Released the same summer as Independence Day, Jan de Bont’s 1996 special effects bonanza Twister helped kick off the late-’90s/early-2000s disaster movie glut. It’s a terrible movie that was mostly accepted as brainless fun at the time, a relic of that early CG-VFX heyday in which you could pack an audience into theaters simply with the promise of a convincing illusion (which it mostly isn’t anymore). And yet, nearly 30 years of nostalgia has left Twister with a considerable cult fandom of people who were little kids when it came out, or simply don’t know any better.
So now we have the belated rehash/sequel Twisters. As directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, it’s a movie nobody asked for and yet manages to almost uncannily reverse its predecessor’s faults and strengths, making a film that’s marginally more successful as a character-based drama — absolutely a low bar, but still clears it — while managing to almost completely flatline as an action spectacle.
We start with meteorological researcher Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her crew of misfit grad students, including best buddy Javi (Anthony Ramos) and boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack). They’re out in the middle of Oklahoma chasing tornadoes, of course; Kate has a mixture of materials she thinks can make one dissipate on contact. Inevitably, things go haywire, and everyone is dragged into the killer suck zone by the storm, leaving Kate and Javi as the only survivors. Now Kate has PTSD — Post-Twister Stress Disorder — and she retreats to the safety of a National Weather Service office job in New York. That is until Javi resurfaces with an offer she can’t refuse, pulling her back into storm-chasing with a new piece of crucial tech that can make a 3D map of a tornado.
For reasons that are never quite clear, Javi and his group of tech bros feel the need to directly compete with famous storm-chasing YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his Tornado Wranglers, who drive huge pickups that drill into the ground so they can do silly stuff like shoot fireworks into the storms and get killer footage of the inside of the cyclones. Why these two sets of folks don’t simply help each other — rather than, you know, trying to ruin each other’s research or even run each other off the road — is never really made clear. More confusing still is exactly how Javi’s data collection benefits a shady land developer who swoops in to buy up storm victims’ decimated property.
Ultimately, though, these details are neither here nor there, and for the most part, just like de Bont’s original, Chung has at least crafted a handsome-looking movie. Anyone who saw Minari can probably imagine the director’s facility with lovely rural landscapes and swooping aerial shots at golden hour would seamlessly translate to this material. His facility with his actors remains intact as well, and despite fond memories of the original’s supporting cast (RIP PSH) and the fact that this sequel is populated by less well-known actors (Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brien), they all are gifted more distinctive, developed personalities. More importantly, most of what passes for the film’s appeal is solely shouldered by Powell, who simply oozes movie star charm at every turn and couldn’t be more amiable here. On the other end of things, unfortunately, is Edgar-Jones, who tries for scrappy though haunted but mostly just winds up scanning as sort of blandly timid. Such weaknesses are at least balanced out at times: a late sequence visit to Kate’s mom (Maura Tierney) at her childhood farmstead really utilizes Chung’s strengths, almost tying everything together dramatically while delivering some playful exposition and a hot hero moment for Powell.
But it’s all too little too late. The improvements in character and personal drama are all well and good, but what Twisters fails to really deliver is intense tornado mayhem. As in the first film, none of the main cast even ever gets seriously injured; all the deaths are mere redshirt civilians, and the storms themselves are, more than ever, rendered as grey-brown digital smears. The original at least had near-constant storm activity stuffing its runtime and a plethora of very well-integrated practical gags to balance out the relative infancy of the digital work; there’s very little of that here. Regarding a late action beat involving a gigantic fire cyclone, Chung makes the bizarre decision to merely observe it at a distance, and the finale — set in a movie theater, of course — just looks like a set that has a few Ritter fans blowing really hard. Quite simply, a movie like Twisters isn’t supposed to be at its best in small moments where a couple actors are simply talking, but that’s, unfortunately, the film that viewers have been given.
DIRECTOR: Lee Isaac Chung; CAST: Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, Nik Dodani; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 19; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 2 min.
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