Twisters – An Imperfect Storm Still Worth Chasing

It’s a tale as old as time: a fresh, up-and-coming filmmaker grinds out for years, endlessly beating on their craft with intimate projects until, one day, something hits. A runaway indie hit connects with viewers and propelling the artist across uncharted waters. The film becomes an Oscar-winning success, a true testament to the enduring power of personal storytelling. And then, with all that clout and a world of options to choose from, what does this sudden hotshot indie director do next? Make a hard-left into studio franchise filmmaking. In the same year that Barry Jenkins is set to finally return to the director’s chair with a Lion King prequel, this circle of life remains disappointingly steadfast, but Lee Isaac Chung’s foray into shameless nostalgia-mining takes on a much different, and inherently more intriguing, register; simply put, who the hell still cares about Twister?

Apparently, enough people to green-light a standalone sequel and rope in the mind behind Minari, so from a story courtesy of resident “Are we sure he wasn’t a thing in the ’90s?” filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 finally gets the follow-up some people were apparently clamouring for. Rather than returning to the rich well of memorable characters from the original, Twisters turns its attention towards meteorological savant Kate (Edgar-Jones), a former storm chaser whose ambitions to enter the heart of a tornado to chemically implode it takes a turn for the worst when three of her cohorts and best friends are killed on an unexpectedly rough expedition. When Javi (Ramos), one the last of those living friends calls her in to help him return to the field with new, updated equipment, Kate’s hesitant reunion with the eye of the storm puts her at odds with Tyler (Powell), a self-professed “tornado wrangler”—the film quickly brushes off the meaninglessness of this term—whose own carefree methods of engaging with the twisters leaves him flirting with more than just disaster.

Without much in the way of nostalgic characters to draw upon (Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman, you are missed), Twisters instead engages in the current nostalgia kick for the 1990’s by treating itself in the most 1990’s way possible. Which is to say, it’s absolutely ridiculous and irreverently enjoyable when it isn’t an open invitation for constant eye-rolls. Mark L. Smith’s treatment of Kosinski’s framework seems almost entirely composed of character beats and lines of dialogue heard in about 100 other films audiences have all seen, to the point where it would almost be unbearable were Chung not so adept at maintaining an honest focus on his characters, however thin they may appear. In truth, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos are perfectly capable of giving their cardboard cutouts some semblance of texture without any real shading, but by the time Twisters ends, the most enthusiastic response it musters is “God bless that Glen Powell!”

One would think this guy were an industry plant, the way studios and critics alike have been championing him nonstop since he nearly upstaged his obvious career model Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, but it truly can’t be understated how much untamed charisma this man is packing behind that unfairly chiselled figure. Where his costars find enough of a victory in not losing themselves to the awkwardness of the film’s tonal anachronism, Powell is just eating up every second of Twisters with so much elated yee-haw-ing that you’re liable to be completely disarmed when that charm is turned towards moments of empathy perfectly attuned to the sincerity of such a patently silly project. Clearly capable of drumming up palpable chemistry with just about anyone or anything that looks his way, Powell proves to be only star here whose whirlwind personality is capable of standing against the actual whirlwinds of the Oklahoma plains.

On that front, while the visual effects remain grounded enough to keep Twisters from coming across like a bloated mess of misplaced spectacle, there are really only so many ways in which one can try to shoot a tornado with some semblance of novelty, and the sparing nature of the resulting scenes leaves audiences at the mercy of yet more unapologetically unrefined character work. In any case, Lee Isaac Chung finds enough earnestness in this studio project to present its cookie-cutter characters with at least a fraction of the care found in his smaller works. For a filmmaker aching with as much humanistic virtue as Chung, that tiny sliver is more than enough to keep that shamelessly merry chase alive and well.

still courtesy of Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Amblin Entertainment

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Julian Malandruccolo

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