Twisters: Everything A Legacy Sequel Should Be

Note - this article is a re-publishing of an earlier article to combat technical difficulties with my site.

I promised you guys a few weeks ago in my article for The Florida Project that I would go see Lee Isaac Chung's legacy sequel "Twisters" and deliver my thoughts on it, and if anybody actually reads my film review blog, you'll know that I'm a man of my word, and a promise made by me is always a promise kept. So yes, I went to see Twisters. I'll admit I wasn't initially too overly impressed by what I saw in the promotional material for the film, but what finally caught my eye, or should I say my ear, was Luke Comb's driving and mesmerizing single for the film, an energetic little country rocker titled "Ain't No Love in Oklahoma." Now, country music is absolutely one of my guilty pleasures. I won't dismiss the genre as a whole because there are some genuine masterpieces under its banner, but let's just say I'm not exactly put off by a cheesy country song, either. And so when I found out that 29 singles by many different country artists were being released by Atlantic Recording and Warner Bros as promotional material for the movie, I actually became kind of excited to go see it. I figured that if nothing else, I could have some fun watching tornadoes destroy things for two hours and then go home to enjoy complaining about yet another rushed, bland Hollywood blockbuster. However, that's not what I'm going to do with this article because as bad a reputation as legacy sequels get these days, much to my surprise, Twisters was actually a strong and self-sufficient outing for all involved in its making, and I'm actually kind of glad that this movie succeeded. I've been fascinated by tornadoes since I was very young, and so it was finally good to see a well-rounded movie get made about them. Into The Storm can go kick the few rocks it's conned from sympathetic and easily-pleased viewers now. If you're wondering, yes, Twisters is better than the original film. It's no masterpiece, but it's good, and it was fifteen bucks well spent. Let's get into this.

Twisters, the ever-so-intelligently-titled legacy sequel to Jan de Bont's 1996 thriller, follows a meteorologist named Kate Cooper as she is lured back into the world of storm chasing by an old friend named Javi five years after she quit due to a tragic chasing accident. Out in Oklahoma, she and her research team cross paths with a reckless chaser and YouTube star named Tyler Owens, and the two crews are forced to reconcile their differences as a massive storm system converges over the state.

The original film pitted a storm-chasing corporation against scientists who actually genuinely loved what they were doing, and Twisters is a clever riff on that dynamic that was established in the first film (although the two movies don't really share much of a connection, except for the fact that they're both about tornadoes). It pits Kate's meteorology team against Tyler Owens (portrayed by Glen Powell) and his reckless team of tornado-chasing rednecks that call themselves "The Tornado Wranglers." However, unlike the first film, Twisters has a lot more nuance and restraint when it comes to trying to draw battle lines between groups and understands that, at the end of the day, tornado chasers go after tornadoes because they ultimately love doing it. The dynamics were shifted from the original film in a very refreshing way, and it was interesting to watch the blatant and in-your-face differences between the two groups cause tension that ranged from amusing all the way to sort of worrying. I also appreciated that this film didn't stereotype rednecks as harshly as I had assumed it would. It has a lot of interest in and seems to genuinely want to fairly portray a culture that almost always gets drug through the mud by city-dwelling and overpaid filmmakers who are afraid to get even a little bit of mud on their boots. Boosting this dynamic are some unexpected characters in each group, such as an upright British journalist named Ben who rolls with the Tornado Wranglers, providing a nice and neat foil to the rowdy rednecks. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the lead role of Kate very well, and brings a performance that feels authentic, vulnerable, and sometimes genuinely haunted, even if her character is outshined by the incredibly charismatic and absolutely show-stealing Tyler Owens, who whips up a whirlwind of charm and attitude by essentially portraying himself. However, despite the force of Powell's performance, the moments in the film where it pushes Tyler to the side just a tad and focuses on Kate's internal emotional conflict are the strongest ones in Twisters, and add a refreshing air of emotional honesty to a film that could have very easily been devoid of it. Now, I do need to say that the rest of the supporting cast is, unfortunately, kind of forgettable. Javi was good enough in the moment, but he's not much to write home about. It's the same with the rest of the supporting cast, which is way too large. However, the film's focus stays, for the most part, firmly fixed on Tyler and Kate, and this is a saving grace.

As far as the plot of the movie goes, it's actually really strong and fluid, and probably the high point of the movie, surprisingly enough. This caught me off-guard, given that summer blockbusters along the same vein as Twisters, even the critically acclaimed Top Gun: Maverick, tend to be really light on plot, and either really heavy on character or otherwise really heavy on imperfections. This movie always builds on what came before, never drops a plot point, always works with its climactic final sequences in mind, and never grows stagnant because it's always trying to develop our main cast somehow. Kate's goals are well-defined and easy to get behind. And so even if most of the supporting characters inhabiting the world are pretty forgettable, is it off-limits for me to say that the pacing and plotting of Twisters is by far superior to just about anything else put out this summer? Yeah, it might not be anything particularly innovative or fresh, but it's a new dog doing old tricks almost perfectly, and this expert construction of the fundamentals makes the movie timely and never, ever boring. The character development that the plot brings to Kate might not be revolutionary, but it tells an old-fashioned tale about overcoming your fears, and just about every plot point lands exactly when it needs to, pushing the film along at a nice and precise pace.

