Twisters, the standalone sequel to the original Twister from 1996, will blow you off your feet with its overdrive on blockbuster tackiness. On the other hand, it’s silly popcorn cinema so if you’re after cheap cinematic thrills, this is probably your ticket.
Twisters is a surprising big-budget overture for director Lee Isaac Chung. He had impressed many with his semi-autobiographical film, Minari, for which he won numerous Oscar nominations. Minari was a stunningly delicate portrayal of a South Korean immigrant family who moved to rural Arkansas during the 80s. While Twisters centres around the same rural outback of America by being situated in Oklahoma, the neighbouring state of Arkansas, that’s as far as the similarities go between the two. In Twisters, any emotional depth is entirely exchanged for potboiler material, resulting in lethargic characters, a flimsy script but decent VFX and bombastic scenes that lead to a reasonably satisfying disaster movie experience.
Oklahoma, once known as the tornado capital of the world, is in the USA’s Tornado Alley, with some of the world’s strongest tornadoes per square mile. Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), is a PhD student from Oklahoma, idealistic and hellbent on using her meteorological knowledge to lessen the devastating impacts of tornadoes. The film begins with her trying to pull off one of her vaguely explained experiments to dissipate a tornado using a chain of specific chemical reactions. She leads her group of friends who are keen to help, one of which includes her boyfriend, Jeb (Daryl McCormack). But things go south when the severity of the tornado is wildly underestimated by them.
A few years forward, and Kate has swapped the bucolic windy plains of Oklahoma for the hard-nosed, concrete jungle of New York, where she works in the national weather department. The consequences of her failed experiment, bear down on her, preferring to bury her head in the books, preferring to forget that she once aspired to destroy tornadoes. One of the survivors of the experiment was her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) who hunts Kate down in New York to persuade her to return to Oklahoma to work with him. He’s worked himself up to become a successful entrepreneur, developing military-grade specialist equipment to collect tornado data. There’s a feeble attempt to bring in a sub-plot, with Javi’s company being linked to the local tycoon who wants to profit from the tornado disasters to buy up the land cheaply. This isn’t developed beyond a mere telling-off from Kate to Javi about how unethical he’s being.
Daisy Edgar-Jones is suited to this archetypal white-leading-woman-with-the tortured-past type of role that we often see. She was similar in Normal People, an adaptation of the book about two emotionally repressed lovers who are so self-absorbed that they probably wouldn’t have noticed a cow falling out of the sky. At least not in the way Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton do in the original Twister, and for which there’s a snuck-in blink-and-you-miss-it homage in Twisters.
The same haunted look on Daisy Edgar-Jones appears again here. She’s solid when playing a tormented soul, but there’s an imbalance between her and co-star Glen Powell in Twisters. Powell who couldn’t look less like a Ken Barbie doll if he’d tried, plays Tyler Owens, a swash-buckling storm chaser who documents his team’s bravado on his YouTube channel, Tornado Wranglers. Kate’s one-dimensional character can’t quite counterbalance the gregarious Tyler, a soft-hearted, science nerd masquerading as an arrogant social media buffoon, energetically played by Powell. To tip the scales further, the age gap between the two actors is a little distracting, exacerbated by Daisy Edgar-Jones looking younger than her years and Glen Powell looking older than his.
The love triangle between Kate, Tyler and Javi was contrived rather than convincing. It would have served the film better to swap the triangle situation for a beefed-up script, with some strategic tension-building before the grand action scenes. A few more dialogue scenes around the reasons for having increasingly frequent tornadoes in Oklahoma, or a little more revealing the human cost of the disasters, would have been a welcome move away from the Ferris wheel of tornado chasing.
On the plus side, the visual effects in Twisters worked well on the whole. A particularly memorable scene was when Kate, Tyler and Javi managed to shepherd people into the town cinema hall to take shelter from the supernado that was bulldozing everything in its path. It was quite the sensory feast when the front of the cinema hall was ripped off by the tornado, leaving our real cinema audience in some kind of Gogglebox situation. Easy entertainment and a nice touch.
You can’t see much of Lee Isaac Chung in Twisters, which isn’t surprising seeing how homogeneous big-budget movies regularly are. However, now that he’s dipped his toes in it all, let’s hope he can say: “Been there. Done that”.
