Twisters is unhinged. Rapidly vacillating between blockbuster special effects, light romantic comedy played for mild laughs, and sequences of traumatic wreckage left in the wake of tornados, the movie veers wildly, provoking tonal whiplash. If Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020) is a deftly built series of concentrated character pieces, Chung’s Twisters is a fun but conventional uncontrolled whirlwind of Hollywood concepts. Twisters is a de facto remake of Twister (1996) and blessedly does little to insist on itself as either direct sequel or winking franchise extension. Instead, the film goes about making a sequel mostly the right way: the same setup is used to create an adventure for characters who are specific to the new movie. There is no irony here. Just another efficient tornado movie, and it achieves the same premise as the original movie; rather than a disaster movie about running from danger, it’s a road movie about running into the eye of the storm.
Twisters is set in Oklahoma — ‘where the wind comes sweeping down the plain!’ — and exists in an alternate reality wherein storm chasing is king and aberrant weather patterns are abundant, a constant flurry of wind and storms ripping across the Great Plains. Weather science remains a super-fun field for genre fare. Like in the first movie, the goal is to deploy a new weather-monitoring device in the heart of a tornado which can stand to save many lives, but also make storm chasers YouTube Famous or enrich their company’s bottom-line. Swap the classic chemistry of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt for more of-the-moment choices Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and you have an interchangeable romantic entanglement that’s more a breezy flirty wind than a full-blown carnal maelstrom.
Effects work sells or buries the action of the movie. The difference between movies from the 1990s and movies from today is that you had to employ a lot of trickery back then. You had to make good, suggestive use of the camera and edit to really convince the audience of context and that there was a real storm brewing around the characters. The fair to middling direction of Jan de Bont in the original was supplanted by the good editing of Michael Kahn — as the movies are part of Amblin Entertainment and feel like it, having Steven Spielberg’s editor on-board saved that movie. Lee Isaac Chung is a better director but has turned in a less visually concerned movie. If you want special effects now, you just shoot some footage and it’s added in post, you may not have the context to really use the camera creatively or to employ in-camera special effects, because all this is now a totally separate part of the process. Which leads to movies that feel like that division of the creative process is baked into them.
What works and does not work are the characters. The light romance is cute but does not have much liftoff or on-screen affection. The Gen-Z-friendly storm chasing YouTuber premise is silly and played out. You can sort of write the movie in your head before the events happen, it plays by the numbers, and sticks to all the conventions of modern blockbusters. The new movie is written flatly by Mark L. Smith who only adapted one good movie in The Revenant (2015) and has otherwise written airless movies like The Midnight Sky (2020) and The Boys in the Boat (2023). Twisters mostly loses itself in the script — at least in terms of what has been filmed, it rambles incoherently between several lightly-plotted A, B, and C stories, and doesn’t land any of them.
Twisters notably is a better soundtrack than a movie. It’s a pretty good reading of contemporary country! The musical imagination of the movie exists in the mind of Glen Powell’s cowboy tornado-wrangler. It’s full of good choices, a music budget exceptionally well-spent and expensive-sounding. Good new stuff by Tyler Childers, Miranda Lambert, Luke Combs, and Thomas Rhett outlines the very-country approach, an alternative to the Rockist original which featured Van Halen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soul Asylum, etc, etc., but achieved a less signature identifiable sound. Notably the original score by Benjamin Wallfisch also sounds good in the theater, as does Twisters’ sound design in general, which uses Spatial Audio deliberately.
It’s hard to have too bad of a time. There are tornados and pretty people on the screen. Do you need much more? Absolutely not. Go enjoy Twisters as a summer reverie, an escape from the heat while you enjoy a drafty blockbuster. It’s not airtight, not at all, but is still a harrowing deluge of simple ideas executed simply. That’s all you need for a night at the theater. This is, for all intents, the right way to produce a generic sequel. Twisters is focus-tested and ensured. It’s been about 30 years and the takeaway remains the same: this is what Summer Movie Season is for.