The quick review of this one is pretty straightforward: Twisters, the long-awaited reboot to the 1996 disaster movie classic, features a generous assortment of fantastic tornado sequences bracketed by a ridiculous script. The exposition scenes will have you rolling your eyes, then the storm scenes will pop them right out of your skull. The usual deal, really, for a summer blockbuster. Vicarious thrills. Assembly-line storytelling. Ocular damage.
If you’re willing to endure the bad parts to get to the good stuff, then Twisters is worth a trip to the theater, because the tornado scenes are flat-out spectacular. Digital effects have come a long way since 1996, and the booming, crashing, end-of-the-world sound design is bonkers, too.
By my count, there are at least eight separate tornadoes in Twisters, including a supersize EF6 tornado, a scary twin-tornado thing, a fire tornado at an oil refinery, a tornado at a rodeo (yes), and in a clever meta moment, a tornado ripping apart a movie theater just like the one you’re sitting in.
Give the screenwriters credit, they’ve assembled a script that makes it juuuust plausible that the central characters could directly encounter eight or so tornadoes within the span of a few days (and a flashback sequence).
The story goes like this: An exceedingly rare “tornado cluster” has formed in Oklahoma, attracting professional storm chasers including scientist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who has a preternatural ability to predict where twisters will form and strike. Also in pursuit: self-styled “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a YouTube celebrity with a massive following who chases storms for thrills and kicks and online ad revenue. Tyler and Kate rub each other the wrong way, naturally, until later when they fall in love and presumably find the right way to do it.
This kind of central romance is mandatory for a popcorn disaster movie, and the screenplay drops in a bunch of additional narrative elements concerning corporate villains, social media dynamics, and some barely coherent science concerning a way to actually fight an incoming tornado. We also get awkwardly contrived scenes to establish the characters, plus the kind of phony heartland sentiment that powers bad country music—pickup trucks and beers and amber waves of whatever.
Storywise, it doesn’t really work and it doesn’t really matter. Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) keeps the pacing such that we’re never more than a few minutes from an incoming tornado, an active tornado, a recently departed tornado, or some other kind of compelling weather porn. We’re wired as a species to be awestruck by stuff like this. The filmmaking team makes the most of it by seamlessly integrating digital effects and stunt work to provide a powerful, visceral experience.
I saw the movie in a big IMAX theater, and I could feel the primitive parts of my brain start to squirm during the storm scenes: Dude! Is this real? Why aren’t you running?
One curious thing: Twisters is ostensibly a film about 21st-century meteorology professionals and unprecedented tornado outbreaks. Yet there’s never any direct mention of the global crisis fueling our heavy weather headlines. The decision not to say “climate change” out loud was deliberate. Were the producers afraid the film would get tagged as a scold or a bummer or somehow woke and throttle their audience numbers?
I don’t know, but it’s a depressing thought. Perhaps future historians will have fun debating it all from our weatherproofed underground cities. In any case, Twisters is fun in a thrill-ride kind of way—spring for the IMAX option if you can.
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