I spent my boyhood in small Iowa towns. One afternoon my mother and I were on the back steps, gazing down across the highway at cornfields that seemed to go on forever. Suddenly, the air got eerily still. “Look,” mom said. A couple of miles away, a funnel cloud eased itself down and began winding across the countryside, luckily in the other direction. I sat there awed and transfixed, and have loved watching tornadoes ever since.
I’m clearly not alone. Which is why we have Twisters, an entertaining new summer blockbuster inspired by the 1996 summer blockbuster Twister, which introduced airborne cows into the cinematic lexicon. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who made Minari, Twisters isn’t a sequel proper but its story-beats mirror the original formula, which embeds an old-fashioned romantic comedy inside a modern effects-happy action movie. Whooshing with sucked up bodies and tumbling semis, it’s about love and loss among the brave souls who spend their lives chasing tornadoes.
English actress Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Carter, a one-time storm chaser who has become a New York meteorologist after a tragic encounter with a tornado. Five years later, she’s lured back to her native Oklahoma by her old comrade Javi, a thankless role nicely played by Anthony Ramos.
Javi has come across equipment to get better data on tornadoes, and he needs her to join his high powered team. You see, Kate has an almost magical nose for where the big ones will strike. Reluctantly she agrees — for one week.
In Oklahoma Kate discovers that there are rival storm chasers. The main one is Tyler Owens — that’s Glen Powell from Hit Man — a cocky, muscled-up YouTube star who shoots fireworks into funnel clouds, sells T-shirts saying “Not My First Tornado” and leads a motley crew of hellraisers. Kate thinks he’s a hustling hot dog; Tyler thinks she’s a fetchingly out-of-place New Yorker. Even before their meet-cute, we know they’re made for each other. They’re bound by a shared obsession with tornadoes.
Now, Chung is the latest indie director to move straight from small personal films to big-budget extravaganzas. In truth, the fit isn’t perfect. Although the action scenes are reasonably exciting, I kept wishing Chung had a better pop sense, especially in his handling of space. His camera is often too close to the characters’ faces, and while the movie does offer immersively granular views of debris swirling in a vortex, it never achieves the thrilling sense of a tornado’s power and scale that comes from keeping our visual distance.
Twisters updates the original by making its heroine — not its hero — the center of gravity, but alas, the script doesn’t let Kate be a whole lot of fun. Although Edgar-Jones is a good actor — she was terrific on the TV series Normal People — she lacks the big-screen electricity of an Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence. She’s a bit overmatched by Powell, a confident actor who seems to think there’s an Academy Award for Smugness. That’s not a swipe, at least not completely. Carrying himself like a movie star in a world of extras, he boasts the energy and charisma to make the love story work.
As for the storms themselves, Twisters shows the shattering damage caused by tornadoes and tweaks the greedy entrepreneurs who swoop in to buy cheap property from the desperate victims. Yet, fearing controversy, it never so much as mentions climate change. Chung has said this is because he doesn’t want to “preach” — he only wants to show our world. But in our world, meteorologists like Tyler and Kate talk about and believe in climate change.
Then again, it’s the nature of summer blockbusters not to fret overmuch about reality. To jack up the suspense, Twisters gives us an imaginary Oklahoma whose citizens are so dim that, even though they live smack dab in Tornado Alley, are bombarded by newscasts warning of biblically large tornadoes, see nearby towns get pulverized and find themselves buffeted by winds as they stand in the street, they still need Tyler and Kate to tell them to take shelter.
Such cluelessness helps make Twisters an exciting movie, but if I was a Sooner I might be tempted to sue.
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