After all the sharknados flying about on basic cable for the past decade, it’s no surprise that the new sequel to TWISTER entitled TWISTERS would treat the subject with a deliberate amount of gravitas. And while the summer actioner doesn’t mention global warming as its culprit, the aspirations of the storm chasers on screen hoping to tame tornadoes for societal good is evidence of the topic throughout. It makes for a summer movie that at times feels quite somber, but if you’re going to hire filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung to direct, the man who brought incredible pathos to his Oscar-winning MINARI in 2020, a certain seriousness is your goal.
I, for one, have never found tornadoes anything but scary since witnessing one firsthand as an an impressionable 11-year-old. (I saw it toss about the American Legion Hall like it was a dollhouse just a quarter mile from my home.) And stirring such fears is one of the goals of this serious sequel. You get no flying cows this time, nor many easy laughs that they milked in the classic 1996 film. Instead, Chung concentrates on explaining why tornadoes are so dangerous, particularly its devastating human toll. Mankind isn’t fodder here, nor are animals, though one low-hanging laugh is served up regarding an unfortunate chicken coop. Instead, the film makes you feel for all those fighting the storms, particularly storm chasers Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Javi (Anthony Ramos) who early in the film are devastated as three of their friends are swallowed up by an unforgiving, category E-5 twister.
After all, this is a disaster film, the same way that THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO were before it, and such fare traffics in both pulp and pain. Granted, those films were often soap-operish in their execution but their narratives did maim or kill many in their tony casts and such effects were as impactful as the Oscar-winning visual ones. (I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten over Shelly Winters’ death scene in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, to be honest.) TWISTERS has the good sense to not show too much carnage outside of ruined homes and leveled communities, but even those visuals lend pain and gravitas to the story here.
The three leads add to the empathy exponentially too, as they’re played by accomplished actors making the most of their roles. Edgar-Jones, so superb in the streaming miniseries NORMAL PEOPLE four years ago, makes her heroine here equally plucky and savvy, likable even when she’s borderline depressive about the fallout from her job. Smartly, the film makes her story the central focus as she tries to redeem those deaths by saving others from such fates with her scientific aspirations to ‘shut down’ a twister before it gets out of hand. That means that any potential budding romances with either Javi and swaggering fellow chaser Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) are placed well on the back burner. The actress has great chemistry with both of her costars nonetheless, and it’s nice to see her Kate character relate to them as colleagues more than potential lovers. In fact, the film is quite chaste, never even showcasing a kiss or canoodle.
Powell is having quite a year, what with his breakout hit HIT MAN on Netflix, and he brings sensitivity and authority to a role that could have been a macho caricature. Credit Chung for ensuring that no matter how close any of these characters edge into ‘types’, he gives his cast the opportunity to register with certain nuances not normally found in such pictures. Even the ‘bad’ characters, most notably David Corenset as Javi’s business partner in storm chasing, aren’t quite the cardboard villains you’d expect in such fare.
Chung shoots the action quite well, made all the more palpable by showcasing specific characters in peril. One scene has Kate and Tyler desperately trying to move motel dwellers to an empty swimming pool for safety and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying. Chung and his team of special effects artists, including cinematographer Dan Mindel, make almost everything on screen look believable, though they miss opportunities to show scale too many times throughout. The fact that an expensive drone gets used by Tyler’s crew but rarely gives us its POV of the devastation at 10,00 feet struck me as inexplicable.
Of course, TWISTER didn’t need a sequel, and many of the exact same beats of the narrative there are repeated here. Still, Chung has delivered an involving actioner that focuses on making us understand the characters as much as we understand the specifics of what causes such weather phenomena. It’s probably too serious for some, but then perhaps as filmgoers we’ve all grown too numb to bullets, cars, and travesty flying about on screen. Maybe it’s time we started to view such dramatics with a more thoughtful perspective. That’s what Chung and team are trying to bring to the party with TWISTERS, and it succeeds in both its thrills and empathy.
