Twisters.
(M, 122 minutes)
3 stars
It is an unbelievable almost 30 years since Jan De Bont's Twister starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt wreaked carnage on the film-going public's wallets in 1996. What is most surprising is, in this day of endless sequels and franchises having every last cent squeezed out of them, how long it has taken for Universal and Warner Bros to revisit this piece of intellectual property.
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Apart from the storm-chasing premise, there's not much that connects this new film to the 1996 Twister, no overlapping characters, so there's no need to revisit the original to enjoy this one.
And enjoy it I did. Twisters is in fact a perfect example of why the cinema-going experience is still so important. If I were reviewing this on an online screener as I sometimes do, I wouldn't have gotten to enjoy the way the audience were so engaged by the spectacle, as they guffawed at dialogue I might have found eye-rolling at home.
The film begins with a band of science geeks, all over-brimming with character and throwing narration and exposition out left, right and centre. These particular geeks are a crew of PhD hopefuls led by Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), speeding through a part of Oklahoma referred to as Tornado Alley to catch up with a probable tornado to conduct a potentially career-making experiment.
While the science behind Kate's idea - that she might release chemicals into the middle of a tornado to reduce or kill it - might be plausible, she's misjudged the particular tornado they're chasing. It ends up killing most of her crew including her boyfriend.
Jumping ahead five years, Kate is a desk-bound meteorologist, spooked by her experience. When the other surviving member of that day, Javi (Anthony Ramos), approaches her with a job offer back in tornado country she is reluctant but feels some guilt that brings her home. Javi needs Kate's expertise as they hope to deploy new technology to better understand storms. He's come to her after all this time because a once-in-a-generation week-long tornado event is expected.
On their storm-chasing path, they run into a crew of social-media-famous "tornado wranglers" led by Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a gum-chewing southerner with an enormous online following and ego to match. While there's an initial attraction between Kate and Tyler, she's convinced he's a reckless glory-seeker until she sees him and his crew helping a tornado-affected town. He helps her recognise there might be something darker going on with the outfit she is working for.
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As the storms continue to build, Kate and Tyler look back on her old PhD project and wonder if her ideas to limit these storms' power might help save these communities from the death and damage.
The original science-heavy Twister story came from Michael Crichton and in the three decades since, many of the things that might have felt far-fetched we can see now recorded on people's phones for YouTube, so the CGI twisters themselves aren't mind-blowing. And so director Lee Isaac Chung doubles down on the layering of sound design and music along with constant camera movement which mostly works - I'm still feeling some kind of vestibular response a few hours later as I write this.
Chung made the beautiful drama Minari in this part of the world in 2020, and he does his best to insert some of that film's quiet, human moments in the noise.
Glen Powell is the It boy of the moment and he deserves the crown with his movie star magnetism. He's the centre of this film, not because it isn't packed with a recognisable supporting cast but because there are so many of them that screenwriter Mark L. Smith doesn't give any of them more than a sentence or two.
