2024 | PG-13 | starring Daisey Edgar Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Sasha Lane | directed by Lee Isaac Chung | 2h 2 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
Nearly 30 years after the Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, post-Jurassic Park Michael Crichton boom turned a movie about tornadoes into a summer movie theater event, Hollywood decides to go back to the Twister well for a sequel that nobody asked for. As if proof-positive there is a timeline graph that counts back 20 years to find out what an adult generation might be nostalgic for. It always reminds me of the Hollywood lore story that James Cameron pitched Aliens by simply writing the word “Aliens” on a chalkboard and turning the S into a dollar sign. Here comes Twister$.
And yet, surprisingly enough, this movie is better than it has any right to be.
At nearly every point it seems written and produced by people who both love the original, understand why it worked (this movie sitting heartily inside a PG-13 rating for peril) and seem to also be interested in tornado chasing culture. While the lead and heart of the film is Daisy Edgar-Jones’ climatologist Kate Carter who, like in the first film, suffered a tragedy at the hands of a tornado and now plays it safe, the movie finds an opening into 2024 relevancy with social media. Of course, in this world, tornado chasing has evolved into a social media spectacle for likes and views. This brings Glen Powell into the mix as the hot shot with the high-tech pick-up that can puncture itself into the ground while riding a tornado. Now the film has both set up two colliding tornadoes and two competing storm chasers, both in much richer ways that the first film did.
This may come as heresy for those nostalgic for Twister, but it is an admittedly very thin movie that gets all of its mileage out of how good early CGI was at depicting the chaos of wind blowing apart structures. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I would imagine that it still looks pretty good today. It’s not gorilla hair in Congo, this is one of the things early CGI could handle. Twisters improves on it in almost every conceivable level. The action scenes are more inventive, the characters are more engaging and most notably, the structure is solid. Yes, Twisters and Twister actually reverse the trend of recent movie sequels of having a solid 3 act structure that sets up our and pays off well. In the end when we’re confronted with a problem we have the solution for, it’s actually exciting and satisfying. Compare this sequel to Independence Day which blew away the box office in the same year as Twister, 1996, and its sequel 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence. For all its flaws, Independence Day works because it has a rock solid 3-act structure, and particularly a strong 2nd act that sets up its finale. Resurgence is a rushed mess with a set-up and a payoff. Twisters is the exact opposite of that, a call-back to solid old-fashioned Speilbergian storytelling.
We know that competitors Edgar-Jones and Powell will eventually team up but it’s initially unclear how with her seemingly pursuing the storms for “the right reasons” and him for fame and pride. Those character turns also work. The biggest problem with Twisters is its incredible length. While busier than the first film, there is no need for this movie to be over 2 hours. Director Lee Isaac Chung follows in the success of his Oscar nominated movie Minari as a director-for-hire in the usual studio assumption that anyone can direct an action movie and you can just plug an indie filmmaker hot off a character piece into this movie and it will just work. Marvel does this all the time. Chung can’t make this movie flow. It visibly starts and stops, shuttering between tornado chase sequences and non-tornado chases that drag on longer than they should. A tighter script that folded some of the dialog into the chases and a director that kept this thing at a galloping pace would have made Twisters a heck of a fun B-movie. Instead, it sits in the middle, fun thrill ride in parts and overly serious character piece in others. And it’s not even that serious – but it’s too serious for this movie.
While I may never watch it again because of these pacing issues, Twisters did surprise me with how much thought was put into it. It’s relevant, it leans hard into Glen Powell’s leading man charm, its well-cast all around (including my girl Sasha Lane popping up again trying to get by in middle-America) and it all comes together nicely. There is an old-fashioned charm to this movie I didn’t expect. Sometimes they do make them like they used to.