Tornadon't

TWISTERS

2024

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Written by Joseph Kosinski and Mark L. Smith

Spoilers: moderate

In order to give the present film, Twisters (with an "s"), the fairest shake possible, I avoided rewatching its "spiritual predecessor," Twister (singular), and to get that discussion out of the way immediately, of course it's not a sequel to Twister, it's IP branding on behalf of a brand new tornado-related disaster movie—or, scratch that, that's insufficiently cynical, it's a new tornado-related disaster movie, spearheaded by Amblin Partners and designed to capitalize on 90s nostalgia and Twister's IP branding, which is slightly different but worse.  If it's obviously not living up to the escalation and genre-hopping of the progenitor of the pluralized sequel naming convention, Aliens, I don't suppose that's even a useful thing to mention, except that "nuking it from orbit" probably would be a more scientifically accurate and technically feasible way of disrupting tornados than the film's ideas on the subject.  To the extent it was ever any kind of actual continuation of Twister, that ambition was retired when Helen Hunt stopped returning Amblin's phone calls, most likely around the time they rejected her pitch to direct it.  At some point thereafter they hired fellow 90s sitcom actress, my beloved Maura Tierney, to do a scene Hunt might have done otherwise.  I only even mention it because she is my beloved Maura Tierney, rather than because anything she's doing is special in this movie where nothing that anybody is doing is special.

So what we have is a legacy sequel with no legacy, which means basically just a remake of Twister, and my recollection of Twister from possibly two viewings over the course of my life, the most recent (possibly only) being from about eight years ago, is that it's a pretty okay disaster movie that to me is largely indicative of disaster cinema's revival in the 1990s, taking its cues as much from disaster telefilms as the actual classics of the great 70s movement, above all disaster cinema's small-screen penchant for reuniting ex-spouses, thereby locking that in as the trope everybody "knows" that disaster movies always do, except that, before a bunch of lazy TV movies and their contemporaneous parody in Airplane!, they rarely did.  It is, in short, a fairly successful application of an unexciting but well-tested formula to the subject of tornados, given form and personality by director Jan de Bont and cinematographer Jack N. Green marshaling the bad weather emerging out of violent green skies as something akin to the wrath of God Himself, while legendary editor Michael Kahn strove to make it exciting, and the whole thing managed a certain ethnographic flavor thanks to the messiness of its slobby redneck hippie supporting cast.

Twisters doesn't even get to "formula."  The movie has been unaccountably successful, staving off the "cinema is dead" thinkpieces for another couple of months but only at the cost of resurrecting all my own direst fears about the medium, because death isn't even the worst fate it could suffer; despite this success, the most famous thing about the movie might just be that Steven Spielberg, in his role as a producer, dictated from on high that a kiss would be removed from it, and that's just Spielberg, I guess.  The explanation is that the heroine's arc isn't a romantic one, it's about rekindling her passion for tornado research and getting over the tragedy that kicks off the film.  Let us leave aside that the male lead is therefore the symbol of this, as well as any more generalized concerns over the sterilizing current in modern media, especially since the latter isn't really being serviced anyhow: the movie was certainly made with a romance in mind, so what it feels more like is an admission of defeat, a seemingly canny acknowledgment that obviously you don't give the first shit about the weak love triangle which it would conclude.  But, man, if you don't give a shit about their love triangles, is it all that likely you're going to give a shit about their start-up plans and environmental impact statements?

So, some time a few years ago, we have Oklahoman Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a newly-minted meteorologist who's invented, in her garage, a radical new technology that might be able to disrupt tornados after they start, using moisture-absorbing plastic that allegedly won't cause any issues for the farmland it's going to wind up getting deposited in (and therefore, yes, this disaster movie is to a remarkable degree about a complete science fiction conceit, which boosters and/or production assistants for the film have taken to editing Wikipedia's tornado research page to claim is "accurate" on the basis of an interview with the film's own consultant who actually said, "yeah, sure, buddy, if you had 22,000 tons of it, lying exactly in the tornado's course").  To perform her initial field experiment, she ropes in her pal Javi (Anthony Ramos) and three others I won't bother naming as much because they're incredibly obnoxious as because they're obviously doomed, because Kate's test inevitably goes poorly, getting most of her friends killed and leaving her burdened with so much guilt she punishes herself by moving to New York City.  Fast forward, and Javi reemerges from the South with a need for Kate's uncanny instincts for storm chasing to help his new business that nebulously involves profiting his chief investor, a slimy real estate magnate who buys up tornado-afflicted properties for pennies on the dollar, though despite a great deal of discussion about Javi's mesocyclonic entrepreneurialism, I was never entirely clear on how the former intended on monetizing the research of the latter.  Anyway, with much reluctance, and an abiding post-traumatic terror that she's loath to admit she feels, Kate heads back home to face her fears.

