual effects, or moments of tension. But it is about tornadoes. And you can’t take that away from it.
Twisters sets out to answer the question: is it still a thriller if you fall asleep?
Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kate, a determined young meteorologist who lost most of her friends during an ambitious plan to dump a bunch of white stuff into a tornado to “dry it out.” Subdued by the tragedy, her passions are renewed some years later when she crosses paths with Javi (Anthony Ramos), another survivor of the tragedy, who thinks with new tech they can get better data.
On the hunt, Kate and Javi’s team cross paths with raucous YouTube tornado celebrity Tyler, played by Glen Powell, during what the film kindly reminds us, ad nauseam, is a once-in-a-lifetime tornado epidemic in Oklahoma.
Kate is apparently some kind of autistic savant for tornadoes, so when the rival tornado-chasing crews are faced with two opposing storms, she cleverly knows which one to track to find the real deal. She tries to lead Tyler and his crew off the scent, unsuccessfully. The filmmakers found this scenario so enrapturing they repeated it three times over about 40 minutes.
The plot ambles predictably from there, as Kate warms to Tyler, overcomes the tragedy of her past, and decides to have another go at her old experiment. The one where they dry out a tornado with a bunch of white stuff (if you must know, superabsorbent polymers, aka pee-puffing diaper granules) in yellow plastic tubs.
Some muddled subplots are thrown in, and side characters wasted. Javi is given the most robust of these, and if there is a standout performance it is probably Ramos’s. Still, it does little more than add to the runtime. Tyler’s crew (including TV On the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, and Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian) felt like they might have a fun movie in them somewhere, but their appeal is squandered on reactive one-liners.
Edgar-Jones and her unreliable accent at least get the job done. The native Brit lurches from Oklahoma to California and back, all while trying to look pensive and concerned as she reads the skeleton of a tornado with X-ray vision.
Powell tries his best to yee-haw with conviction. If what you wanted was that man looking good in a cowboy hat, it’s here in spades. What schoolboy charm he might have is mostly wasted, as Twisters plods along for a spiritually sexless 122 minutes.
Add to that a tonally schizophrenic score from Benjamin Wallfisch, and a slate of forgettable country anthems ready for the checkout line at CVS – like, uh, Jelly Roll’s “Dead End Road” – blaring over car commercial drone shots, and you’ve got yourself… whatever this is.
In the film’s final moments we are treated to a single scene of what might have been a decent rom-com. A predictable airport goodbye mixes in some earlier elements of the film (and a fun cameo), and the leads get as close as they ever will to a kiss. Why Powell and Edgar-Jones’ relationship for the bulk of the film is relegated to the neutered middle school intimacy of teasing jests and elbow jabs, is a mystery lost to the fog of time and money.
The effects are decent if unspectacular, which, given the absence of an A-list cast, leaves me wondering where its $155 million budget disappeared to. Wind certainly whips and wails, with some iffy particle effects to boot.
But like its predecessor, Twisters supports the idea that it might just be tough to make storm-chasing exciting. A tornado is not a monster. It comes and goes, and you live or you die, after driving around in a Jeep for a while. Without larger stakes, like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), or characters to care about, like The Perfect Storm (2000), there’s not much there. If we’re returning to this mode of thriller, what we want is vibrant shlock like Anaconda (1997). What we’ve been left with is gray CG and wooden archetypes.
Twisters, if anything, isn’t stupid enough. Too concerned with broad appeal, it constantly falls short of actually having fun, lodging itself in the uncanny valley where it’s difficult to have strong feelings, good or bad, about anything at all.
Lee Isaac Chung, director of 2020’s wonderful, thoughtful Minari, was either unable or unwilling to vivify Mark Smith’s slog of a script. Perhaps director Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland-to-Eternals pipeline of Oscar bait to IP trash was too beguiling.
I’ve got one word for you: Run!
