They say in real life, just before a tornado hits you, you hear a freight train. In Twisters, just before a tornado hits you, you hear Shania Twain. That’s the only way in which movie tornadoes are worse.
In 100,000 years, nobody who watched the near-perfect, quiet, haunting Minari would ever think “This director’s next film is absolutely going to be a sequel to a 28-year-old movie best known for a flying cow.” And yet, it kinda makes sense? Director Lee Isaac Chung brings the same reverence for nature and the same depth of humanity to this superficial but oddly effective blockbuster. It is a superhero movie about meteorologists, lacking only Al Roker in spandex and a cape.
Instead, the hero is Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Kate’s entire character is “knows weather.” Also, she 100% has magical abilities. She’s basically Storm from the X-Men, only instead of actually controlling the weather she just knows what’s going to happen. That is far less useful against Magneto. Magneto does not appear in Twisters.
The opening sequence sees Kate and her friends chasing a tornado in the hopes of “taming it.” This is done very scientifically. You see, they have barrels filled with what’s inside diapers. That stuff will absorb the moisture and kill the tornado. It does not go well!
Five years later, Kate has left her agrarian Oklahoma home for the asphalt of New York City. But she’s lured back to Tornado Alley by her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), who wants her to help his new company use high-tech radars to create a real-good 3D model of a tornado.
Javi’s team hates YouTube storm chasers. Which, you know…fair… Tyler (Glen Powell) is an Internet sensation and “tornado wrangler,” a job that sounds horrifyingly plausible in our capitalistic hellscape. If you don’t think that the broken-hearted Kate and the smug-but-kind Tyler go from feuding to flirting, please let us know how you’ve avoided the Hallmark Channel your whole life. There can be no real plot in a movie where the villain is rapidly spinning air, but the whole thing builds to a remarkable disaster climax that is legitimately thrilling.
It is thrilling because Twisters remembers how insanely captivating it can be to watch people helping other people survive a horrific situation. As fun as it is to watch superhero slugfests, seeing un-super heroes risk death to help strangers is profoundly, empathetically satisfying. The film contains multiple lines of dialogue along the lines of “We need to not do selfish things and instead stop and help people.” Is that dialogue clunky? You bet your sweet Doppler radar blip it is. It’s also kinda great.
Less great is the lengths to which Twisters goes to avoid acknowledging that climate change is real. Several times characters describe how tornadoes are getting so much worse and more frequent. At every moment when it seems like the multiple meteorologists talking to each other are going to acknowledge global warming, a country song filled with small town fetishism kicks in. Nobody expected Twisters to be a political statement, but its likely studio-executive–required cowardice is still annoying.
Also galling: Glen Powell. Or maybe not? What a weird aura that man has. He is perfectly cast here as a character designed to be simultaneously loathed and loved. He may have achieved global heartthrob status this year, but his maliciously charming grin is unsettling. For her part, Daisy Edgar-Jones does also appear in the movie.
Ignoring moments of convenient and flagrant stupidity, like storm chasers going to an outdoor rodeo during a tornado outbreak without checking the forecast, Twisters has too much country music. Ignoring the country music as well, Twisters is a pleasing disaster epic packed to the brim with compassion. So maybe it is worth enduring a little twang.
Grade = B
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Sarah Gopaul from Digital Journal says “From the opening scene, this movie is exciting and pulls no punches when representing the sheer awesomeness and destructive power of these tornadoes. But it also captures the allure of storm chasing, depicting the adrenaline rush through high energy performances and a country rock soundtrack. Then it juxtaposes that vigour with the solemn aftermath of casualties and devastation as the characters rarely miss an opportunity to try to help survivors.”
Jenn Adams at Strong Female Antagonist says “None of this story feels particularly novel. Uniform tech versus grassroots altruism is a hallmark of the disaster subgenre and as common as the treasured enemies to lovers trope. But we don’t buy a ticket for a movie like Twisters for the story.”
Allison Wilmore at Vulture says “Twisters is strangely insistent that the moral thing for its characters to do is rush toward communities about to be hit by a tornado, though it labors to show how exactly they’re supposed to help once they get there. There’s no sadder sign of the times than a film whose moment of triumph involves an individual figuring out how to diffuse a single storm — a supposed step toward saving the world — but which refuses to acknowledge the larger issues buffeting its characters like gale-force winds.”