Director – Lee Isaac Chung – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 117m
Film ***1/2
Special Effects (the twisters themselves) *****
A young woman attempts to compensate for failed “twister taming” which caused the tragic deaths of three of her friends, by further pursuing tornadoes – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 17th
In the very first moments, Kate (Daisy Edgar Jones from Where the Crawdads Sing, Olivia Newman, 2022) stands in a field of tall grass. It’s an image that could almost have come out of director Chung’s previous film, the intensely personal Oscar-winner Minari (2020). Almost, but not quite: apart from one briefly seen-child, this is not a film populated with Korean-Americans. It doesn’t attempt any kind of ethnic statement, but then, why should it? People either come to this because they saw Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996) and want a rerun or, if they’re younger, because they want the same thing that pulled audiences into the first film: mayhem caused by the awe-inspiring, unstoppable force of nature that is a tornado, aka a twister.
The title implies there are more than one, and there are indeed, but then, there were in the first film too. But a plural always makes a good sequel title after a singular: remember Alien and Aliens.
The script has a great opening, possibly in the school of scriptwriting that says the script will work if the first ten minutes are good and the rest doesn’t matter so much, because what happens in the opening grabs you in a way that much of the rest of the film fails to.
Kate is a young Oklahoma woman on a mission: she and her four friends set out to tame a tornado. The plan is to do this by placing a chemical substance into the tornado to cause it to fizzle out. So she and three others drive a lorry and the latest iteration of Dorothy, the device from Twister that places numerous, small sensor globes where the twister can pick them up so that a computer can show a real time moving graphic of what the twister is doing.
The fifth member of the Kate’s team Javi (Anthony Ramos from In The Heights, Jon M. Chu, 2021) has to keep reminding her of the importance of putting Dorothy in the path of the Twister as well as her own taming chemicals. Without Dorothy’s computer model of the twister, they won’t know what it’s doing.
It all goes terribly wrong when she drives the truck too close to the twister and her three friends, including her current boyfriend who gets her to seeming safety under a bridge and holds her to protect her from the twister, are sucked into it one by one. (That’s the whole point of these movies: get too close and cue amazing special effects.) Five years later, demoralised and guilt-ridden, she’s working for a weather centre in New York, which saves her having to go into the field.
But then Javi tracks her down and persuades her to come back to Oklahoma and work with him, which leads her into the company of self-styled “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell from Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski, 2022). She soon loses faith in herself and retreats to spend time at home with her mum (Samantha Ireland), who is shrewd enough, when Tyler calls by, to invite him first for supper and later to stay over for a few days so he can help her daughter get her head back together. For the finale, Kate, Tyler and Javi will again attempt to tame a twister, this time doing it properly.
All this is engaging enough in terms of a slight love triangle (a near asexual one in which there’s hardly even any kissing, more like a girl torn between two male friends), and there’s an unexpected gravitas in the scenes of Kate at her mum’s, thanks to the welcome, anchoring presence of Miss Ireland. It’s a further improvement on Twister in that instead of wanting to fast-forward through the character bits to get to the mayhem weather bits, the character bits this time round are generally tolerable enough to hold the attention. They are also executed with a lot more brevity, so there’s less to put up with in between the main attraction of the weather mayhem.
The cast and characters are pitched far younger than those of the original film (mid-twenties rather than late thirties). Edgar-Jones makes a very watchable leading lady, while Powell proves surprisingly charismatic and winsome. Among the minor cast members, Harry Haddon-Patton (The Crown, TV series, 2016; Downton Abbey, TV series, 2014-15) plays the token embedded Brit journalist hailing from “South London somewhere between Norwood Junction and Streatham Hill”, a line that will endear him to Londoners everywhere, while Sasha Lane (How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Garber, 2022; American Honey, Andrea Arnold, 2016) is woefully underused as a techie who flies drone cameras.
As with the original film, this is mostly just an excuse for lots of twister special effects sequences. These feel bigger in scope than before, showing twisters wreaking havoc and their aftermath in small town urban areas rather than sticking to open country, which is probably less complex and easier to pull off in computer effects terms. There is much travelling across country material too, with convoys of twister-chasing vehicles jockeying for front position, cutting through fields or across each other’s paths en route.
Kate has an ability to sense before anyone else when a twister is going to grow or collapse, which leads her to, for instance, when choosing between two twisters, to turn left when everyone else is turning right. The small town sequences include a race to shelter in a basement and another to get everyone into a cinema showing a Monster Fest when a tornado hits with what looks like a 1930s Frankenstein movie, a clear attempt to rerun Twister’s far more effective scene of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) playing at a drive-in when a tornado hits.
There are nods to the perils of global warming, with storms and twisters more frequent now than they used to be, and profiteering, with Javi trying to make money out of people whose homes have been devastated by a twister; however, these constitute little more than the occasional line of dialogue or media voiceover and aren’t really worked out to any significant degree. There’s also a somewhat fanciful suggestion that technological innovation on its own will solve all our problems. These are, however, minor carps: there’s enough in the script to hold the attention for just under two hours as the film guide us through a series of hair-raising encounters with twisters. This wasn’t true of the original.
Equally, though, the original, for all its faults, did it first, and even if this new film has a more compelling plot and more extensive special effects, it still feels like a rerun, arguably a pointless rerun. Those audience members coming in fresh at this point aren’t going to be disappointed, because the film works well enough as a standalone movie, and those who saw the original and want more of the same will also likely be satisfied. However, this new film has little to add to its predecessor: it’s just bigger and more of the same. See it for the spectacle, and you won’t be disappointed; just don’t expect too much as you’re going in.
Twisters is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, July 17th.
Trailer:
Trailer 2:
Official Close of Day Sale Trailer: