Joyce Glasser reviews Twisters (July 17, 2024), Cert 12A, 122 mins. In cinemas
Techno-wizard Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster movie Twister was to storm chasing what the CSI television series was to forensic science degrees. Before Twister, most people would cancel a trip to the Midwest in tornado season. Nearly three decades later, there are group tours to tornadoes costing $1,000 a person – insurance not included. And now there’s Lee Isaac Chung’s (Minori, 2020) new disaster movie Twisters. Chung, and script writer Mark Smith (The Revenant) up the ante with enough technobabble, real equipment and genuine colour graphs to ground the plot, while a romantic triangle pitting a You Tuber, cowboy tornado wrangler against serious, but compromised, scientists provides the entertainment.
In the prologue, which contains what is arguably the scariest tornado set piece of the film, enthusiastic tornado whisperer Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Normal People miniseries, Where the Crawdads Sing), goes tornado chasing one day with a group of close friends. They are testing out Kate’s new technique for busting a storm so that it withers before it can cause much damage. We learn that as a child Kate always loved weather and later in the film we see the laboratory she rigged up in her single mother’s Oklahoma farmhouse.
Kate’s experiment backfires. She has underestimated the strength of the storm, predicting an EF1 on the Fujita scale, when the storm becomes an EF5. The results are catastrophic and Kate, traumatised by loss and guilt, retreats to a cushy desk job in New York City, analysing the weather.
Five years later Kate receives a surprise visit from Javi (Anthony Ramos, Transformers, Rise of the Beasts, Hamilton), from the ill-fated Tornado Alley mission. He was the Cassandra insisting in vain for data first, fighting the storm second. He is now a data entrepreneur working with a team of scientists intent on using a triangle of radar monitors to gather data, the better to warn surrounding towns.
Kate resists. Javi pleads. She’s the only person who can lead them to the right storms with her sixth sense that intuits the transformation of clouds to storms by watching which way dandelion fluff blows. Kate, who has not had the courage to return home in five years, can no longer resist the call of the wild.
But as in real life, where “serious” storm chasers are plagued by reckless tourists and social media idiots, so in this film Kate is introduced to the new wild west. She spends the first half of the film trying to avoid the loud group of social media chasers led by galling cowboy-wrangler Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, Hit Man, Top Gun: Maverick). Tyler even has a British journalist in tow, writing a feature of his exploits.
If Kate’s evasiveness fails, it might have something to do with Tyler’s Stetson, his Josey-Wales squint, two-day-stubble-grin and the way he keeps looking at her. Tyler’s appearance is needed because since the “incident” Kate has become so subdued and sullen that the spikey Edgar-Jones seems to be fading away.
And it must be said that Javi’s unrequited crush on Kate doesn’t stand a chance. He has to go on his own journey, realising that the greedy investor in his data business is more interested in buying up the land of mourning families than helping them.
The brash enemy, Tyler, with his macho aura, killer smile and irreverent motley disciples, on the other hand, identifies with the tornado victims and genuinely wants to help them. If Tyler rubs Kate the wrong way it’s just long enough for the audience to try to figure out how they will get together.
Just as Tyler discovers that Kate is not a city a girl, so Kate discovers that the guy she spends the first half of the film duping about which cloud she is going after, is a soulmate.
Ok, we are not surprised that Tyler is actually a brain with a degree and seems more interested in seeing Kate’s lab than her bedroom. But does he need to be a former rodeo-champion, too, just to invite her to a rodeo where, of course, a twister strikes?
The final set piece in the film, however, is a winner, injecting the disaster movie thrills we pay for and turning the defeated Kate into a heroine with a bit of nail biting suspense.
And if you missed the Steven Spielberg credit, you won’t be surprised to learn that Spielberg, who was a producer of the first Twister, which is referenced in Chung’s Minori, came on board to persuade the financiers to let Chung shoot on 35mm. So, not entirely coincidently, the spectacular climax to Twisters takes place in a movie theatre, a location dear to Spielberg’s heart and one where the film belongs.
Chung keeps the characters fun and the action flowing, but with the exception of the prologue and climax, the tornadoes never feel real or very scary. And the supporting characters are not developed, including Tyler’s misunderstood drone operator played by Sasha Lane (the talented star of American Honey) and Kate’s estranged mother Cathy Cooper (Maura Tierney, The Iron Claw, The Report). Given how terrific a mother Cathy appears to be, their glacial reunion needs to be melted by a good mother-daughter conversation.
Listen to the unobtrusive score by Benjamin Wallfisch, the grandson of 98-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the cellist who survived Auschwitz who is featured in the powerful documentary The Commandant’s Shadow.
