Twisters is a rare legacy sequel that is unburdened by the original film’s story and characters. Much as Doug Liman’s Road House treats the 1989 original film as a genre unto itself, so, too, does Twisters, the 28-years later sequel to the 1996 blockbuster Twister, treat its source material as its own genre. 

 

If you haven’t seen or don’t remember Twister, don’t worry, Twisters requires no homework. Twisters is a worthy successor to Twister that bears many hallmarks of the “Twister” genre, but it does not rely on previous knowledge to tell its story. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung and scripted by Mark L. Smith (with story by Joseph Kosinski), Twisters stands fully on its own.

The film starts with a nod to the original via the “Dorothy” device that sends tiny aerial sensors into tornadoes to collect data. No one ever specifically says so, but presumably a generation later, meteorology students use Dorothy as part of their lab kit like radar and satellite feeds. It’s a nice nod to the original without belaboring the point. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones doing a here-and-gone Southern accent) is a tornado whisperer who just knows what the wind is going to do next, but she underestimates the ferocity of a storm, resulting in several of her friends being killed in the field. Five years later, she has blonde hair and wears blazers and works in New York City, having removed herself entirely from her storm chasing ways.

 

Until her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) comes knocking, wanting her to join him in Oklahoma during a once in a generation outbreak of violent weather which, frankly, seems more believable now than it did in the 1990s. Javi survived that fateful storm in the old days, then went on to join the military, where he was inspired to use high-powered radars to map tornadoes from every possible angle. Thus, Kate joins “Storm PAR”, a team of slick, polo-shirted storm chasers with branded trucks and a real estate mogul investor. On the other side of the line is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), an internet-famous storm chaser whose crew sells tacky tee shirts and shoots fireworks into tornadoes and is considerably more ragamuffin than Storm PAR.

 

It's basically a reversal of Twister, where we get to know the team of slick scientists, rather than painting them strictly as black hats in the way of doing the REAL work of understanding destructive storms to save lives. Both Storm PAR and Tyler’s “tornado wranglers” want to capture data to better track storms and warn the public, but both groups are constantly in each other’s way. The first half of Twisters does a great job kind of making you hate everyone, because people DO die in storms, all the damn time despite better warning systems than we had 30 years ago, and it is incredibly frustrating watching these wind nerds dick-swinging when there’s so much on the line.

 

But Lee Isaac Chung knows what he’s doing, because the second half of Twisters starts unravelling those first impressions to show what’s what. There is a little bit of black hattery, because films like this need a villain and you can’t really get mad at a tornado because it’s not sentient, but as Tyler and Kate get to know each other, so, too, do we learn what the real motivations are and how wrong first impressions can mislead people even with the best of intentions. Twisters is not a complicated story in the least, but there is an idea about first impressions which lends shape to the narrative beyond the “point A to point B” nature of storm chasing. 

Speaking of Kate and Tyler, though, while Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell have good chemistry, their romance is strangely Puritanical—for all the heated looks, they never kiss (at least not in the finished movie). Twisters is very much an “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny” movie, which undercuts the emotions of the climax a little. It’s one area where Twisters doesn’t match the original—in Twister we fully believe the collapsing marriage but surviving love between Jo and Bill Harding, which adds real stakes to their physical peril in the storms. Kate and Tyler never quite reach that level of desperate believability when things are at their absolute worst.

 

But Twisters is still a great movie. Is it stupid? Sure, sometimes. Do things happen that would only happen in a Hollywood movie? Yeah, of course. But it’s fun and thrilling, what else do you want from a summer blockbuster? The most annoying thing about Twisters isn’t the occasional illogical leap to make the next plot point happen, it’s the overpowering soundtrack that drowns out the top-notch sound design (from the team at Skywalker Sound) with mediocre country music. The second-most annoying thing is that no one ever says the words “climate change”, though Maura Tierney does have a line about how there are more severe storms now than ever before, which is as close as we’re going to get, I guess. In all, though, Twisters is the kind of exciting escapism that Hollywood blockbusters can provide at their best. 

Attached - Glen and Daisy at various promotional stops for Twisters yesterday in New York.

 

Twisters is now playing exclusively in theaters.