©Universal/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
It follows the “Twister” template, but 30 years of footage from real-life storm chasers has given Lee Isaac Chung’s tornado thriller a higher bar to clear.
“Twisters” has something big to compete with — and no, I’m not talking about “Twister,” Jan de Bont’s $242 million domestic tornado thriller from 1996, which I loved (I was one of the few critics to put it on his list of the year’s top 10 movies). “Twisters,” a standalone sequel coming out nearly three decades later, will certainly be compared to the original film (to get to the point: it’s not nearly as good). But it will also, inevitably, be viewed through all the real-life tornado footage that is now readily available to those of us who are couch-chasers, happy to stay home and watch each other’s close encounters with tornadoes.
This kind of thing was already around when Twister came out (there were Weather Channel specials, and VHS and DVD edits of storm-chasing footage shot on camcorders). But it wasn’t as much of it, and it wasn’t as ubiquitous. The Internet was just starting to come into its own. In 1996, you couldn’t just go to YouTube and be one click away from seeing the awesome weather porn equivalent of Godzilla.
I think the fact that you can now do this is a higher level for “tornadoes.” We know deep down, more than we did then, what tornadoes really look like, how they come out of the sky and slide over the earth, and—most importantly—what it feels like to encounter one. I’ve never seen a tornado in real life (I’ve always dreamed of them), but I feel that the feelings inspired by tornadoes border on the religious. It’s not just their destructive power (many hurricanes are more destructive, but they don’t hold the same divine fascination). It’s the fact that tornadoes look like tornadoes. beingslike monsters in the form of weather. They are the embodiment of the strange in nature.
“Twister” captured that sentiment well, and the fact that it was made 28 years ago is a testament to how quickly digital effects technology has evolved. Visual effects in movies often age poorly, but in retrospect, the early and mid-’90s were a renaissance. The T. rex in “Jurassic Park” (1993) looked like a real T. rex, stomping and tactile. The bus crashing into the ice in “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) looked like a bus crashing into the ice. And the tornadoes in “Twister,” or at least a number of them, had an astonishingly corporeal quality; the F5 at the end looked like a fast-moving upside-down mountain.
But some viewers thought the effects look at I love digital effects, and while I don’t share that feeling, it’s one I often had watching “Twisters.” The tornadoes in the new movie are very accurate replicas of the real thing, and up close, from below, you can barely see the dusty winds that combine to create them, but from a distance, they don’t have the eerie muscular power that a real tornado often has, the feeling that the air is moving so fast it almost becomes solid. They’re not scary in that way. They’re impressive, but they don’t blow you away.
Director Lee Isaac Chung made the searing humanist drama “Minari” (2020), about South Korean immigrant farmers trying to get by in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. And while that might not make him the most likely candidate to helm a popcorn spectacle as steeped in technological wonders as this one, he does a fluid, confident job. Still, Chung is no Spielbergian wizard like Jan de Bont. (Spielberg served as an executive producer on both films.) Rather than simply trying to replicate what “Twister” did, I wish he had tried something more radical and eye-opening — like, say, photographing tornadoes. as if They were filmed with phones, so they looked as real as something hurtling toward your house or seen in the rearview mirror.
A lot of the storm chaser footage – I would say the bulk of it – is just hanging back and amazed Storm chasers are people who go around chasing tornadoes. That’s what you want to do. But “Twisters” is so busy with everything else the movie is about that it almost forgets to let us do that. The storm chasers in the original “Twister” were trying to learn about tornadoes so they could create a storm warning system. But the storm chasers in “Twisters” have bigger — and, I would argue, windier — ambitions. The movie opens with Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her crew driving through Tornado Alley in Oklahoma, trying to deploy Kate’s grand experiment: throwing a dozen barrels of polymer into the eye of a tornado, so that it wilts and dies out. They are literally struggle the tornado. But the tornado, which they thought was going to be an EF1 (the Fujita scale has now been replaced by the Improved The Fujita scale, used since 2007 in the United States, turns out to be an EF5. It is a fearsome beast that leads three of Kate’s colleagues, including her boyfriend, to their deaths.
And so ends her career as a storm chaser (or so she thinks), and it is from this tragedy that Daisy Edgar-Jones’ performance springs. This prologue introduces Kate as a virtual weather psychic, a sort of tornado whisperer who can read wind shear and storms and know how and where it’s all going to happen. But once the film cuts to five years later, when Kate is a weather analyst in New York, she emerges as a lugubrious, slightly recessive presence, one of those seemingly plucky heroines with an inner quietude, and it’s hard to tell how much of that is the character and how much of it is the actress. Kate is quick and likeable, but she’s not exactly flashy. (I sometimes wonder if British actors like Daisy Edgar-Jones, however impeccable they are at playing Americans, sometimes end up shaving off a layer of their personality to do so.)
But maybe she leaves all the work to Glen Powell, as Tyler Owens, a good old tornado chaser in a white Stetson who made his name on YouTube as the “Tornado Wrangler,” a smiling, daredevil cowboy who doesn’t just film tornadoes. He drives his red truck into them, welds the vehicle to the ground with automated screws, and performs stunts like shooting fireworks into the eye of the storm. He’s the tornado chaser as a social media Jackass, and the movie initially treats him like a vulgar exploiter. Instead, it praises the team of scientists Kate has agreed to join for a week during a unique tornado outbreak. It’s a small corporation of tornado chasers run by Kate’s former boyfriend and colleague, Javi (Anthony Ramos), who want to study the phenomenon of tornadoes by circling one by three pieces of radar, to better collect all this data.
Ah, data! That’s what the tornado chasers in “Twister” (Helen Hunt! Bill Paxton! Philip Seymour Hoffman!) were also collecting, but somehow we always knew it was a MacGuffin, the excuse behind it all. They chased tornadoes because they cared! — but really, deep down (that was the subtext), they did it for fun, which is why the thrill of the chase could trigger vibrations of sexual energy between Hunt and Paxton as a divorced couple getting back together.
In theory, the same thing happens here, when Tyler, with his shameless grin, teases Kate, whom he insists on calling “city girl.” In this case, however, the rival storm-chasing teams represent opposing values, even if the frowning Kate and the swaggering Tyler may not be as far apart as you might think. In fact, he’s, deep down, a serious guy who studied meteorology. And is she a thrill-seeker at heart? Not quite, but in the end, she’s willing to drive a truck straight into a storm to do the right thing. Meanwhile, the very good actor Anthony Ramos finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to mope around as Javi, who has a one-sided crush on Kate.
The story of “Twisters” works…well. Interesting actors like Sasha Lane continue to pop up; one only wishes Mark L. Smith’s script would give them more to work with. Powell, with his squinty eyes, his hair, his intricate dimples, maintains his old-school movie-star magnetism (think young Clint Eastwood as a highly evolved brain), and there are moments of spectacle that hook you, like a collapsing water tower, or the sequence that begins with Kate and Tyler’s date at a rodeo and culminates in a scary tornado that leaves them hanging on the corner of a motel pool. But “Twister,” in its day, was dazzling because we’d never seen anything like it on the silver screen before. Watching the tornadoes in “Twisters,” I felt like I’d seen something exactly like them before — and that when it comes to real tornado footage, I’d seen something even more incredible. “Twisters,” as fun as it is, is a movie where reality eventually takes over.