‘Twisters’ review: Tornado, tamed

Where’s the cow? One of the most memorable details in Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) was the flying bovine. You’d expect Twisters, which reuses much from the first movie, to have one of its own, or maybe a herd. But director Lee Isaac Chung wasn’t keen to. "They think they want the cow,” he said in an interview. “But I promise you, you would be disappointed if there was a cow."

My disappointment in Twisters goes well beyond present or absent cows. I am, however, curious why the makers thought this wouldn’t work for viewers today. Were they worried they’d be meme’d? Do they consider themselves above such silliness? After all, this is a tornado movie about overcoming trauma and helping the public, not the kind where a second cow flies past and Bill Paxton says, “Actually, I think that’s the same one.”

Twisters begins, like the 1996 film did, with loss. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and four of her storm-chasing college friends in Oklahoma are happily headed into the path of a tornado. They’re about to test her experiment—an attempt to ‘tame’ a tornado by releasing barrels of a polymer into it. But once they’re close, they realise it’s a much bigger storm than they accounted for. Three of Kate’s friends are sucked into it. She survives, and gives up storm-chasing for weather-watching in New York. 

A visit by Javi (Anthony Ramos), the other surviving member of the quintet, pulls her back; he says he’s testing data-gathering tech that could help towns in danger of being swept away by larger tornados (the Oklahoma of the film seems to get one of these every week). I groaned when Javi introduces the team—PHDs from NASA, FEMA, etc, all wearing the same uniform, the camera barely bothering to register their faces. You just know the film’s going to bring on the most regular Joe straight-talkin’ small town values folk you’ve ever seen.  

This still might not prepare you for Tyler (Glen Powell) and his drone-flying, live-streaming, vibes-enjoying crew (played by Brandon Perea, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brian and Sasha Lane). I kept hearing Ben Affleck’s sardonic audio commentary for Armageddon in my head: “He’s a salt of the earth guy, and the NASA nerd-onauts don’t understand his salt of the earth ways, his rough and tumble ways.” The next half-hour of Kate and Tyler competing for storms while playing reserved science girl and slick cowboy is excruciating. It’s almost unfair that Hit Man just released on streaming; Powell's sparring with Edgar-Jones doesn’t hold a candle to his flirting with Adria Arjona in that film. 

Twister was a disaster film crossed with a comedy-of-remarriage; Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were as absorbing and chaotic as the storm. Chung’s film is a boilerplate redemption story: Kate must learn to face her past, Tyler must help her do this. The film picks up when they join forces, even if Mark L. Smith’s writing refuses to. I’m not asking for Billy Wilder, just something less literal than your ‘wrangler’ going to a rodeo with someone who says “It’s not my first rodeo”. I rolled my eyes when Kate’s mother tells her, “I’m still waiting for you to save the world.” It’s a film about the weather in one American state, but Hollywood is always ready to launch into superhero talk. 

There will hopefully come a point when those in charge start to question the wisdom of ‘promoting’ directors of small, human films to effects-driven studio films, which almost always end up lacking the personality that animated their indies. Lee Isaac Chung’s last film, Minari (2020), was a Koreeda-like drama set in Arkansas. It felt achingly personal, even if you didn’t know it was Chung’s parents’ story. There’s nothing like the bittersweetness or specificity of that film in Twisters; even nature seemed more awe-inspiring in Minari.

When the tornado rips into the movie theatre at the end, it interrupts the Boris Karloff Frankenstein at a fortuitous moment—“It’s alive!” This is the kind of bright choice the film needed more of. Instead, if I remember anything at all, it’ll be Kate going on and on about polymers and Tyler expressly going to save a dog and the film never showing us said dog. What can I even say about self-sabotage on this level?