Twisters

Review by Mark Woodring

I’ll say it out loud: I’m not aware of anyone who was screaming for a sequel to the 1996 Jan de Bont directed action-adventure. Myself included.

Clearly, then, it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I went into this sequel/reboot/reimagining.

**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**

Twisters - Review
Twisters (Universal)

 

117 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

 

Synopsis:

A retired tornado-chaser and meteorologist is persuaded to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies.

 

A guilty intellectual, a social-media personality, science vs nature: surely all these pieces can add up to a good film, right?

Surprisingly, I’ll mostly say yes to that.

Obviously, Twisters isn’t a perfect film. Far from it. It is, much like the first, full of the fun “science” that it passes off as plot points, and that’s more than fine. The best way to use science in fun films is to start with the known, then take it all to its (il)logical extremes, giving our characters something to do.

Here, Daisy Edgar-Jones is Kate, a brilliant meteorological student and gifted weather savant (think Bill Paxton in the original) who believes it is possible to “tame” a twister by depriving it of moisture. During an experiment in Oklahoma, her team of fellow students (except one) is killed and she abandons her chasing ways, taking a job in New York City with the National Weather Service as an analyst, spending her days looking at radar images and numbers instead of actual storms.

After five years, she is approached by Javi (Anthony Ramos), the lone survivor of her team, with an intriguing proposal: help him chase a hurricane to gather a detailed three-dimensional radar scan which could help further tornado prediction models, saving lives.

Lured back, she is greeted in Oklahoma by legions of storm-chasers intent on experiencing a storm for themselves, drawn to the idea by YouTube sensation Tyler Owens, played with typically smarmy appeal by Glen Powell.

With his livestreams and juvenile antics, Tyler has created an army of followers, and serves as a foil to Javi’s company, who they have several issues with.

What follows is some basic character interplay interspersed with admittedly exciting action sequences. The advanced in VFX since 1996 are evident, as the weather patterns and twisters themselves are incredible to watch come to life on the big screen.

Thematically, we’ve got art vs science (in terms of how Kate does her thing, which is really some sort of alchemical combination of the two); we’ve got the perversion of science in service of corporate greed; there’s survivor’s guilt, loss of self-confidence, and forgiveness.

All good stuff, and the film generally does a good job at interweaving them throughout the predictable evolution of the relationship between Kate and Tyler.

There is a good deal of attempting to provide some actual explanation of how twisters work, but the limits of actual knowledge, combined with the frenetic pace of those explanations, renders them little more than gobble-gobble tech-talk.

But it works well enough.

With a soundtrack of modern country sounds, as opposed to the original’s eclectic song selection, Twisters is definitely catering to — and targeting — a younger crowd.

Bonus points for Twisters having the new Superman in the cast, as David Corenswet rides shotgun with Javi most of the movie as his business partner. Not a lot here to judge that future endeavor on, though, I’m afraid. He’s a paper cut-out @$$-hat.

[Extra bonus for casting Maura Tierney as Kate’s mom. I love her.]

Overall, Twisters is a surprisingly fun, if shallow, time, thankfully not overstaying its welcome with a bloated run-time, and Daisy Edgar-Jones’ and Glen Powell’s chemistry works well enough to not pull the audience out of the film.

Twisters is in theaters this Friday, July 19, and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, Katy O’Brien, Kiernan Shipka, and David Corenswet.

And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.

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