The original Twister is an archetypal ’90s blockbuster, alongside stuff like Independence Day and Armageddon. A tornado might seem a little mundane next to those other flicks, but Twister delivered the same level of thrill even so. 30 years later, there are a lot of potential ways to update this weather-oriented flick for a modern audience, particularly as man-made climate change continues to ramp up. But Twisters just goes with the most straightforward approach available: Update the particulars, but still hit basically all the same beats as the original movie.
Fortunately, it’s a fun and well-made movie, and it’s got a great cast. It will entertain you from beginning to end. But since it also plays things so safely, it’s not that memorable. It’s a cotton candy movie–it tastes great, but you’re not really getting anything out of it. But that’s hardly the worst thing a movie could be.
Since Twisters follows its predecessor’s template, it opens with a tragedy. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a woman with a plan for destroying active tornadoes by using diaper polymers to absorb the moisture in the storm. But the small EF1 tornado that she wants to try it out on very quickly turns into an EF5, and things go badly. Very badly.
Five years later, Kate lives in New York, having given up on her plan. But her old pal Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor from the prologue, convinces her to return to tornado country (Oklahoma again) to help him use portable radars to map an active tornado–the modern version of the original film’s Dorothy idea. The twist, however, is that Javi is now a corporate guy with wealthy benefactors, and the pair of them quickly develop a little rivalry with a boisterous group of storm-chasing YouTubers led by mega-hot dude Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). But don’t judge him just because he’s sexy–Tyler is actually both nice and a genius, and definitely not shallow at all. It’s an obnoxious trope, but Powell is entertaining nonetheless.
The plot is like they took the characters from Twister and threw them in a blender, and it works pretty well, particularly with the corporate angle. The original film had Cary Elwes as the nefarious corporate stooge, but the only villainous stuff he really did during the movie was be rude to the main characters. In Twisters, though, the corporate benefactor is a land developer who’s using Javi’s company to buy up properties destroyed by storms for bottom dollar. Having witnessed this exact behavior after surviving one of the costliest tornadoes in recorded history, I really appreciated this bit.
It’s on that sort of experiential level that Twisters really shines–over the course of a half-dozen or so tornadoes, it pretty well captures all the different vibes of being in or near these sorts of storms, as well as dealing with their aftermath. Credit to director Lee Isaac Chung for that–he grew up in Arkansas, so he’s been there, as it were, and it comes through in the film.
That in-the-moment authenticity makes the complete and utter lack of any mention of climate change all the more glaring–particularly since it feels like Twisters actually had numerous climate-change references that were removed. Take that prologue tornado, for example. Early on, it seemed like the tornado’s escalation would be some sort of topic–like that Kate’s plan had somehow caused the tornado to grow, or that it’s a climate anomaly. There are several lines of dialogue like, “We’ve never seen storms like this!” which end up sounding strange since there is never any discussion about why unprecedented storms are occurring. It smells to me like references to climate change existed and were removed, and that leaves it feeling empty.
Fortunately, Twisters is a breezy movie, with a cast that’s very easy to enjoy doing anything. Edgar-Jones is charismatic and pleasant, Powell has movie-star charm, and Ramos, as always, has this baseline level of emotion under his delivery that makes his performance feel incredibly human–dude is by far the best product to come out of Hamilton. Without a core trio this strong, it’s very possible Twisters would have fallen flat.
As it is, though, Twisters has some great action sequences, a delightful core cast, and it pretty well captures the feeling of being in some absurd weather. Realistically, I shouldn’t need anything more than that–I had a great time watching it, after all. But you can’t do a weather-based disaster movie in 2024 without any mention of climate change. It’s just ridiculous.
