Glen Powell proves his leading-man chops as an arrogant storm chaser in Lee Isaac Chung’s entertaining, silly spectacle, where bricks cascade, hay bales fly and cars aquaplane. By Yasmin Omar
Another summer, another legacy sequel. This time, Minari’s Oscar-nominated director Lee Isaac Chung has signed on to reboot the 1996 disaster movie Twister, a move that prompted much the same eyebrow-raised bafflement as Greta Gerwig’s decision to make Barbie (2023). The new film follows its predecessor beat for beat, tossing in the odd Easter egg (honestly, they’re more like Mini Eggs) for good measure.
There’s a tragic prologue where fearless Oklahoma storm chaser Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones, an empathetic everywoman) is bereaved three times over when her team, including her boyfriend, is sucked into a 70,000 foot tornado. Since the inciting incident for the modern blockbuster is invariably – say it with me! – trauma, she retreats from service and relocates to New York, where she can track hurricanes from the safety of her office cubicle. It isn’t long before Kate’s former friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) asks her to swallow down her PTSD, blink away the dreams of her deceased partner spooning her in bed and return to Oklahoma to track a once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak. She, of course, obliges.
This, the first 20 minutes or so of Twisters, amounts to a lot of expository dilly-dallying and credulity-stretching ‘science’ until the main event: the arrival of Glen Powell. The film, bogged down in setting stakes and establishing relationships, springs into action once he’s introduced. It’s a classic movie-star entrance, a true star-is-born moment. Yes, the actor has been on quite the hot streak these past few months (bickering with Sydney Sweeney in sleeper-hit rom-com Anyone But You, pinballing from part to part in identity-swap crime caper Hit Man), but this is his first test as a blockbuster leading man. And he aces it.
When Powell’s red truck, booming country music, swoops into a rest stop, all eyes are on him. The Glenergy is palpable. Chung shoots him from below, the camera peeking up at Powell almost in awe as he flashes a winning smile, doffs his cowboy hat and proceeds to autograph merchandise for the swarming crowd screaming his name. It’s a deliberate blurring of actor and role that tells audiences this is the guy. He plays Tyler, otherwise known as the Tornado Wrangler, who beams out livestreams of his daredevil stunts to his million YouTube followers.
Twisters (2024)
Much like Cary Elwes’ profiteering antagonist in the original Twister, Tyler is initially positioned as the villain of the piece, a self-involved thrill seeker selling T-shirts with his own face on them. His gang of rough-and-ready hobbyist influencers, who laugh mockingly at PhD candidate Kate when she enquires where they studied meteorology, represent today’s dispiriting preference for flashiness over expertise. They stand in direct opposition to Javi’s straight-edged, Ivy League-educated crew, a dedicated team striving to collect and analyse data from the storms.
But it’s not so simple as scientists good, influencers bad. The characters’ motivations are muddled, as evidenced by the whiplash-inducing shifts in allegiance between the members of these rival gangs, which result in some pretty troubling conclusions about the value of science (a concerning trend a mere week after the moon-landing conspiracy theories of Fly Me to the Moon). You can see Mark L Smith’s screenplay contorting awkwardly to land spatting adversaries Kate and Tyler on the same team.
Twisters (2024)
The thing is, Twisters isn’t about the characters. It really doesn’t matter if one minute they’re recklessly letting off fireworks in the eye of a storm, and the next they’re pompously distributing humanitarian aid to survivors. The tornadoes are the stars of the film, which is structured around six cortisol-spiking set-pieces that showcase their ferocious power. Visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, who also worked on the first movie, is equipped with the digital tools that match his ambition, the way he wasn’t in the Nineties.
The cyclones – snatching up electricity pylons and hurling them, sparking, at cars; felling water towers and spilling their contents down high streets – never fail to spark a voyeuristic terror. The threat level remains high, partly because Twisters dares to injure its protagonists, leaving them bloody and battered and bruised by the time the hurricanes blow out. Edgar-Jones and Powell, wet hair plastered to their cheeks, eyes widened in fright, fulfil the action-hero(ine) portion of their roles as capably as their exchanges of lightly insulting flirtatious banter. It’s thrilling.
Twisters (2024)
When you’re trapped in the suck zone (their term, not mine!), dodging debris and clinging for dear life onto rattling objects, you can’t help but fully buy into Twisters. It’s necessarily silly – the kind of dumb fun that has you rolling your eyes, but simultaneously outstretching your hand for more. The pure wind-howling, dust-billowing spectacle of the film, along with the easy chemistry of its leads, ensures Twisters is a ride you’ll want to take.
WATCH TWISTERS IN CINEMAS
