The New Twister Is a Pure, Mindless Hoot
“It’s old, but it’s field-tested,” says a character in Twisters as he unveils the original prototype of Dorothy, a device built a generation earlier by a team of storm-chasers to gather meteorological data from inside a tornado. The same might be said of the weatherbeaten yet durable storyline of Twisters, a stand-alone sequel to a smash-hit blockbuster that is now also a generation old. While not quite a “legacy sequel” in the sense of a movie like Top Gun: Maverick (in that Twisters dispenses with the characters and lore of the prior film while retaining its basic premise and most of its story beats), Lee Isaac Chung’s reboot is a worthy successor to the original, a rollicking popcorn thriller with an appealing screwball romance in the eye of its fast-moving storm.
Twister was the second highest-grossing movie of 1996, bested only by the even more outsize and gleefully absurd Independence Day. The film’s critical reception at the time was tepid: Roger Ebert conceded that the movie worked as “loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment” but lamented that it lacked the wit of director Jan de Bont’s previous action hit Speed. But like Dorothy, a jury-rigged homemade machine that got the job done against all odds, Twister has endured to become one of the most beloved action flicks of the 1990s. Real ones know the script (by bestselling novelist Michael Crichton and his then-wife Anne-Marie Martin) well enough to quote Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gung-ho communications expert marveling at the gathering “greenage” of a pre-tornado sky, or Alan Ruck’s dry-humored navigator observing that the unmapped road his colleagues’ truck has disappeared down is “like, Bob’s Road.” Though Twister centered around the rekindling of the romance between Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as soon-to-be-divorced meteorologists, much of its humor and warmth came from the weather-nerd banter among the two leads and their ragtag team of fellow storm-chasers.
To the mind of this superfan, Twister, which the screenwriters said they based in part on Howard Hawks’ rom-com classic His Girl Friday, is as much a hangout movie and a comedy of remarriage as it is a disaster movie; it’s the nesting of the love story and the shambling co-worker comedy inside the tornado chase that makes the whole contraption work. For that reason, Chung, the director of the small immigrant-family drama Minari, was a natural choice to direct the sequel, despite his lack of experience with blockbuster-scale action. The unknown quantity in choosing Chung was not “Can he capture the delicate subtlety of human relationships?” but “Can he convey the horror of being sucked into the funnel of a giant honking tornado?” I am relieved to report that Twisters delivers on both fronts—if anything, more reliably on the action front than on the human-drama one.
Like its source text, Twisters kicks off with a spectacular cold open that establishes the origin of the female lead’s tornado-related personal trauma. A group of meteorology students in pursuit of an Oklahoma twister, led by weather whiz Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), experiences a series of tragic losses after Kate underestimates the strength of the storm. As a result, Kate gives up on her dream of inventing a way to “tame” the destructiveness of a tornado in progress. Five years later, the conscience-wracked Kate is working a desk job at the National Weather Service in New York City. Her former classmate Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor of the disastrous experiment, approaches her about joining him in a new business enterprise: He is testing the ability of the military’s cutting-edge radar technology to bring a whole new understanding of tornadoes—one that might finally allow Kate to fix her calculations. Kate insists that her storm-chaser days are over, but a trip to her native Oklahoma, and a glimpse of Javi’s spiffy new fleet of tricked-out vehicles, convinces her to give the old game one more try. Meanwhile, a hot-dogging YouTube star named Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) is chasing the same deadly storms down the same scenic highways, styling himself as a “tornado wrangler.”
Given Powell’s rising star on movie screens of late, it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that his sexy weather cowboy turns out to be a more complex figure than the villain played by a smirking Cary Elwes in the 1996 film. In fact, Tyler may not be a villain at all, as becomes clear in a set piece where his team joins with Kate’s to herd potential storm victims into the basement of a small-town cinema showing James Whale’s Frankenstein (a shoutout to a scene from the original in which a tornado rips through the screen of a drive-in theater during The Shining).
Twisters’ action sequences may lack the practical-effects oomph of Twister, a movie in which actual tractors were dropped by helicopter in the path of moving vehicles (though the fondly remembered airborne cow was an example of then-novel CGI technology). But Chung directs action with visual clarity and, just as importantly, a vivid sense of drama. When someone gets sucked up by a tornado, as quite a few people do in the course of this PG-13-for-a-reason thriller, we feel the visceral shock of seeing a loved one literally pulled into the sky. A cowering British journalist (Harry Hadden-Paton) who’s riding along with Tyler’s crew for a story makes a handy audience proxy and an excuse for rapid-fire exposition dumps about the science or pseudo-science behind the chasers’ exploits.
Twisters generally outperformed my expectations for a summertime thrill ride, but there are spots where its recycled-IP status shows through. The script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) is more functional than inspired, hitting dramatic and comic beats effectively enough to keep us engaged without ever creating a fully realized fictional world. And while there’s a spark between the low-key Edgar-Jones and the 10,000-watt Powell, it never approaches the crackling electricity of the Bill Paxton-Helen Hunt pairing in the original, perhaps because Edgar-Jones’ dreamy, almost sleepy affect doesn’t suit a character who’s meant to be weather-obsessed to a fault. And the supporting cast of scrappy storm-chasers—a promising bunch that includes Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian, American Honey’s Sasha Lane, and Tunde Adebimpe of the band TV on the Radio—gets sadly little onscreen time or memorable dialogue. Not to keep referencing the original, but Twister’s most unusual and memorable feature was the attention the film paid to its sprawling cast of textured if briefly sketched secondary characters. From Hoffman’s all-in meteorology bro to Lois Smith’s nurturing Aunt Meg to Jami Gertz’s soon-to-be-jilted fiancée, they each got their moment in the sun (or under the hail).
A larger critique of Twisters might note the film’s general disconnection, outside of a few oblique references, from the huge changes in the world’s understanding of weather since 1996. Of course, one doesn’t and shouldn’t come to a movie like Twisters for cogent explainers of real-world climate policy. A summer blockbuster is hardly the best vehicle for a social message about an issue that urgent and complex, and the science on the link between climate change and tornadoes is still inconclusive. But even assuming the team’s imaginary tornado-fixing technology is frankly fake, a movie about extreme weather events that takes place in the present day is by nature more than a piece of escapist science fiction about escaping one particular climate disaster.
Still, there is something to be said for the lasting impact of just having fun at a movie. The original Twister’s huge popularity upon opening, and its later omnipresence on cable TV, led to a measurable uptick in meteorology majors at the University of Oklahoma for several years following the film’s release.* Some impossible-to-calculate number of the scientists now struggling to find their own Dorothy-style solutions to the climate crisis were raised on flying cows, skyborne 18-wheelers, and Aunt Meg’s gravy. This 21st-century update to the story may be little more than loud, dumb, skillful entertainment, but that doesn’t mean it won’t prove memorable enough to set a new generation of weather nerds to work, inspired by the wonder and terror of the gathering greenage.
