‘Twisters’ Review: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell Headline a Middling Sequel With Plenty of Storms but Little Genuine Enthusiasm

One of the elements that gave Tornado In 1996, the film was so visceral that it had struck a balance between special effects and computer-generated images, at a time when the latter were increasingly easily integrated into live action. Jan de Bont’s dynamic direction and two attractive leads with excellent chemistry also contributed to this success. Arriving almost three decades later, Tornadoes Tornadoes that endanger life and leave a trail of destruction in their wake are effective. But the fact that it’s all conjured up by a digital paint can dulls the wonder that grips the pulse of nature at its most destructive.

The film marks a fairly sure step toward a much larger canvas for director Lee Isaac Chung, whose personal connection to the rural American heartland has brought such aching tenderness to to painThis quality can be discerned in the film’s sense of geography, with its red-dirt back roads cutting through the green fields of Oklahoma, and in the sadness with which it witnesses the devastation of small communities.

As a summer blockbuster, Tornadoes more or less meets the requirements, setting off a lot of fierce timing, putting a smart, attractive woman between two attractive men who seem to have very different priorities, and underscoring the stakes right from the start by surprising us with an extended prologue with major casualties.

But there’s something missing. Mark L. Smith’s screenplay, based on a story by Joseph Kosinski, who was originally set to direct the film, settles into a routine pattern in which one whirlwind follows another without enough momentum building. The character dynamics are entirely predictable, which tends to dull the drama. And as for humor, there’s nothing here that comes close to Jami Gertz’s New York therapist who blurts out “We have cows!” as a heifer flies past the vehicle she’s riding in with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

The central character of Tornadoes Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a physicist and tornado expert, hopes to secure a research grant for her ambitious PhD project to neutralize storms by absorbing the moisture trapped in their wind funnels. The film opens with Kate and her team of storm chasers, college friends, seriously underestimating the tornado they plan to test their experiment on, with tragic results.

Five years later, Kate has moved back to New York, where she works as a meteorologist, still monitoring the weather from her desk. Her detachment from Oklahoma and her farm roots is so compelling that her mother, Cathy (Maura Tierney), tells her daughter’s former colleague, Javi (Anthony Ramos), that Kate is never coming home again.

Javi arrives in New York after serving in the military as a data analyst. He comes up with a plan to obtain three-dimensional analyses of tornadoes using portable radar units. He has a highly trained team and the backing of a wealthy investor, but he needs Kate’s help to predict the storm’s paths. She takes some convincing, but finally agrees to give him a week.

Back in Oklahoma, Kate gets her first taste of the circus side of storm chasing when Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) rolls into town from Arkansas in his camper van, accompanied by his gang of rowdy daredevils. Javi’s business partner Scott (David Corenswet) calls them “rednecks with YouTube channels,” but Tyler prefers to call himself a “tornado chaser,” a nod to his days on the rodeo circuit.

Powell’s charisma is complemented by Tyler’s confidence and unabashed egocentricity fueled by his social media fame. His team’s merchandise includes T-shirts featuring his image with the slogan “Not my first rodeo.” Still, with Tyler and his team constantly yelling and hollering like Wild West cowboys, they’re initially a boring bunch.

It’s only once Tyler has let go enough to get close to Kate and show her genuine respect for her knowledge that the main characters really get involved. Even then, when Javi and Tyler’s attitudes toward tornado chasing prove more complicated than they first appear, there’s never much doubt about where Kate’s loyalties lie. If you put Glen Powell in Western-style shirts and skinny jeans, who else really stands a chance?

There was a real opportunity here to modernize the story by integrating climate change into the increasing frequency of violent storms that ravage tornado alley in the United States. But Smith’s screenplay limits this to one or two brief mentions; shots of wind farms or an oil refinery being struck by a tornado, adding fire to its elemental ferocity, speak more eloquently. The film scores, however, in its observation of how wealthy business opportunists profit from the tragedies of ordinary Americans.

Someone who comes to Tornadoes Viewers who primarily enjoy tornadoes will probably enjoy the film. But it’s perhaps the relative paucity of intimate scenes away from the storms’ path that gives the characters and the actors’ performances limited scope.

Tyler’s crew is a colorful one, comprised of videographer Boone (Brandon Perea), who approaches every weather event like an extreme sports enthusiast; thrill-seeking drone operator Lily (Sasha Lane); excitable science geek Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe); and Dani (Katy O’Brian), who doubles as a mechanic when she’s not busy shouting war cries. But the group is more individualized by their appearance than by the substance of their characters. The same goes for Harry Hadden-Paton as Ben, a London journalist profiling Tyler, who sheds his initial stiffness at just the right moment.

It’s almost as if someone decided not to let any human compete with the mighty forces of nature for attention. That goes for everyone, including Kate, Edgar-Jones’s sincere, compassionate and, sorry, slightly annoying wife; Ramos’s gullible entrepreneur Javi; and Tyler, played by Powell, despite his movie-star smile and hair that looks good even in 300-mph winds. Their love triangle is sketched only in a fragile outline.

The tornadoes are considerably more robust. Twenty-eight years of advances in special effects technology give the storms more definition and visual sophistication than the sequel’s forebear. Most notable is a menacing destroyer that gathers momentum during an evening rodeo, striking the grandstand and neighboring motel with little warning. The monumental final tornado also provides a spectacle, tearing through a working-class town with a streetcar running through its Main Street farmers market and an old movie theater showing James Whale’s film Frankensteinwhere people gather for short-term shelter.

But no one ever answers the nagging question of why all these people living in a region regularly hit by tornadoes never seem to have a basement or cellar to retreat to. Except that the movie’s formula is built around humans in danger, which tends not to work so well if you don’t expose them to nature’s fury.

Chung and DP Dan Mindel take full advantage of the wide-open spaces of rural Oklahoma to give Tornadoes a living sense of place, rooted in another era, embedded as much in the architecture as in the landscapes. This is further enhanced by a soundtrack of original country songs by contemporary artists (plus a cover or two, including Charley Crockett performing “Ghost Riders in the Sky”), all enhanced by the music of Benjamin Wallfisch.

Whatever the film’s strengths or weaknesses, it benefits from what seems like a genuine love for this environment, in which the modern world collides with old-world America. The focus on the townships destroyed by storms suggests both the outdated values ​​of community solidarity and the increasingly urgent need to stop abusing nature before it consumes us.