Into this situation strides Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a whooping performative hillbilly, punching up his stereotype on behalf of his YouTube channel with a million subscribers, which is devoted to riding into tornados with his tricked-out tornado-proofed truck and doing (and filming) stupid but clickworthy stunts such as blasting fireworks into the funnel.  He's really attractive, and, as noted, Kate eventually recognizes that he has the joie de vivre she once had, even if initially she sees him as a competitor—indeed, for some reason, she and Javi's team treat him like he's literally there to "beat" them to something, probably as an artifact of this being a loose remake of Twister—and it takes a while before she warms up to his persistent charms.  Then tornados happen at them, or they happen at tornados, and somewhere in this Javi halfheartedly confesses that he had, or has, feelings for Kate, too; and that's not really pursued much, either, so the movie still has a lot of time to kill before it finally gets to "maybe my model was wrong" and "let's try the experiment again" with no surprises and the barest whisper of a theme or story being served.

This movie has just the one thing, and that's Powell, who has blasted out in the last couple of years as a real-deal movie star, or the closest thing we have to a movie star in this day and age, in a manner that I like to think a lot of young and not-so-young actors are looking at and finding inspirational, in this regard not unlike Rebecca Ferguson (Powell is the movie star you might've never even heard of till he was already in his mid-30s).  And I don't know, he's charming and charismatic, but it's not enough and I'm not sure he's such "a movie star" that he's able to legitimately bend a film around him and make it worth your while just by virtue of his participation; people I respect a great deal see a greedy eagerness to this performance that's almost crass, and I kind of wish I saw the Twisters they apparently did, because in the one I saw, it feels more like Powell resting on laurels he still hasn't quite attained yet, mostly just wandering around the sets and smirking, effectively "what if Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick wasn't a douchebag, he just sort of looked like one?", Maverick being a movie where he was actually taking every possible opportunity to warp a chilly vibeless experience* around his presence and succeeding to the point that Tom Cruise, sensing the threat by instinct, didn't let him participate in much of it.  Now he has the whole canvas of a movie, but he's just absorbing the nothing that Edgar-Jones is giving off, and Ramos is giving off, and walking through them like they aren't there in what feels a lot more like an accident.  But I'll give the man this much, it doesn't even come off like a theatrically-released motion picture until Powell finally shows up, nearing the twenty-minute mark; unfortunately, it doesn't feel like the first proper scene of a theatrically-released motion picture has happened until some significant time even after that.  I'm only being slightly facetious to say it's a dialogue with Edgar-Jones that occurs about an hour and a half into it, and whatever else, to the extent Powell brings energy a lot is getting sucked away by the irritating secondary non-characters accompanying his YouTuber.

Though that's nothing compared to the energy dumped down the drains of the other two leads. By all means, "YouTube storm chaser" is an automatically-aggravating character class, online clout being a very inadequate replacement for the stock but likeable obsessive pursuit that drove the characters in Twister (even the damn "villain"), but at least Powell's character demands a showman; the other two-thirds of our primary cast are, for lack of a better word, just fuckin' nerds, with no screen presence filling out joyless characters who speak like a PowerPoint reads and whose greatest aspiration in life seems to be to show you its spreadsheet attachments with the really exciting financials.  They're not "likeable scientists," and they're not even merely over-expository, their exposition feels like it's constantly in service of pitching a business plan for a fake business at the audience for a summer popcorn movie.  It's as astoundingly wrongheaded a tone I've ever seen any movie take with the majority of its characters, though let's be clear that this is some savagely needless exposition, with a shockingly low opinion of its audience's ability to retain or process information, which unfortunately isn't limited to just Edgar-Jones and Ramos; it's not an exact quote, but I swear to God that Powell is tasked at one point with saying something to the effect of "that's a tornado."  But the most egregious example winds up with Javi, who repeats the exposition, nearly in full, that we heard only ten minutes earlier as regards his three-dimensional radar mapping of a tornado's interior, which even the first time is explained like we were babies, possibly not human babies, earnestly and patiently walking us through the wild idea of how an object in physical space can possess—hold on to your butts—more than one side.  The screenplay's logical fecklessness and low-energy characterization starts to make a little more sense when you realize it thinks its audience needs the concept of "three dimensionality" spelled out in duplicate.  And so the best thing Edgar-Jones does in the whole movie is some nice nuance to her American dialect work with a faded Southern accent, which is by definition a triviality; the best thing Ramos does in the whole movie is to actively sabotage the abominably disgusting trailer line, "this theater wasn't built to withstand what's coming," to the extent that to the best of my knowledge they weren't able to actually use it in the trailers.  (Okay, okay, I enjoyed Ramos's underreaction to accidentally plowing through a chicken coop a tornado threw at his truck, one of the few idiosyncratic things to occur in the film.)