On a cosmetic level, this film looks largely excellent. The cinematography itself isn't much to write home about (with a few very notable exceptions in some scenes), but it's good enough, and the visual effects work on Twisters is by and large remarkable. All of the tornadoes in this film look head-and-shoulders above any other computer-generated tornado I've ever seen, and there was one render in particular, where a tornado whips up some red dirt on a road, that I genuinely believe may be the most photo-realistic computer graphic I've ever seen, even more so than anything in The Revenant or Zodiac, as fantastic as the CGI work in those movies was. But I think that the real star of this movie has to be the practical effects work, which simulates some pretty breathtaking scenarios in a grounded and authentic way that legitimately kind of made the tornadoes feel terrifying, which is a factor that is very often missing from disaster movies. Oh, and speaking of the tornadoes themselves, they all felt unique, which was a mark of quality from the original film that Twisters replicated very well. Every tornado had a distinct voice and presented its own distinct threat to our characters, and no two storms very felt like they were blending together, which really helped the overall plotting of the film.

I've been interested in tornadoes since a young age, and so even though I would have gone to see this movie even if it were terrible, I actually ended up saying a lot more good things about Twisters than I would have ever guessed judging from the promotional material, and I think I need to talk about one more thing before I bring this article to a close. Specifically, I want to talk about the complaints from the peanut gallery and out-of-touch journalists that this film doesn't address climate change. First off, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if an artist isn't painting the picture you want him to paint, that doesn't necessarily make his picture a bad one. I personally respect Lee Isaac Chung for wanting to make a solid summer blockbuster and nothing more. Not every movie needs to be a big political or social statement. You can mark my words: the lack of a strong polarizing message in Twisters will take this movie far. Now, I'm not the guy who denies that our climate is changing. Of course it's changing. It's always been shifting one way or the other, and it always will be. And of course human activity affects it, if perhaps not as much as some would like to believe. However, I want to talk about one particular quote I read from the Wikipedia article on the film.

"Writer Margaret Renkl criticized the movie for not mentioning the link between climate change and the increasing frequency and intensity of tornadoes."

That would be great and all if it weren't for one problem: tornadoes aren't getting more intense. They're actually getting weaker. Now, remember that I am not attacking climate change here. Instead, I am attacking the assertion that tornadoes are getting stronger, which is simply not true. As of today, we have not had an EF-5 tornado (the strongest rating on the EF, or Enhanced Fujita Scale, a scale that measures the intensity of tornadoes on a scale of 0-5, with 0 being the weakest, and 5 being the strongest) touch down since May of 2013, and this is the longest-standing EF-5 drought in American history. Before 2013, the United States had an average of one EF-5 each year. The year 2011 alone saw six of these monsters. Now, some who would like to assert that tornadoes have been getting stronger have chalked this drought up to better building standards, but when we look at pure wind speeds alone, we haven't had a tornado's winds break the 200 or, Lord forbid, the 300-mile-per-hour mark since 2013 (the minimum threshold for an EF-5 tornado is damage caused by winds measured to be at least 200 miles per hour). The closest we've come is probably the 2023 Rolling Fork tornado, the wind gusts of which peaked at a rare 195 miles per hour. There are no two ways to slice it: tornadoes are getting weaker, at least for the time being. And this is why I don't like people claiming that they aren't because regardless of how you feel about climate change, tornadoes are just simply not getting stronger. Quite the opposite, in fact, and this particular entry on Wikipedia is yet another example of a horrendously biased site keeping objectively false information up on a page because it makes the administrators feel good to see their flawed opinions look legitimate. OK, rant over. I just needed to address this conversation because I'm a little tired of journalists using circular reasoning and incorrect assumptions to attack a film that really doesn't deserve a lot of the science-based criticism leveled at it.

At the end of the day, Twisters easily surpassed my expectations, as well as the original film, and so even while it's not quite perfect, it's still a solid and fun four-star outing, the perfect choice for date night if you're into that kind of thing. It's inoffensive and well-constructed fun with a surprisingly and relatively decent amount of gravitas to it, and so while it's not necessarily going to get tacked onto my mental Hollywood Hall of Fame, I'm really glad I went to see it. I had a blast watching this movie, so much so that I actually didn't take any critical notes in the theater, and I just ended up writing down my retrospective thoughts at home. This movie is everything a legacy sequel should be. It's familiar to, but also distinct from the original film. It adds to the legacy of what came before rather than replicating or replacing it. And more importantly, it's also just a good movie. And that by itself is enough to win even my cynical heart over. I think that one line from a promotional song for Twisters really sums up my personal feelings about the film.

Water tower graffiti faded, am I older or just jaded?

Everything and nothing changed at all.

Twisters - 8/10

Job 38:1-7

Edit - there may have been one tornado in Greenfield, IA, on May 21st, 2024, that should have been rated an EF-5. Measurements show that winds may have peaked at 308 miles per hour (the tornado received an EF-4 rating for some reason). But tornadoes are still overall getting weaker, and a lack of EF-5s since 2013 is a massive statistical anomaly, so my point still resoundingly stands. Also, the NWS still counts like this: "1...2...3...4...4...4..."