There was a time when disaster movies were all the rage. From Apocalypse to basically every Roland Emmerich film in the ’90s, disaster movies were the go-to summer blockbuster of the era. At the time, CG-driven special effects were starting to take off and now audiences could see sights and spectacles that couldn’t be done with practical effects. Take Twister, a movie about rampaging tornadoes. The main hook of that movie was watching giant tornadoes destroy towns and it developed a cult following. That being said, why anyone would want a sequel, fittingly titled Twisters, nearly 30 years after the original release, is beyond me.
It’s not just that making a sequel to a movie like Twister is weird. The past decade has seen a slew of movies being revived for seemingly no reason in an effort to capitalize and profit off of nostalgia, but I’ve grown used (aka numb) to that. No, my confusion mostly comes from why a movie as basic and as simple as Twisters doesn’t bother trying to do anything noteworthy. It doesn’t even try to capitalize on nostalgia from the first movie. This feels like a run-of-the-mill franchise sequel that was filmed in the ’90s but wasn’t released until 2024 and at times feels so lifeless and bland despite there being a decent amount of potential.
Twisters
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Release Date: July 19, 2024 (Theatrical)
Rating: PG-13
The film follows Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a former storm chaser turned meteorologist in New York. When she was younger, she was developing technology that would try to eliminate tornados once they appeared, but a test went wrong and resulted in three of her friends being killed in the most dangerous type of tornado, an EF5. When her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), the other survivor of that ill-fated experiment, approaches her with a proposal to create a new tornado scanning system to try and prevent future disasters from taking place, Kate signs up and returns to her hometown in Oklahoma. While there, Kate and Javi meet Tyler (Glen Powell), a tornado chaser famous on YouTube who starts to get to know Kate and makes her question the group that Javi is working for, Storm Par, and the motives of their investors.
Right from the get-go, I found it next to impossible to care about any of the characters here. Most, if not all of them feel painfully generic and have very little to distinguish from each other. The only reason I found Tyler to be at least somewhat interesting was because of Glen Powell’s performance. He oozes charm and is probably the best part of the film, bar none. Virtually everyone else, whether it be major characters or side characters, feels two-dimensional and boring. In the opening scene when we see three of Kate’s friends die in the tornado, I felt nothing by their deaths because they were barely characters. They were simply there to die and inform Kate’s development.
I guess that’s fine to a certain point. Lord knows there have been countless characters who have existed just to be killed off to serve as motivation for the protagonist, but more often than not I can name them. I can assign some identifying character traits to them, but I can’t here. I can’t think of any meaningful character traits for any of the cast, except for Glen Powell’s Tyler and this one British reporter simply because he was British. Some may argue that disaster movies like Twisters aren’t meant to be character-focused dramas – just special effects showcases – but to that I say the action still needs to be grounded in something for it to matter. When I witness tornadoes devastate small communities, it has to mean something or else it all becomes irrelevant.
Copyright: Universal
At times there are cool little moments, like when a tornado hits an oil refinery and briefly catches on fire, or when Tyler and his gang shoot fireworks into a tornado for their subscribers, but those brief stupid moments rarely pop up. It’s during those sequences I start to think back to disaster movies like Moonfall and how I enjoyed myself solely because of how moronic things were. The situations the characters found themselves in were so outlandish and ridiculous, but they were played so seriously that it made it all the more entertaining. Not so with Twisters. At first, you think that it’ll be a farcical ride with fireworks in tornadoes and drilling cars into the ground just to get into the center of a tornado, but then the film gets into boilerplate drama that feels too understated to be interesting.
Take for example the revelation that Storm Par’s investors are profiting off of the disaster by buying the land of those afflicted. Look, I’m all for seeing a movie say that corporations that profit off of the tragedy of others are scum, but the way that the movie shifts into showing how greedy and evil Storm Par is and how noble and virtuous Tyler and his YouTube Storm trackers are is sloppy at best. When we first meet Tyler and his friends, they’re constantly mugging at the camera, yelling, and generally come across as grating. However, when we learn that Tyler and his crew help people after tornadoes destroy their homes, suddenly their buffoonery stops, and now they’re depicted as kind and compassionate and Storm Par is now the baddie I guess. It just doesn’t feel earned.
Twisters isn’t the first movie to show that plucky and poor underdogs can take on corporations that are out for profit, but it doesn’t do anything with that concept. Hell, it doesn’t even do anything with the fact that Tyler is a YouTube celebrity and has a flock of amateur storm-chasers that follow him around into clearly dangerous situations. It’s mentioned in his first appearance and we see them fawn over him, but it’s quickly dropped. Like I said before, this could have been a sequel set directly in the aftermath of the first movie, but that also means that the set-up the film does with social media and influencer culture feels pointless and goes nowhere.
Copyright: Universal
Speaking of the first movie, I admit that I’ve never seen it, but I am aware of a few images associated with it. I saw this with a diehard Twister fan (they exist) and outside of a brief cameo of an object that was in the first movie, this is entirely separate from the events of the first film. I’m all for a sequel stepping out and doing its own thing or even having a franchise take an anthological approach, but there’s nothing in Twisters that has anything to do with the original film. You literally could have called this anything and it wouldn’t have mattered that this wasn’t connected to Twister. The only thing this movie has in common with the first film is that there are people in it who are driving around in a bunch of tornadoes.
Speaking of, the tornadoes are, unsurprisingly, pretty alright. I’m all for a nice spectacle and while the tornadoes themselves aren’t exactly amazing to watch, they get the job done. The destruction they cause is cool and watching people get sucked into them and start flying around never gets old. It’s almost like a slasher villain who kills people via gusts of wind and it always got a chuckle out of me since they did everything you shouldn’t do in a tornado. Again, the film does have the potential to be goofy and ridiculous with its tornadoes like when one is set on fire, but it takes the safe way out yet again.
And that’s Twisters biggest problem – it’s too safe. It doesn’t want to take any risks and instead wants to tell a grounded story about tornadoes and the struggle of the people who hunt them. But every time it has the chance to try something different it takes the easy way out. I guess in that regard it’s a pretty efficient throwback to the simplicity of ’90s summer blockbusters, but this is 2024 and those movies were only great for their time because they were loud, bombastic, and as energetic as a child after snorting pixie sticks, eager to show off its manic ideas. In reality, those ideas were stupid, but damn it they sold us on conviction alone. Without that conviction, we just have a boring, passable, and inoffensive disaster movie that checks off all of the boxes it needs to but never steps beyond the bare necessities. For some that may be enough. For me though, the bar for summer blockbusters has been raised too high for movies like Twisters to meet.