This leaves the "disaster cinema" aspect of it and my assumption is that Twisters, at a minimum, must have more twisters than Twister, but it doesn't feel that way; I've never been entirely convinced that "wind" is an ideal candidate for the disaster movie treatment, yet armed with all the technology of 2024 and a $155 million production budget, Twisters should be able to make me eat my prejudice, but it just... doesn't.  It's a movie where it simultaneously seems like it can't rain in Oklahoma without generating a murderous tornado, yet also like there still aren't very many of them in this movie.  (For the record, there are three consequential setpieces—the one under a highway overpass that opens the film, one at a rodeo, and the one at the end that concludes at that movie theater Javi mentioned—plus the one tornado fun run that introduces Tyler.)  I chalk that up to them not being particularly excitingly depicted, and while directors obviously have to come from somewhere, I'm not sure "made the small-scale autobiographical immigrant drama, Minari, and thus once lived in Arkansas" is the resume of a disaster thrillmaker, and Twisters does little to prove otherwise for Lee Isaac Chung, with the threat of the whirlwinds feeling extremely intermittent even when they do manage to do damage, and a soundscape split between mighty winds and wretched pop country, including stuff that I'm disinclined to believe is what country sounds like now, but it chills me to the bone that it could be possible.  The presumption that he'd dig into "the western part of the South" isn't even borne out: nothing about this, beyond Powell's own surface-level performance, feels like this is a place with a personality or culture, and there's also the eyebrow-raising insistence that Oklahomans need to be apprised of what "a tornado" even is.  (Thanks to the sci-fi claptrap needing to wait all the way until the finale, our protagonists are instead thrown through a bunch of phony-baloney "hero" modules, where they run around various Oklahoman towns offering basic tornado survival advice to residents of Tornado Alley such as I, myself, was drilled in as child.  I'm not even from there.)  As for being a middlebrow director tossed into the AAA side of the industry, Chung appears to have insisted it be shot on film, and I don't see how you'd even notice that, either in the specific sense of it having a photographic texture, or in the grander sense that film fetishists usually tend to make movies that look interesting or good.

There are, anyway, ideas here that ought to be epic in their complexion—a tornado marauding through a wind farm and throwing their pylons across the landscape, and later one that barrels through an oil refinery—but these settings barely matter at all to the storytelling, as much a creature of the CGI pre-vis team, or even the damned trailer editors, as the film's actual director.  Sometimes there are moments of right brutality that demonstrate the demon power of a tornado (the motel swimming pool outside the rodeo entails the film's single best "disaster horror" beat by a huge margin), but these are few and far between; the modal image of a tornado in this film is somehow less evocative and frightening than an image search.  There's likewise perhaps an overreliance on tornados hidden in rainstorms, which are the most insidious kind of tornado for real-life meteorologists, but which, in a movie, come off like an exercise in layers and layers of obscuring particle effects rather than an exercise in, you know... terror.  And then there's that last one, which attacks that movie theater (a repertory screening of 1931's Frankenstein—but why?**), and which likely would've been on solider footing if it didn't do anything, but held on that closed emergency exit until it was over.  But, of course, that would be an artistic choice, rather than a movie directed on autopilot, so instead it takes a page out of Joe Dante's Matinee without a fraction of its imagistic power or its cleverness, or, as noted, even a cognizable meta-gag playing off the bleak humor of a relevant movie being shown—I mean, fucking seriously, Warners helped with this in some fashion, just do The Wizard of Oz.  It's certainly not too "unimaginative" for Twisters, after all.  It is not by any means the worst film of 2024, yet the sheer blandness of it sickens me.

Score: 4/10

*I think there's a lot of commonality between these two Powell-featuring "movies are back" blockbuster successes, particularly in that I don't really understand what people see in them that's all that great, but at least Maverick had cool fighter planes and some measure of stakes tied to its external conflict as regards Iranian-occupied Norway.  The upshot is that it feels like filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, this picture's credited scenarist (some other dude wrote the screenplay), used to have a lot more juice.

**It's clearly not "because this movie is about scientific hubris," so I guess "it's owned by Universal" will have to suffice.