Twisters

dir: Lee Isaac Chung

2024

Genius. Whoever was working in the marketing department for this film, whose decision it was to call it Twisters, you, sir or madam, or non-binary equivalent, are a platinum-plated, stone-cold genius. First movie was called Twister. Do you even reckon they bothered with brainstorming titles? “Uh, Twister 2?”

What about…Twis2er? Twister II, more old school perhaps, or maybe 2 Twist 2 Furious?

Nup. Nope. Twisters. And then when they make the sequel to this, they have the next, absolutely perfect title: Twisti3s. I smell marketing opportunities galore!

Bold, lots of bold choices going into this film. Especially since there’s practically nothing connecting the two films, other than they’re about idiots chasing tornadoes and then getting scared and having to hide from the same tornadoes.

It never occurred to me before, but the perplexity I face watching these special kinds of disaster flicks was somewhat alleviated when I realised, during the ‘intense’ moments in the film, that they’re really not that different from monster / kaiju movies, in that tornadoes are gigantic mindless forces of nature that destroy everything in their path. And when done right, the little people running around admit they have no power over anything, and are at the mercy of a cruel yet somehow indifferent universe. In the bad versions of these stories, the pathetic humans think they are the ones in control, and they can do things to make the bad giant monsters / tornadoes go away.

I mean, such hubris. If you want to talk about classic storytelling, people who arrogantly thought they were more powerful than the gods / nature used to get their comeuppance and then some (back in the day). These days, especially in American movies about how exceptional Americans are in the face of nature, thinking that you’re smart enough to tame a tornado is actually rewarded, though not initially.

Initially, it means you have to get a bunch of people killed, in order to give your main character some kind of backstory, though not a meaningful one.

The opening shows a group of mostly young, attractive people doing their storm chasing thing, who run into some trouble because they’re chasing fucking tornadoes. Most of them die, as if the tornado itself wanted to give our lead Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) the trauma necessary to motivate her later in the film. The other survivor is Javi (Anthony Ramos, who was so great in In the Heights), who transforms from a hard-partying grad student fuck-up into a military mercenary scientist type square.

Kate’s transformation now is just that she’s blonde, and she doesn’t chase storms any longer. I have seen Edgar-Jones in a few things, so I know that she’s a more than decent actor. In fact, I thought she was great in the series Normal People, and that she was exceptional in Fresh, a film in which she’s unintentionally put herself onto a cannibal’s menu, and has to try to find a way to get herself off it in relatively one piece.

Here she delivers a performance that’s pretty bland and that doesn’t make much of an impression, and that doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. I wondered whether it mattered, maybe in comparison to the original flick, and the thing is, whatever you think of that “blockbuster” flick from nearly 30 years ago, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, the great Bill Paxton who is sorely missed, their performances are memorable. They stick out. They leave an impression in the shadow of the storms they are chasing. Even if the nub of what they’re arguing about it fucking tedious (the remnants of their marriage, the passion for stormchasing that still connects them, the humour and the in-jokes), it’s a lot more than what we get here. A lot more.

Not to mention that there’s not a single soul in this new flick who can hold a candle to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s deranged performance in the original.

I never said it was a good performance, but tis’ certainly memorable. Gods I miss him, as if he were an actual dirtbag friend of mine from the early 90s…

Everything is too clean cut and shiny in this new flick, even if the effects are x1000 better, but that’s okay. We watch disaster flicks to watch something fuck things up, and our heroes barely escape with their lives, multiple times, and help others where they can. This flick has all that in spades, in case you were worried.

It’s also got corny Americana by the bushel or the pound, whichever you prefer (as long as it’s not measured in the metric system). After a tornado destroys a town and Kate and her enemy to friend to eventual lover we are meant to theorise Tyler (Glenn Powell) barely escape with their lives, he tells her “I want to show you something nice”, and yes you might be amazed he’s not offering to send her some dick pics: he takes her to a fucking rodeo the next town over. You would be amazed to see that a tornado happens during the rodeo as well, and then, they barely escape with their lives, but they save a mother and daughter along the way.

Like… I guess these resilient, salt of the earth types are used to this happening, living as they do in Tornado Alley, on a daily or hourly basis? And then just go about their business afterwards, if they survive?

One neat trick the film pulls is that it starts off with Kate and Javi and a clean cut crew of jerks as our purported main characters, and categorises Youtube influencer Tyler and his crew as noisy, opportunistic, self-aggrandising messy jerks. But then it flips the script, making Tyler’s crew the “real” heart and soul of America, and the cold scientific types as emblems of ruthless late stage capitalism. Because every film needs villains, and the tornadoes are destructive but hard to hate.

So much pseudo-scientific gobbledegook gets expelled from cipher mouths in the service of making it sound like everyone knows something important, but the real distinction the flick makes (being populist pablum) is that science can be ‘good’, but it can be used for ‘bad’, and that real, good-hearted people, while they might math real good and have gadgets and stuff, they’re better because they intuitively feel stuff, whether it’s what a tornado is going to do, or whether it’s the best place to hide when it comes after you. In that, despite the characters’ skill-sets being virtually indistinguishable, Kate is the ‘real’ one, just like Bill Paxton’s character was: someone with an almost mystical connection to weather.

It’s a shame that the character here is such a fucking drip, because one thing no-one ever accused Bill Paxton of, he never put in a boring performance in his goddamn life, no matter the quality of the film. And while I’m sure this flick will in no way inhibit Daisy’s future, in fact the flick did pretty well, she feels like one of the least essential parts of it.

I haven’t talked much about Glenn Powell being in this, because I’ll be honest I am tired of the discourse this year that won’t stop fluffing him up to be the next Tom Cruise, as if we fucking need a new one. I don’t need to see his version of the classic shit-eating grin to roll my eyes already. He is perfect in this underwritten part, but there’s no depth in his characterisation, and I don’t care how many puppies they make him rescue off-screen. I don’t yet know if there is anything behind those vacant eyes, so I am reserving judgement until he puts in an actual decent performance in something. They might think he’s the next Hollywood film star, like we have any shortage of them, but to me it’s like when they kept promoting an endless array of Joshes as to who was going to be the next king of Hollywood.

Josh Hartnett, Josh Lucas, Josh Duhamel, Josh Brolin, Josh Holloway, Josh Hamilton, Josh Hutcherson, Josh O’Connor – it’s almost as bad as the plague of Chrises from the last ten years.

We don’t need no stinking Joshes, and Glenn can probably fuck right off as well.

It’s exactly what you expect – a flick that delights in destruction, including the awesome goings-on at an oil refinery that is just, wow, next level world-ending stuff, or the bizarre destruction of a theatre that is still playing Frankenstein even as the roof and walls disappear, with characters who, if you were lonely or desperate enough, you could latch onto to care about if there’s nothing else going on in your life, and it doesn’t stick around too long. If this had been 2.5 hours I would have hated it, probably, but this is just right.

It’s especially great if you like watching people drive fast towards things, and then drive fast away from them. There’s a lot of excited driving in this flick. And fireworks, too, if you need that in your life.

6 times I sometimes wish the tornadoes would win and finish us all off out of 10

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“You're the only person that can get me close enough to a tornado to do this.” – weird people with weird objectives - Twisters